The State of Things
In the wake of the heist on Zeitrich Manse, Hans Zeitrich is dead and the Rattlesnakes are no more. Sabian has vanished into the city, Stefano has fled with his money, and Stubby has been displaced from time, soon to be at the mercy of Drabscallow and his noble masters. Salumax and Sigmund, bearing the Zeitrichs' mysterious compass, have been picked up in a carriage and are now careening through the midnight streets. The clock is ticking.
Escaping Gorgarten
The carriage, driven by Erith Cazarian - Salumax's dragonborn companion - raced through the city streets, coming to a stop in a back-alley. Erith paid the blind keeper of the wagon and led the party to a safehouse near the edge of the city: a dilapidated riverside mansion with a view of the river. Inside was Mormenos and Pigeon Rustle, the remaining members of the Seekers of the Vigil, a group of treasure hunters hunting the Kastalav Chronovault. Though the group regarded Sigmund with suspicion, necessity demanded that they band together to escape the city before sunrise. To do so, Salumax and Sigmund disguised themselves while Erith defaced Hans Zeitrich's ruby-topped rod of rulership.
Upon leaving the safehouse, the building erupted in flames: the Reaper of Gorgarten, a high-class assassin on Attaline Zeitrich's payroll, had arrived to take them in. A brief battle ensued: Mormenos clouded him in noxious fumes, but the Reaper rushed through and took a poisoned scythe to Salumax, weathering Pigeon Rustle's conjured ice storm. However, Mormenos cursed the Reaper with hideous laughter; Salumax took the opportunity to banish him, thereby giving the party a window to escape.
Aboard Erith's carriage, the group went to the River Gate, where Kapitan Stejalki of the Gorgarten city watch came to examine the wagon. However, with Salumax and Sigmund disguised as a nondescript traveller and an obese noble, respectively, the Kapitan let the carriage through the gate and into the wilderness.
The Journey
As the cart trundled north along the Drowning Road, so named for being the site of ritual executions by the Thorned Kings, they crossed paths with a group of Kochevni traders heading to Gorgarten. The amiable caravan leader made friendly conversation with Pigeon and warned the party that the soldiers at the Mountain Gates were conducting intense inspections on travellers. With this information in mind - as well as the knowledge of one-hundred-and-fifty men garrisoned at the Gates - Salumax elected to take the Black Marble Pass, a disused and dangerous mountain path that circumvents the Gates.
When the Gates came into view, the cart veered off the road towards the Pass; however, they found their way blocked by a wall of thorns. Only able to burn a small hole in the thicket, the Seekers abandoned their cart and continued on foot, laden with their stolen goods. Pigeon Rustle located the entrance to the Pass and led the way into the mountains.
As the party climbed, they became aware of the continued presence of a raven along their journey. Sigmund recalled that a raven is a form commonly taken by imps, and the group deduced that the raven was Drabscallow's last remaining familiar, tailing them from the manor. They debated eliminating the bird, but it disappeared before they settled on a decision.
The group came to a narrow, crumbling shelf and pondered how best to cross it. Sigmund suggesting jamming pitons into the cliff and using rope to form a makeshift banister, but Salumax was concerned about the structural integrity of the marble. While the group debated, Pigeon Rustle navigated the shelf and threw back a rope to aid the others in crossing.
The Campsite
The Seekers veered off the beaten track to the site of their previous camp, which was clustered around a Kochevni eagle totem beside a hot spring. The group settled down for the night to recover their spent stamina. Sigmund took the Zeitrich treasure to a spot in the woods, buried it and marked it in a way that only he would recognise. Meanwhile, Salumax gathered his fellows for a private conversation, expressing distrust towards Sigmund and advising caution.
The following morning, Salumax dug up a chest he had buried beneath the eagle totem. Amidst the mountaineering equipment within were three epoch tesseracts: green glass cubes plundered from Chronovaults across the continent. Following the compass, the group set off again into the mountains, heading for the Vault.
Arrival at the Vault
After abseiling down a small cliff, the group followed the compass down a narrowing valley into a sheer rocky crater. Inside the crater were three artificial half-pillars surrounded by rune circles - one beside a waterfall, one on a precipice, and one directly in front of a vast bas relief of an eye. A cryptic message, written in Vigil runes on a nearby boulder, read:
You stand before a crypt unmourned
The worthy proceed, the false shall fall:
Align three towers and be warned,
The touch of sand shall entry stall.
Salumax, Erith and Pigeon Rustle positioned themselves at each rune circle and placed the tesseracts within the hollow at the top. The half-pillars immediately extended into the air, revealing towers of spinning stone wheels, three on each tower, with each wheel carved with a numerical sigil. Upon the activation of the towers, three vaguely-humanoid sand creatures stirred from the ground, and began moving inexorably towards the rune circles.
Aligning the runes required great focus and recollection of arcane Vigil lore, so Salumax, Mormenos and Erith took charge. However, the presence of a sand elemental within a rune circle caused its tower to become static and prevented the alignment of its runes. A lengthy war of attrition ensued, with Pigeon Rustle summoning a fey warrior to assist in combat, but aligning the towers simultaneously proved too much of a challenge; Salumax was repeatedly engulfed by the sand creature in his circle, and every time an elemental was slain, another would appear just moments later. Eventually, the Seekers found that, by magically charming the elementals, they could both command them not to enter the rune circles and avoid the risk of them dying and being replaced. Pigeon Rustle's fey ally charmed one, while Sigmund used Hans Zeitrich's enchanted cane to command the other two. With the elementals indisposed, one-by-one, the towers were aligned.
The alignment of the fully-extended towers caused green light to refract from the tesseracts and converge at the centre of the eye, which crumbled away, revealing a gaping tunnel leading into the mountain. Still concerned about Drabscallow's imp-raven, Erith opted to remain in the entryway and keep watch, promising to use her sending stone to contact Salumax if she encountered danger. With the watch arranged, the rest of the Seekers ventured into the darkness, with further challenges lurking within, and beyond them the deepest secrets of time itself...
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