The White Corpse

The Last Priest of Telchur

The expected priest arrived, but the truth he carried was larger than the sanctuary. Telchur had been slain by the forces of disease. In the final extremity, the dying god transformed his own vast body into the glacier now moving through the world. The company had not entered an avatar or an ordinary demiplane: they were travelling inside the changed corpse of a god.

Called the White Corpse, the glacier still healed, shifted, remembered and dreamed. Telchur’s surviving divine spark endured as crystal fragments within it. The last priest could ask the body to open routes between its inner regions, but he had not realised that its intended passage to the Summerlands had stalled.

The Journey That Never Finished

The White Corpse carried more than relics. White drakes, frost giants, winter fae, remorhazes, ice elementals, cold-adapted aberrations, magical beasts and refugees had found shelter within its moving ecosystem. Once its journey began, ordinary exits sealed and conventional teleportation ceased to work.

Its course toward the Summerlands had been arrested by a planar obstruction powerful enough to block divine movement and ordinary links between worlds. Instead of leaving the Prime Material, the immense body continued to grind across the countryside.

Asuran tested another boundary. He channelled otherwise neutral gem power through a prayer to Ghaunadaur. The result was more than invisibility: even the unicorn and the Mind Flayer could neither perceive nor contact him, as though he had stepped outside ordinary reality. The gem supplied power, but the invoked divinity shaped its expression.

Kraal in the Moving Ice

The glacier shifted with sudden violence. A corridor closed around the company, pinning Karl waist-deep and catching Tanner’s arm in the wall. From the forming ice rose a great cold elemental the priest called Kraal. It attacked without hesitation, filling the passage with freezing breath and refusing every chance to withdraw.

Toby invoked Telchur through the mark he carried. The White Corpse responded by closing around Kraal and imprisoning the elemental in its own ice. The victory came from recognition and restraint rather than destruction.

A Morning That Never Came

The company believed it had slept twice, yet the priest made clear that not even one full day had passed. Inside the White Corpse, apparent rest could last only moments. Exhaustion might ease without prayer, memory or divine gifts truly renewing, and repeated attempts to force recovery could attract consequences from the dreaming glacier.

The imprisoned Mind Flayer claimed to have lived inside the glacier for roughly sixty to ninety years. It offered to place a minute part of itself within willing minds, a reserve that could be consumed once as a second chance. Several accepted, though the record does not securely identify every recipient. Halen certainly did: he spent the presence to recover his battle fury, and later examination found no continuing domination.

The Frozen Shrine

Deeper within the Mouth they found a fertility shrine whose altar was not bound to one god. Different powers could be addressed there. An enormous winter knight knelt frozen in penitential prayer, while nearby a crystal golem stood locked in the ice.

The true danger was hidden inside the fallen shapes around them. Aberrant, possibly demonic parasites wore dead bodies as outer shells. Breaking a corpse did not kill its occupant; each creature had to be fought twice. When a shell failed, the parasite tried to abandon it and infest a stronger host—including the helpless knight.

The company destroyed the exposed parasites and prevented the possession. Their exact name was never confirmed; the chronicle records them provisionally as Crystal Parasites.

The Winter Knight and the First Shard

Freed from the ice, the knight proved to be a powerful human warrior of Telchur rather than a cleric. He explained that the crystal golem was a mindless construct sustained only while it remained inside the god’s transformed body. In gratitude, he gave the party a crystal taken from the construct: a Shard of Telchur and a key to the roads within the White Corpse.

The Winter Knight provided the clearest route yet through Telchur’s transformed body. The White Corpse was divided into five great internal regions, each reached by means of a shard recovered in the region before it. These were not simply landmarks: together they formed a deliberate road from the god’s Mouth to his surviving Heart.

Escape was therefore no longer the only question. If the company simply found a way out, the White Corpse would remain stranded on the Prime Material, continuing to crush and freeze the mortal countryside in its path. Their developing intention was to follow the five-stage road, discover what blocked Telchur’s passage and redirect the divine body towards its intended destination in the Summerlands.

The Avatar’s Answer

The Winter Knight could not leave his chambers. He had answered Telchur’s call while dying, after the god’s temples had already closed, and had come with the last High Priest. With no stores to offer him, the company placed what food it could spare before the neutral fertility idol and joined his prayer.

