Gathered to Clifford’s office, a group of B.A.S.E.’s best and maybe not the brightest all are informed of the strange phenomena taking place at the graveyard near to the town, on the border ethereal. Going through a briefing with Evelina and Clifford, the group is filled in on the dangers, threats and the potential for massive loss of… souls? Not to mention life, if this domain manages to expand onto the material somehow.
With this information in hand, the party splits up to complete several objectives. Purchasing tuning forks, changing enchanted items, even attuning a glass fork to the ethereal plane for later travel. Even a small… detour at the Pallid Scriptorium where an infiltrating member of the party learns some regret in trying to dupe Mathias as to their identity and worship. Nonetheless, reuniting the next morning at Hyssop Home, Quinton delivers a prayer over a grand feast of a breakfast, preparing the party in body, mind and spirit, with even a silly little song from Zug Zugger regarding Tetsu’s mummy-dating proclivities, before the entire party sets off to the graveyard in the material.
Arriving in the real world, a few hundred feet back, the party as one plane shifts into the border ethereal and makes their way as one into the mists. Walking for almost… too long this time, the party finds their way to the familiar deadened landscape, with rotting trees, almost… unhallowed feeling ground spreading under their feet as they advance. An advance quickly slowed by the presence of a large number of wraithful figures, including a very familiar one to Evelina, one that’d… participated quite eagerly in her previous demise. Few words are exchanged. As the party certainly has little intention to negotiate, or to leave.
Thus, battle is joined, with a number of large magical effects used to both protect and control the battlefield, a fairly back-and-forth fight being joined until one by one, the combined heroic efforts of the party manage to drive most of the dead back, scattering their forms back into the pervasive fog surrounding, their spirits banished back to their masters’ embrace for now.
The lead shade did manage to escape, but only just, heavily wounded and soaring for the cover of the higher reaches of the fog. The party takes a few minutes to regroup, allowing prayers from Quinton to magically soothe their wounds. Pressing on, they encounter a closed, sealed door into the cliff face, familiar too, to Evelina. But unfamiliar are the runes that traverse the door in five bands, small to large, at each of the ‘sizings’ of the doorway.
Spending some time puzzling this out between them, the party eventually discerns two of the runic combinations as magical formulae, spells inscribed upon the door. The first, smallest, being an augmented arcane lock spell, of more ancient origin. The next, more unclear, some kind of anti-life barrier, to repel the living from entry. The rest escape being learned, though with some dispelling efforts, the anti-life barrier is defeated… though the towering statues to either side begin to crack, and crumble.
Suspicion running high, certainly not trusting this place’s ancient netherese architecture that Quinton has identified it as… in unison, two of the party on one side sunder a statue apart, while Quinton levels his scepter at the other, and simply blasts it apart. Thus revealed, four towering, skeletal guardians are freed from their prisons, and move to strike the adventurers.
After a rather decisive battle, though painful for some, the guardians lay defeated. A concerted effort and many spell slots go into breaching the door’s remaining wards, the largest finally identified as an augmented version of a prismatic wall. Managing to clear the wards, the party bravely pushes the door to a passage of absolute darkness open, and press on, the doors shutting unnaturally behind them.
After half an hour of walking, the group opts to start marking their trail, but backtrack to check on the main door. Finding it… only a minute behind them? Managing to open the door, Quinton steps out to the hillside where they’d defeated the guardians, and prays to Ilmater, wishing for a sanctuary of hallowed ground within the accursed land. The prayer is answered, both by his god, and the Wraith-Ruler of the domain, who expresses it’s displeasure for Quinton’s efforts.
This of course manages to spur Philomila to action, who steps into the tunnel with an escort, and calls out a wish to the very cosmos. To whomever would listen. To aid her too, in placing a section of blessed ground into this dismal land. And the call is answered, with a long breath of a moment passing as Philomila is brought to her hands and knees in the tunnel, a vision of a starry sky, the moon prominent within the vision, before vision returning, and a burgeoning aura of moonlight filling the passage, bright as day. Thus blessed by Selune for her cry, she rejoins the party, and Quinton transports them all back to Driftriver, to the hallowed halls of Hyssop Home, and to safety.
Reporting on their limited successes in carving a foothold into the dreadful wraith’s domain, each goes their own way, to perhaps return to the progress they’d made… at a later, soon, date.