Charlie Company returns from bailing out Delta on a chicken rounding turned lich pounding. Portent Order next assigns them to a VIP escort mission for lapin Brother Im, of secret tanker building fame, as he pilgrims to a nearby temple site of Frith and Inle in the frigid Graypeaks. The party requisitions billy goats and cold weather gear. As Hops will be unavailable for a while, Ander equips the party with spellwrought tattoos of wound curing as well as shield for Briar and Sqyylarr and a revivify for Ash who has a proven talent for surviving catastrophes.
The next morning finds Brother Im fasting. The party finishes preparations and departs the caravan for a valley between two peaks, guided primarily by Brother Im’s intuition and protected from indiginous stone giants by his crushed herbs and tuning fork dinging.
After spending one night on the trail the party arrives at the broken temple wall. The billy goats are hobbled outside the walls. Inside, fresh tracks of human footprints visit a turret of icy stairs up to the wall, an open pavilion to the west, and a larger temple building to the east. The party pokes around cautiously while Brother Im makes a tour of the pavilion.
Within the pavilion a pair of gongs seem to symbolize sun and moon. There are a couple of prayer wheels and a table covered in frozen blood around a steel and wood box. Watc and Briar make an investigation of the box and figure out that the gold amulet inside is a honey trap designed to sever the hand of anyone helping himself to the illusory amulet. At least eight people have learned the trap the hard way as the secret door below reveals an equal number of severed hands, one of them especially fresh.
Further contemplation of the trap is interrupted by a boulder smashing into Barika. Sqyylarr easily spots the origin of the boulder’s trajectory as a huge stone giant looming in the courtyard next to an icy patio. Ander’s persistently readied firebolt finds the giant. Charging Sqyylarr slings a couple of bullets. Barika also rushes the giant but slips prone on the ice short of the goal. Briar makes a running misty step and smacks the giant solidly, backed by Ander’s force ballista and an immolation by Watc halved by the giant’s litheness. The giant smashes Briar and smashes prone Barika but is finished by a sneaky arrow from Ash and a critically fatal blow from Sqyylarr. Barika regains her feet and high-fives Sqyylarr.
Ash resumes his exploration into the east temple but is jumped by a scimitar wielding human, possibly a bandit, who knows? Slippery Ash disengages around a corner and yells a warning to the cheeky bandit and his fellows. Shifted Briar misty steps in and makes the warning officially intimidating. The bandits back off and Brother Im leads in the rest of the party.
Brother Hlessi, lapin caretaker of the structure over the undercroft Altar of Inle, has meanwhile been patching up bandit Jorbar’s right stump. The bandits have already lost some cohorts to the monsters below, including Cap, and mostly they just want to leave. They aren’t keen to fight so Briar sends them out to the west pavilion until this situation is under control.
Brother Im and Brother Hlessi exchange their greetings. Brother Hlessi is mighty sorry that the altar and tomb of the three has been overrun with vampires and tentacled aberrations, but what can one do? Brother Im is undeterred from visiting the altar anyway so the party prepares to escort him down.