The original three from Session 0 returned to High Alden, reported what happened at the lake, and were sent beneath The Collegium Arcanum to deliver the ruined wolf cargo to Professor Sylic. What should have been an academic errand turned into a descent through traps, passwords, a troll, Charlie the corrupted cube, and an ice room full of recurring Frost Goblins before Sylic finally explained that The Frost Corruption behaves less like weather than like instruction.
Zhodrok came back to High Alden by road with Burn and Ord Stonebreaker, the steam wagon rattling north with dead wolves in the back and too many rumors on the road for any one of them to be useful. Ord kept his arms and legs covered as best he could. Where wolf teeth and Morvath's grip had found him, the skin had already begun to go colder, stiffer, and a shade wrong. He said nothing about it.
Shelly and Liorin Vale had spent the intervening days inside the city. They helped Cousin Barry survive a children's party at Lantern Abbey, drifted afterward through Ashdock, and collected the usual High Alden mixture of certainty and nonsense about the Corruption. Every district had a theory. None matched. All were delivered with conviction.
When all five finally reported in, Sir Kaelin was already most of the way through the facts before anyone spoke. The Dreams of Gold had made dock. Captain Edric, Zhurm, and Orison-7 had survived. The cargo had not. He sent Burn and Ord Stonebreaker away to rest, making it clear — without saying so aloud — that he had noticed what was happening to Ord's limbs. Then he brought Shelly, Liorin Vale, and Zhodrok before the King Regent.
She was done pretending the problem could still be spoken of as though it were a bad season. The King Regent told them plainly that The Frost Corruption was not ordinary cold, nor ordinary disease, but something older and more deliberate — a force that behaved like purpose. She ordered them to take the corrupted wolves to Professor Sylic in the Underhall Archives beneath The Collegium Arcanum, listen carefully to whatever he said, and bring back anything useful.
The entrance to Underhall was hidden under the Collegium the way only old institutions know how to hide things: not invisible, merely made to seem unimportant. Inside, the first rooms felt less like an archive than a test. One chamber held only a cot, a table, a stove, and a sign that said "Watch out for Charlie," which made more sense later than it did in the room with the stove. The moment they were all inside, iron gates slammed down over every exit. The answer to that first problem turned out to be the large bone burning in the stove. Once disturbed, it regenerated into a Troll who opened the gates with bored familiarity, as if this happened often enough to count as routine.
Beyond that waited a library with no visible onward passage and a sign that simply instructed them to say the password. The numbers on the wall resolved, eventually, into Black Temple. Saying it opened the hidden way forward, which was the sort of answer that solved one problem while creating several worse ones. Shelly also took a book about steam wagons from the room. Once he left the library, the text inside vanished. He kept the book anyway.
The next room was part trap, part filtration works. Bars rose and fell in steady intervals over a sloped stone floor, and somewhere in that rhythm moved Charlie — a Corrupted Gelantinous Cube. The party's first answer to the room was simple enough: Zhodrok picked up Shelly and tossed him over the bars. Shelly landed directly in Charlie, to everyone's surprise but especially his own. After that there was no puzzle left to negotiate. The fight took time, and most of it was spent trying to free Shelly from the cube before it dissolved more of him than they could afford. More than once it must have looked as though they were simply hacking at a moving wall of cold filth for the privilege of getting their friend back. Eventually persistence won, Charlie died, and the way onward opened. In the aftermath, Liorin Vale found a Deck of Illusions in the filtration room or cave beyond and kept that discovery to himself.
Past the filter cell, the stone turned slick. The floor of the next chamber froze over the moment they fully entered it, leaving only two small platforms clear of ice. When two of them finally stepped onto the pressure plates and held them, the room did not simply thaw. The ice rose into Frost Goblins instead. The fight became a balancing act: they had to keep the plates occupied while killing what the ice had just made, because stepping off would let the room reset and the goblins reappear. They fought those things more than once before they finally held the room long enough to recover the key trapped beneath the ice and get through the door.
At the end of it they found Professor Sylic at work over the opened body of a corrupted crocodile, more interested in the pattern of the thing than its ugliness. He asked after the wolves, accepted quickly that "contained" was no longer the right word, and was mildly put out to learn that Charlie — the archive's corrupted cube — had been killed, though not enough to do more than register the loss and move on. Shelly had also kept a sample of melted Charlie in a vial; Sylic dismissed it as water, but Shelly kept the vial anyway. At some point Sylic also asked whether anyone had seen a Deck of Illusions. Liorin Vale said nothing. Sylic then explained the version of the truth he could afford to say aloud: that The Frost Corruption behaves like pattern, instruction, and rewrite. It spreads through living carriers, tainted objects, compromised places, and perhaps through memory and identity besides. It does not merely make things cold. It makes them less true. He handed them the public version of his report and made it clear there was a more dangerous version behind it.