The Company, fearing it may be unwittingly sealed in the Warrens, continues to explore with greater alacrity. Several sealed vault doors line the hallway, on the main hallway and in a connected hallway that continues to the north. Behind one of the unsealed vault doors, the Company finds three ancient corpses, now mostly bones, on the ground in front of two empty shelves carved into one of the walls. Behind another of the unsealed vault doors, the Company finds a crude box wrapped in chains. When Sebastian enters the room, a miasmic cloud bursts forth and injures him. Calling upon his familiarity with magicks, Jeremi surmises that the spell attached to the trap Sebastian sprung was designed solely to harm good characters. Sebastian picks the lock, and Jeremi opens the box using more arcane magick to create a ghostly magical hand. Inside are a mace, five crossbow bolts, a little pearl, and a ring. Jeremi senses that they are magic, but the Company agrees not to take the items until it can determine that they are not evil.
At the end of the second hallway, the Company finds a room whose door has been ripped from the hinges. Someone has laid bones into a crudely shaped cross near the threshold. The room is cold, and glistens with frost. Jeremi casts a spell and makes Sebastian invisible. Sebastian moves silently into the room. In the room�s center, he finds a deep pit with ancient runes carved into the stone lip of the pit. The bottom of the pit is coated in a skin of ice and swirls with boreal mists.
Finding no exits from the room, the Company returns to a wide opening in the first hallway that heads to the south. As the Company walks, Avi asks why the Company is leaving doors unopened and entering other rooms with stealth. Cirend explains that some of the Banes are, in fact, undefeatable. Avi seems reluctant, and reminds the Company that its primary goal is to obtain the Sword of Lies before the agents of the �tonist church, who want it for what Avi believes are nefarious purposes.
The wide hallway that the Company passes through leads into a two-level chamber with a catwalk along the wall. In the room�s center is a bronze sphere mounted atop struts that jut out like an insect�s legs in every direction. Dragons are craved into the plates of the sphere. The Company instantly recognizes this as a warding generator, similar to the two previously encountered by the Company. This one, however, is working. Uso spends a few minutes studying this operational warding machine while Sebastian finds a secret door that leads back, via a narrow passageway, to the Undead Cleric�s resting chamber.
Beyond the warding generator is an unusual room with angled mirrored plates on the walls that bounce light in a nearly hypnotic pattern. A steel door is breaks up one of the walls, and two doors � one gold and one silver � are at the far end of the room. Several Company members become dazzled by the brilliant interplay of light and shadow caused by the mirrored room, but Sebastian manages to open the steel door. The room beyond is empty, but for gold and white chains mounted to a wall that hang emptily to the floor. Sebastian attempts to unlock the gold and silver doors, but finds that they are magically locked.
The Company agrees to rest for the day, and retreats to the now-hallowed chamber.
The 23rd of Darkel
The next morning, the Company returns to the chamber containing the crude box containing magical items. Jeremi finds that the items do not appear to be evil, and the Company takes them. The Company then back-tracks to the gold and silver doors, so that Uso can use his arcane powers to unmake the magical lock.
As the Company is waiting in the mirrored chamber deep in the bowels of the Banevault for Uso to call upon his arcane magicks to unlock the gold and silver doors barring its way, Sebastian comments on how he feels particularly sluggish and groggy.
