Veil of Frozen Tears

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You can disable this banner in your personal preferences. The Veil of Frozen Tears is a dungeon in northeastern Irrisen, created by Baba Yaga after the ill-fated rebellion of her daughter Queen Tashanna in the Witchwar of 4213 AR.

Creation

Following Tashanna's defeat, Baba Yaga had the surviving soldiers of Tashanna's army marched to northeastern Irrisen and chained to a cliff. She then had every soldier's family rounded up and brought to witness them. Using a spell of mythic power, the Old Crone diverted a mighty river to make it crash down the escarpment and flood the valley below, killing the hundreds of soldiers and thousands of gathered civilians to show Tashanna the price of rebellion. Baba Yaga then wove another spell to freeze the cascade solid and summoned great remorhazes to bore through the frozen waterfall, creating tunnels to form a dungeon of solid ice. Tashanna and her captains were then marched into the newly-constructed Veil of Frozen Tears for imprisonment, never to be seen again.

Description

The Veil of Frozen Tears is a frozen waterfall roughly seven-hundred feet in height, trapped in mid-cascade on a stony escarpment. A castle, carved from the ice itself, protrudes from the ice sheet. Further up, a hollow has been carved into the ice in which a village has seemingly been built: a necropolis of tombs carved from the magical ice, sculpted to mimic a northern village in every detail. A stair at the base of the waterfall leads to the tunnels inside the icy dungeon.

True Purpose

Although it was assumed to have been a tomb for the rebellious Tashanna, Baba Yaga did not in fact kill her daughter. For her own inscrutable reason, the Queen of Witches instead banished Tashanna from Golarion to realize her own potential as a witch tyrant on other worlds where she could not interfere with her mother's plots. The icy dungeon was not created without purpose, however: it housed the Torc of Kostchtchie, a powerful artifact that Tashanna had tried in vain to use against Baba Yaga and which the Old Crone wished to keep out of the hands of any other potential enemies.

Recent History

In 4710 AR, Queen Elvanna of Irrisen discovered the location of the Veil of Frozen Tears and sent her granddaughter, Ilivorr Karanasi, on a mission to retrieve the Torc. At the same time, the demon lord Kostchtchie, a fragment of whose soul was imprisoned in the Torc, became aware of Elvanna's plot and sent a detachment of frost giants and other minions to stop her. The outcome of these events has remained a secret.