As the party travelled on through another day, a dark storm followed them down out of the mountains, and onto the foothills of the Dalenath Plains. After the sleet and rain and hail and snow had cleared, near midnight, a thick, freezing fog rolled in out of the darkness. From within it, a great voice asked, “Why did you kill Blue?”

They spoke with the voice, while Poy, Zan, and Sam tried to penetrate the darkness to find the source of it. Phoenix took to her eagle form, and soared high above the mists – to find only a starlit canopy, and a roiling mass of gray below. The voice spoke in Druidic, nameing a place and date to meet him, if Phoenix wished to replace her scimitar, and Faeradd wished to know more about his people. The voice did not respond, when Sam called it, “Coward!” But a clawed hand so large that the Black Rock Merc stood between two of its fingers made the weaponmaster quite aware of the danger they faced.

“In five days, you shall meet me in the Valley of Shadows – two days east of the Bandit King's cave.”

The party met the Hoar Frost Clan in the Valley of Shadows, where Toomaran Plainsmen had traded their horses for minotaur lizards, and accepted the benevolent leadership of a druidic white dragon. Tangala'asaleph offered to aid the party to escape the hated Inquisition, and further the cause of the druids around the world. Through Aran, Tangala's appointed representative, the party would be equipped from the dragon's hoard for the dangers that lay ahead in their journey to Rakore. Tangala would even take the party a thousand miles west, deep into the Laekenala Jungle, to help them on their way.

Zan killed a man, for no other reason than his own, inherant evil. The victim was discovered missing on the first day. The clan's warriors searched for him on the second day. The clan's elders searched for him with their druidic might on the third day. Tangala'asaleph found the victim's spirit, and knew who the murderer was. Only Faeradd's hasty threat of Prophecy stopped the white dragon from turning Zan over to the elders for sentancing as a treant.

In exchange for Zan, the party would turn over Oorhl as a hostage – and Sam would have a geas laid upon him. Responsibility for the assassin would lay heavily upon the party, as Tangala summoned the mists to take them away. When the mists cleared, they were within an alien world – the Laekenala Jungle.

The date is Lan the 9th, 1328 Avard – on a cool, wet day with the clouds unseen in the canopy, and the rising sun hidden by the forest.