Renier's Shelter

Three hours east of Coldpeak camp, where the mountain’s shadow starts and the temperature drops another degree regardless of wind. No path leads here. It does not announce itself.

It is a single-room timber lean-to, built against a rock face. The wood has aged to near-black, split along the grain in places, and packed around with frost that never quite melts. By every measure it should have fallen a century ago, and then another century ago, and then a third. It has not. Whether this is Netherese construction that outlasts anything built since, or whether Renier kept performing the maintenance enchantments he had otherwise refused — and kept refusing everything else the empire asked — is the kind of question his journal does not answer directly. The journal suggests a man who drew his lines very specifically.

Inside: a writing desk, a hook on the wall, a sleeping alcove behind a partition. The desk holds the remnants of a scholarly life — an empty stoppered bottle, the mark of a quill that wore the wood down over years. When the party arrived the hook still held a jeweled masquerade mask, untouched by centuries. The journal was there too — in careful Loross, recording the years after the city vanished mid-conversation and took everything with it.

Session 11

The party reached the shelter on July 10, the same morning as Thessaly Vorn and her assistant Aldric, who had found it independently on a Brotherhood survey. Neither group knew the other was coming. The timing meant that when the echoes of Yael and Yrel — Renier’s wife and daughter, left behind when Irenthal stopped having ever been — took possession of two warm bodies, there were ten people in a one-room lean-to and no way out except through the only door.

The echoes have since been dispersed. Both hosts survived. The party took the journal, the mask, and Renier’s ring.

The shelter is slightly warmer now than the air outside — barely, but noticeably. Whatever has been holding it together is finishing its work.