The statue awakened. One eye opened, folded arms moved and the offerings vanished, leaving only smoke curling from a sacrificed pair of boots. Telchur could not answer in person, but an avatar or divine intermediary spoke in his name and allowed the company one request.

They could have asked for escape. Instead, knowing the White Corpse would continue to devastate the mortal countryside, they asked how its failed journey could be corrected. The answer arrived as shared visions and settled within each of them as a commanding purpose—not a magical compulsion, but a foremost duty that would endure until fulfilled.

Telchur had not wholly died. At the edge of death he became the White Corpse and remained faintly alive, still healing and dreaming. The party must find the guarded concentrations of his essence and use prayer and ritual to release or redirect that power. Simply tearing it away could kill what remains of him.

Six Visions Beneath the Ice

The answer showed six guarded scenes. Their order and exact locations were not revealed, and the five named regions should not yet be treated as a one-to-one key to the visions. What was certain was their purpose: these were defenders or prisons around Telchur’s remaining divine essence, not an assortment of unrelated monsters.

The forgotten dead: frozen or dead worshippers waited in a ruined refuge while wolves prowled and a frost giant stood outside. The company suspected these might be souls unable to cross into their proper afterlife.

The corrupted elder: an Elder Frost Elemental of immense age and power was scarred by undeath or abyssal corruption.

The crystalline host: an advanced Crystal Golem was supported by swarms of small ice mephits.

The sloughing remorhazes: great remorhazes hauled themselves from their own discarded skins, suggesting transformation rather than ordinary nesting.

The Ice Drake: the creature was a drake rather than a true dragon. It might possess intelligence, but the vision gave no indication that it wielded spells.

The crystal over the abyss: a mountain-sized crystal hung above a frozen gulf, surrounded by six smaller crystals moving like moons. Whether it was a guardian, a prison or an entire essence-site remained unknown.

Prayer Through the First Shard

The first Shard of Telchur was more than a key. The many crystals still visible within the emptied golem were ordinary material; the single shard held all the divine essence once carried by that guardian. Unlike the protected gems shaped by dwarven hands, it was a raw piece of a god and could be damaged by a failed invocation.

The company considered using it for enduring light, protection from the cold, renewed rest or even passage towards the next shard. Divination offered no easy answer because divine beings and their works resisted such questioning. What the shard could do depended upon the faith gathered around it: the greater, wider or longer-lasting the request, the more essence it consumed and the more dangerous a failure became.

They chose to use some of its power immediately. Time within the White Corpse had almost stopped—only about a minute and a half had passed while they debated—and any essence left trapped within Telchur ultimately had to be released or redirected. This gave them a rare opportunity to restore knowledge that the Waning had denied them.

Karl and Tanner led the first prayer. Both warrior-priests had possessed the training and conviction to perform many simple sacred workings, yet the emptied world had allowed each to retain only one. Through the shard, their neglected understanding returned: protective blessings, healing prayers and other foundational acts of faith became accessible again. The effort consumed more than half of the shard’s reserve, dimming the multitude of reflected lights within it until the company could finally judge how little power it truly contained.

Encouraged by that success, Asuran attempted the same recovery through arcane understanding. Supported by the others’ prayers and Karl’s religious knowledge, he recovered ten foundational arcane workings. The invocation succeeded, but the raw essence recoiled. The company had already agreed that any backlash should be driven into the shard rather than allowed to tear through those taking part. Karl, Tanner and Halen held the prayer together while Toby and Asuran were forced back, and their combined will turned the surge inward.

That defence saved the prayer circle but placed a burden upon the unprotected fragment greater than the power it had left. In the first course of events the crystal exploded across the chamber. Karl received the full force of the blast: his armour was torn apart and he was left far beyond the point from which ordinary first aid could save him. The others were badly injured and had only moments to prevent his death.

Asuran then invoked the second chance granted to him by the imprisoned Mind Flayer. Reality returned to the instant before the disaster and the failed working was attempted again. This time the shard remained intact. Karl’s mortal injuries, the damage to his armour and every other wound caused by the explosion had never occurred, while the crystal retained six measures of divine power.

The earlier mystery of Asuran’s disappearance was also resolved. He had not merely become invisible; divine power had displaced him into an adjacent planar state. He could still touch his companions, yet even the unicorn and the Mind Flayer could not perceive him.