Having escaped the destruction of Todstein Island, the party found themselves floating in a grey, featureless sea of mist. Without any means of propulsion or clues as to any destinations, they were content to drift and instead focus on the items retrieved from Meredoth's crumbled lair. Farid claimed the wizard's purple and black robes. Leif claimed a pair of bracers that were apparently made of bone; when donned, small teeth bit into his wrists, and spine-like tails wrapped his forearms, looking frightening but doing no other apparent harm. Ghrym, however, focused on the main artifact gained from the necromancer... the black ba'alstone. Examining it reverently, the party wondered after its many secrets; as they did, they barely noticed the landscape around them coming into focus.

When the mists cleared, the party found their small boat had come to rest in the center of a dry, cracked plaza. All around them, a marble city rose up the sides of a steep valley. The sky above was grey and hazy, but a distinct and distant arch could be seen, the remnants of a shattered moon. The buildings and sculptures that adorned the city were plentiful and ornate, with one temple towering over all. Of the inhabitants, no sign could be found.

Leaving the incongruously placed boat in the center of the plaza, the party separated to search the city. Finding nothing, they eventually regrouped at the base of the large temple. Climbing the impossibly long flight of broken stairs, they eventually reached the entrance. Inside, past the wide columns that flanked the doorway, they found a massive, open roofed sanctuary. An enormous statue stood inside, depicting a woman in robes holding aloft a blazing sun symbol. Large cracks ran across the floor, opening to a dark space below. While the rest of the city had seen decay and erosion, it seemed clear that the temple had been at the center of a long-ago disaster.

Suddenly, while the party was looking around, a figure, draped in tattered golden robes, appeared out of corner of the room. As the figure approached, they could see that it was skeletal, and that it clutched a golden mace in its left hand, while its entire right arm was missing. It opened its mouth to speak, but the party didn't wait to parley; after the horrors of Todstein, they acted quickly and decisively. Using the black sword Darkfire, Leif cut the skeletal figure down, its bones and robes turning to ash in the fire from the dark blade.  Soon, the only inhabitant of the Necropolis city was gone, and the party was again alone.

After more searching, Ghrym was able to find a hidden door in the base of the statue. There, a small room held a stone-like altar, upon which sat a glass box containing a gold and crystal device. A chain hung from the top of the item, and there appeared to be a lid of some sort. The box, however, had no hinges, and the glass seemed to be as impenetrable as steel. Beyond the altar was a descending iron spiral staircase, and it was to this that the party went to further their investigation.

The stairs descended deep into the earth, and suddenly ended in twisted metal as the shaft tilted to the side, obviously the result of a shifting of the rock. After navigating through the browken and twisted shaft, the party came to the catacomb level, which had fared no better in whatever earthquake had wrecked the city. After some searching, a chamber, mostly intact and level, was discovered; therein, large iron chains hung from the each corner, floor and ceiling, all converging on a large slab of black stone that was suspended over the center of the room. Runes and glyphs covered the floor, centered around the hanging stone. As the party entered, they moved to investigate the stone more carefully. The stone resembled a four-sided obelisk, hanging point-downwards. Each face featured a stunningly realized bas-relief carving; going around the stone, the carvings featured a man in armor and greathelm, a fanged and horned humanoid, a pair of adolescent twins, and a large, demonic creature with an oversized fanged maw. Grasped in the demon's claws, and locked within the cage of teerh, was an skeletal arm and hand, still clutching a fist-sized, polished black stone.

It was the second Ba'alstone, partially embedded in an unguarded stone statue beneath an empty city. As the party pondered this, and immediately began looking for something they missed, Ghrym grew impatient. With the second ancestral stone in sight, he drew back his darkforge hammer and let fly with a mightly swing. Before anyone could stop him, the black hammer struck the black obelisk, shattering it...

Suddenly there was a great explosion from within the pillar, as if eons of pressure were suddenly released when the rock cracked. The party was thrown to the ground by the blast, for all except Ekel where in near contact with the obelisk when it exploded. After an initial burst of hot light, there was a vision of something living emerging from the stone, before all went dark...

After a few moments or days, it was impossible to know, the party once again became aware of the room. The obelisk was gone, leaving only chains still tethered to floating chunks of black stone. Ghrym was gone, as were any semblence of the obelisks statues. Ekel lay in the doorway, hands over his face. Looking around, the party soon realized that something was wrong... They could see the room and Ekel, but not each other, at least not distinctly. After experimenting, the party realized they they had become bodiless ghosts, somehow driven from their corporeal forms by the force of the obelisk's destruction; their bodies, however, where gone, either taken or destroyed in teh blast. After much doing, they realized that Ekel had been the only one to "survive" the blast, except for Ghrym, whose footprints showed that he had left the chamber, along with several other unknown persons. They asked Ekel, but he could only barely hear their spectral voices, and he knew nothing about what had happened, nor had he seen anything. In fact, they saw that he had been blinded by the blast from the obelisk.

Guiding Ekel by voice, the party exited the catacombs and returned to the upper temple. There, they noticed another phenomenon -- the city was slowly being dissolved into mist. Much like had happened on Todstein island, the Mists of Ravenloft were again claiming a domain. By destroying the lich priestess and shattering the obelisk, the domain was apparently crumbling. Worse yet, strange shadows seemed to lurk in the Mist; when Lief went to explore, he sensed a terrible pulling upon his ghostly consciousness. Returning, he deduced that the party, in their current states, would not survive a journey through the Mist, and would dissolve with the domain.

Frantically, everyone began searching for a way out. The giant statue of the sun-bearing goddess towering over the hidden room with the glass box and altar seemed to be at the 'center' of the enclosing mists, so the party and Ekel concentrated their search there. Where none had been before, writing now appeared on the glass box, inscribed in gold:

The party soon deduced that the key to their escaping the encroaching Mists lay within the glass box. All of their efforts to open the box or remove the gold and crystal Reliquary inside were fruitless, however; even in their incorporeal state, they could not penetrate the container. Ekel could offer nothing else either, and though he still possessed his body, he knew that wandering blind through the Mists would mean certain death.

As the Mists closed in, the party struggled to make sense of the riddle before them. They soon discovered that they could use Ekel as a vessel and interact physically though him, either in examining the box or even cast spells. In this fashion, Ian was able to cure Ekel's blindness, but no progress was made on obtaining the reliquary. Just as the Mists had dissolved everything but the center of the room, the solution was stumbled upon. It was surmised, off handedly, that the "song" of a goddess of the sun could be a metaphor for light. Ian, desperate and out of other options, used Ekel to cast a light spell on his hand; in so doing, he was able to reach through the glass box as if it didn't exist and draw out the Reliquary. As he did, blue light shone forth from the artifact, just as the Mists fell upon the ghostly forms of the party. They stood in an island of blue light, protected at the last moment from oblivion by the holy power of the Reliquary.