Prologue for January, 2020

Over a crisp white path, twelve adventurers travel on only a whimsy and a hunch. Their footsteps play the tune of anticipation as each crunch moves from unison to sporadic. A tune follows them and fends off their woes as they stumble upon a small town just outside the proper.

Six more adventurers yet, lay buried in stacks of knowledge, bound parchment, in the form of a mountainous pile. They study with a curiosity voracious enough to have the books themselves even yearn for diligent eyes to grace their brittle pages. An impossible knock at the door spells motion not only here, but in another place unnamed.

That place holding another two heroes, whom should encounter the unknown.

Travance lay a white abyss for weeks. Only now did the snow begin to subside. Only now did its vile frigid form begin to take that of water and breathe respite into the frost-entrapped flora, fauna, and structure below. An odd silence breaches the air, do the animals still hide? Do the common folk not venture out into these white hills, to seek refuge from their imprisonment? Who wouldn't after such harsh storms? But a quit panic is soon to rise. For assuredly everything may seem fine in this brief moment, but that is not the actuality.

Silence walks but a ravenous path.

A family is cast into panic.

It emerges not of, but from the storm.

“You better clasp your mouth real tight, lest you wind up gone.”