After a quiet and uneventful night sleeping on the leather couches, the companions awake and begin to make ready, Tinneraine and Vanise find a pair of swords displayed on the walls and clasp the scabbards to their belts, while Awela and Sadiba peruse the bookshelves for anything of value. Sadiba, noticing a tome on sword-fighting, brushes aside a dusty web when a sharp pain on his hand elicits a scream as he falls to the ground shaking. Tinneraine dashes over and swats away the enormous pallid ghost-recluse with his new sword before he sucks the poison out from Sadiba's wound.
"My dear, you must be more careful," Tinneraine says to Sadiba upon his return to consciousness, "who knows what foul crawling things can do!"
"It's best we depart now," says Awela as she shoulders her pack.
As the companions exit the manor they notice the corpses they had encountered the previous evening had vanished by some means in the night.
Tinneraine mutters some esoteric prayer to calm his beating heart as they pass by and set foot across the dewy meadow toward the mountain pass to the north.
