Gathered in their room at the Lion's Pride Inn, the party weighed their options and decided the Witchwood was the only sensible way forward. Everything else lay back the way they had come, and Khasim's Crown waited on the far side. That night Ferinthria and Momeline crept downstairs at the sound of raised voices and saw Farley, the innkeeper, berating his daughter in the kitchen room, calling her a whore while she wept.

In the morning, Dravencoles stepped out in search of a Root Beer Zero and nearly collided with Tomas, who was waiting in the hall with an easy smile and an offer: guide services through the Witchwood. After some haggling the party agreed to 250 gp, half upfront, and Tomas said he would meet them behind the inn, then climbed out their window. It did not take long to piece together why. He had bedded Farley's daughter and wanted to be well clear of town before anyone noticed. Ferinthria, mishearing Momeline's explanation, concluded Tomas had relations with dogs, and spent the rest of the day baffled that no one else seemed troubled by it.

The forest closed over them within the hour. Tomas consulted his notebook more and more openly. Ferinthria grew certain someone was stalking her through the trees, and when a hand seized her arm she spun and slammed a lightning-charged Chromatic Orb into the figure behind her, who turned out to be Dravencoles. The Witchwood had already begun rewriting what their eyes told them. The party gagged Ferinthria and pushed on.

They came upon a band of goblins arguing in a clearing about a cathedral somewhere deeper in the wood. Momeline confronted them, noting that one of the goblins bore an uncanny resemblance to a famous comedy actress, but before the shouting resolved into anything useful, an otyugh burst from the undergrowth and tore three goblins apart. The party dropped it, and the surviving goblins vanished between the trees.

In the scuffle Tomas's notebook had come loose and the pages had mixed themselves back together wrong. He admitted, finally, that he was lost. Dravencoles turned to his Hammer, which tugged firmly in a new direction, and the party followed. Rain came down in sheets as a ruined Elandrian cathedral rose out of the mist.

Inside, the hammer pulled toward the altar while the Elandrian feather revealed a hidden staircase behind a statue. The ground shook as the staircase opened, causing a pillar to collapse on Lirielle and Landor. At the bottom of the stairs waited a long crypt half-buried in piles of human bones. Momeline and Landor rigged a rope so Momeline could pick her way across the heap, and on the far wall she found a Valaen relgious text. On the return crossing her footing gave way and she fell into the heap, under which she felt the slithering of a vast bone naga. The party brought it down in a hard, fast fight. Then the earth shook. The stair they had come down by collapsed in a roar of dust, and the crypt sealed shut around them.