They each arrived in High Alden separately, and none of them made it to morning with dignity intact.
Shelly came over land on the King's Road, found a tavern, and ordered something strong. Then ordered it again. By the time the evening crowd thinned, he had only a rough theory about which direction his inn was. The lamplit streets of High Alden do not forgive wandering drunks kindly. At some point the city won — and he came to passed out at the bottom of a stairwell inside the castle, head pounding, gear still on him.
Zhodrok crossed the Sable Sea by cargo vessel and arrived in the port district, moving through the crowd with the unsettling quietness of someone large enough that the crowd parts around them. He found a tavern by smell. He had just settled in when a very drunk Shelly stumbled past the doorway, squinted at him, and asked which way the inn was. He pointed with great confidence in the wrong direction and finished his drink in peace. He was a block from his own inn when he heard the soft hollow sound of a blowgun and felt the sting at the back of his neck. The street tilted. He didn't see who fired, and he didn't see much after that. He woke in a locked cell.
Liorin Vale crossed the Gray Sea from the north, landed at Guildwater, and walked the rest of the way — which is the kind of decision that says something about a person. He arrived travel-worn, didn't stop to eat, didn't find a room. He went directly to the castle, found the first floor empty and cold, followed the only signs of recent use down a stairwell, and at the bottom found Shelly — still horizontal, still alive, beginning to have opinions about the noise.
They freed Zhodrok from his cell — the gear for all three sat in the room across the hall, apparently gathered and left there — and took stock of where they were.
Working through the dungeon below the castle, they lit the way with the Lantern of Steady Flame — a strange device whose cold, steady glow seemed to push back not just darkness but the Corruption itself. The first sign of what they were dealing with came quickly: the reanimated dead of the castle garrison, hollow-eyed and blue-skinned, moving with that unmistakable glacial wrongness. The lantern seemed to unsettle them. Several guards lay half-transformed, frozen mid-death in corridors they'd clearly never left. One corner held an ice wall that melted back at the lantern's light, then re-froze the moment it was withdrawn.
In the guard rooms beyond the dungeon they recovered their equipment, along with two oddities: a rod of iron with a worn button that could lock itself immovable in space, and a small rust-orange cloak sewn for someone far smaller than any of the castle's guards.
Further in, the stonework changed. A stretch of wall caught Zhodrok's eye — dwarven craftsmanship, unmistakably older than everything around it.
Then came the rope bridge.
The corridor dropped into darkness. A single rope spanned the gap — barely five feet across — the floor below unfrozen in patches where the lantern light reached. Zhodrok led the crossing: long arms spread wide, bracing against both walls, Liorin Vale riding his shoulders with the lantern held high. They made it halfway before the bats came — a swarm of eight, pouring out of the dark from every direction.
Liorin Vale used a charge of magical tinkering to send a sharp, disorienting ring through his shield. The swarm scattered briefly and poured straight back in. Shelly conjured a shower of sparks with Prestidigitation, catching one and sending it splashing into the water below. Zhodrok lashed out with a dagger and killed another mid-dive. Together they carved their way across — slowly, carefully, one step at a time — while the swarm struck at them in turns and the immoveable rod stood ready if anyone lost their footing.
Near the far edge Shelly hopped clear of Zhodrok's shoulders and landed on solid ground. He set the lantern down and opened fire with Firebolt, burning two more from the air. Liorin Vale planted the immoveable rod, clicked it fixed, and pole-vaulted from the rope to the far side. He finished the last bat with a crack of thunder from Sorcerer's Burst.
Then he went back for the rod.
He didn't make it — slipped from the rope and dropped four feet into the water below. Cold, shallow, and the walls too smooth to climb. Zhodrok leaned out — those absurdly long arms exactly as useful here as they'd been on the rope — and hauled him back up. They retrieved the rod. They kept moving.
Past stone doors, the corridor opened into something older: a throne room that predated the public one above. A low stone altar stood at its centre, and on it lay a man — breathing, chest still rising and falling, but unconscious and wreathed in a faint blue-edged light. Around him stood four figures: ice-blue, utterly still, utterly inhuman. They weren't guarding him. They were watching him.
Two wall-mounted torches burned with a light that looked, uncannily, like the lantern's own flame. The mephits kept their distance from all three.
When the party stepped too close, the mephits woke.
The fight that followed was ugly at level one. Zhodrok worked from range — those long arms letting him strike from ten feet out — while Liorin Vale locked a Witch Bolt onto his target and kept the current running turn by turn. Shelly shot one apart with Firebolt, straddled the king's body to shield him, and — at one desperate moment — held his pistol to the king's temple and threatened the mephits into backing off. He rolled a one. The gun fired into the altar instead.
The mephits did not stop.
The real problem was the reforming: every time one shattered into ice shards, another gathered the remains from the floor and breathed it back to life. They fought through two full cycles of this. When two mephits unleashed their frost breath in concert, both Shelly and Liorin Vale went down.
The door opened.
A knight stepped in — spectacular plate armor, moving with speed that made no sense for a man that encumbered. Behind him, a girl in a dress with a red bow, small and careful, but clearly the one in charge. He swept through what remained of the mephits in seconds. She walked to where the fallen lay, placed her hands on them, and brought them back.
One hit point each. More than enough.
The girl was Anna, the King Regent. The man on the altar was her father, King Harold III, and he had been like this for 43 days. No physician had reached him. No priest had broken whatever held him. It didn't come from nowhere — it was made, somewhere in the realm — and the people who made it were still in this city. She needed people unknown to the city's power players to find the source. The summons she'd sent was real. So was the reward, when the time came.
She hadn't been gentle about recruiting them either. Zhodrok had been drugged and brought in to the castle. Shelly and Liorin Vale had been intercepted at the gate and thrown in the dungeon when the Corrupted arrived before her people could reach them properly. She apologized for both.
Sir Kaelin, the knight, would remain in Crownvale — but he had contacts in every other realm, and he showed them the proof: a map of the Alden Peninsula, its surface marked with slowly moving dots. Their names were already on it. He would know where they were.
Before they rested in the now-cleared throne room, the King Regent lifted the necklace from around her own neck and gave it to Liorin Vale. Sir Kaelin produced two Frostmarch Cloaks — dark, heavy things that smelled faintly of smoke and cold stone — and handed them to Zhodrok and Liorin Vale.