Session 2: The Forgotten Tomb

Tresendar Manor sat on a small rise east of Phandalin, its stones blanketed in moss and its windows long since emptied of glass. The locals avoided it. When the party asked why, they received the same answer from three different people: “Best not to go looking.”

Naturally, they went looking.

Into the Manor

The manor itself had been stripped — furniture, fixtures, anything of value removed years ago. But in the basement, behind a false wall Theron found by pressing what he thought was an ordinary stone, they discovered a staircase descending into darkness older than the building above it.

The barrow mound predated Phandalin. The stonework was different — older, carved with symbols that made Mira’s holy symbol warm against her skin.

“These are not Lathanderian markings,” she said, holding her torch closer. “These predate the Dawning.”

The Dead That Walk

The first chamber held four sarcophagi and, unfortunately, their occupants — four skeletons in ancient armour, animate and hostile. The fight was straightforward until a fifth skeleton dropped from the ceiling where no one had thought to look.

Zax took a rusted sword through the shoulder. Theron’s arrows found joints and eye sockets with methodical precision. Lyria’s Shatter reduced two skeletons to bone fragments with a thunderclap that left everyone’s ears ringing.

Mira’s Turn Undead stopped the last skeleton in its tracks, and Zax destroyed it with considerable satisfaction.

The Warning Chamber

The second chamber was intact. In its centre stood a stone plinth bearing a clay tablet, still legible after what Lyria estimated was eight hundred years. She read the ancient Common aloud — slowly, carefully, with the particular dread of someone who understood every word:

“Here lie the Wardens of the Threshold, who gave their lives to bind the Endless Night. Let no flame be snuffed in their presence. Let no voice speak its name. What sleeps below must never be awakened. The seal holds. The seal must hold.”

The seal in question was carved into the floor of the chamber — a six-pointed design in silver metal, inlaid into the stone. It was intact. Mostly. One arm of the design had been chipped away, the silver removed.

Someone had been here before them.

The Obsidian Coin

Beside the damaged seal, half-hidden under debris: a single obsidian coin. Identical to the ones Snarg the goblin described. Stamped with a symbol none of them recognised — a spiral within a spiral, like an eye closing.

The party retreated from the barrow in thoughtful silence. In Phandalin, they sought out the town’s only scholar, an elderly woman named Mirna who had lived in the region her whole life. She turned pale at the description of the coin.

“The Cult of the Endless Night,” she whispered. “I thought they were a story.”

Session end: Mystery deepened, seal examined, Phandalin’s scholar becomes a contact.