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Suddenly, the carriage comes to a stop. The spectral horses driving it rear and whine, and the passenger door swings open. You are left to stop out into the forest, and your breath is visible in the cold air.
Hesitantly, you exist the carriage, and the door closes behind you. The horses turn the vehicle around, and they bound away. The entire carriage seems to pass into the border ethereal, fading with a blue glow as it heads back the you came, vanishing in the fog.
You turn and look at the road ahead. There, built into the side of a mountain, is Krezk.
A gatehouse built into a twenty-foot-high wall of stone reinforced with buttresses every fifty feet or so. The wall encloses a settlement. Beyond the wall is the tops of snow-covered pines and thin, white wisps of smoke. The somber toll of a bell comes from a stone abbey that clings to the mountainside high above the settlement. It's hard to tell at this distance, but there seems to be a switchback road clinging to the cliffs that lead up from the walled settlement to the abbey.
You do a quick double-check of your equipment, especially your trusty longsword, then you make your way up to the settlement, where you are to meet your sister for the first time since you were little. The nervousness compounds as it hits you that if this goes well, it may be the end of the journey that you have been on since you were a child.
...
The air grows colder as you approach the walled settlement. Two square towers with peaked roofs flank a stone archway into which is set a pair of twelve-foot-tall, ironbound wooden doors. Carved into the arch above the doors is the settlement's name: Krezk.
The walls that extend from the gatehouse are twenty feet high.
(cont.)
