Date in-game: 13th of Kythorn, 1491 DR
The session opened with a reading of The King’s Brother.
The night the masquerade burned was not the same night for everyone.
For Bronn, Strom, and Barnaby, it was still the spore-haze of The Spunny, the crowd above the pit, three dwarves still standing. For Benny LeBeau and Blastran Starweave, it was the cool Atratan dawn, a side passage out of the palace, and a walk back to Harlon’s Hill in the company of a family that did not yet know they were walking with the wrong son.
The party had been split four ways at the end of the last session. By the end of this one, it would be split worse.
The Pit
The fight in The Spunny opened with Bronn on his hands and knees.
Whatever the spores had done to him had not finished. He sank to the sand and crawled toward the first dwarf with the grim certainty of a man who had stopped wondering what the world was. The crowd, expecting a charge, fell briefly quiet — and then, deciding this was part of the show, began to cheer the strangeness of it.
Strom did not need encouragement. He surged across the pit and started swinging.
Barnaby retreated into his shell, then out of it again, and joined the fight with claws out. The dwarves — Olivor, Kelga, and Asta — pressed in with terrible vitality, almost demonic in their prime, but the three of them in the pit were no longer fighting people. They were fighting whatever the mushrooms had made of them.
Strom dropped Olivor with a single right hand. Then, without pausing, he took the body by the legs, tore it down the middle, and found the braided beard still holding the two halves together. He swung the corpse over his head and used it to kill Kelga in front of the crowd.
Bronn came back to himself in time to bring an overhand fist down on Asta’s skull. They fell to their knees and yielded. Lightning crackled in the leather of Bronn’s boots. He did not believe in mercy. He stomped them out, and the thunder of it rang up through the floor of the pit.
The crowd loved it. The three of them stood in the sand with their pupils blown wide and unnatural smiles fixed on their faces, and the cheering went on without them.
The Mural
Afterwards, the trip kept moving.
Bronn found himself standing before a mural of Talos painted on the wall of The Spunny — the god of thunder, pulsing in the spore-light, calling to him. He stood half a foot from the paint and swayed for an hour. Nobody disturbed him.
Then he took a sharp breath and ran.
He ran out of the pit, up the stairs, through the alley, past the homeless. He ran past a trader hauling produce to the docks and snatched a sack of potatoes from the cart without breaking stride. He ran into the main street, into a bathhouse, up the stairs of it, and stood in the upstairs hallway swaddling the sack against his chest. It will be okay. It will be okay.
Then he turned and ran again. Down through the baths knee-deep, stepping on heads, knocking over wine, panic erupting around him. Bare shoulder into the window. Once. Twice. Out into the street through the glass.
The trip carried him another half-mile before it set him down on the cobbles outside the bathhouse, where strangers leaned in with a wet rag and asked after his head. The potatoes, miraculously, were unharmed.
The Well
Barnaby wandered.
He took the balconies of The Spunny and then a corner booth, drinking in the place from a quiet distance, and somewhere in the looking he remembered what he was carrying. Not here. Somewhere private.
He left through The Spunny and the streets of Cynders alone, unaware that the night had its own watchers. He found his way to the well at the centre of the market square in front of Eldritch College, looked down into the small dark water at the bottom, and climbed in head-first. He balanced his Bag of Holding on the rim. He crawled inside.
In the close warm dark of the bag, he sat down beside the bodies he had been carrying — Luxor among them — and confessed his sins to the corpse as if it were still able to absolve him. Then he opened The Butchered Words of Kyoss and read.
The book began to drink. He felt his life-force lifting out of him like steam off a wound. He shut the latch.
The bag tilted. The wall beneath him became the floor; the floor became the ceiling; the cylinder of cobblestone he had been sitting in upended itself around him and tipped him out toward the small distant point of light where the drawstring had been. He spilled into the night air beside the well, alive, hollow, and watched.
The Hero of the Pit
Strom, meanwhile, was being adored.
The crowd of The Spunny had taken him as their own. Drink came at him from every angle. Stolen jewels left his pockets in handfuls, thrown over his head into the crowd. He leapt from table to table. He declared his love to a dockworker and gave her the rest of his fortune. He collapsed somewhere near the bar and slept where he fell.
Later, much later, he woke up enough to remember he had won a prize. He went to claim it.
The horse he had been promised was a pony, on account of Bronn’s magic, but he took the pony with the dignity of a man taking a war-horse. He rode out into the night topless. Somewhere along the way he traded his last priceless gem for a baguette he had decided was a sword of great significance. The drink caught up with him a few streets later and he came off the pony face-first into the gutter, where he lay until the others found him.
The Dawnbringer
She had been watching the well.
Barnaby came up out of his bag into the grey before dawn and found himself at the feet of a woman in blue, with dark veins running like rivers beneath her skin. She had followed him. She had been waiting.
She asked him questions. Under her gaze the answers came whether he wanted them to or not — and then, at her quiet instruction, the contents of his bag came too. Bodies. Treasure. A chest. And the book.
The moment the book appeared in the open air, her interest in the rest of it vanished.
Barnaby ran. He poured himself into a haste-spell and sprinted across the market square toward Eldritch College, book clutched to his chest, claws skittering on the cobbles. He did not get far. Invisible hands closed around him mid-flight and reeled him in across the square like a fish on a line.
What followed was not a fight. She reached into him and pulled him backwards through his own life until she found a memory — bright, soft, irreplaceable. His birth. The warmth of sunlight on a beach. The first time the world had ever been kind to him.
She took the sun out of it.
She did not damage the memory; she removed the sun from it entirely, and the memory closed over the empty space without a seam, and Barnaby would never again be able to picture the light he had been born into. A part of him had simply been spent.
He gave her the book.
The Dawnbringer — she gave him her name as a courtesy — took The Butchered Words of Kyoss in her hands and turned away. She had hunted it for a thousand years. She walked perhaps a dozen paces from the well and stepped out of the world entirely, and the parting words she left behind were a promise that he would see her again at the end of it.
The rubies — six thousand gold worth, woven into the ritual of the book — went with her.
What Was Left at the Well
The city did not know.
Barnaby knelt by the well in the grey dawn and stuffed the bodies and the chest back into the bag with shaking claws. The bag had changed. It opened now onto a stone shaft — a well within a well — a permanent cylinder of cobblestone and a small high point of light where the drawstring used to be. He could not put it down. He could not explain it. He carried it with him toward Harlon’s Hill like a confession he had not yet found anyone to hear.
Bronn picked himself up off the cobbles outside the bathhouse and oriented himself by the silhouette of The Skyport in the middle distance, and worked out, after asking three different strangers for directions, that he had not actually run very far at all. The plan, as he half-remembered it, was the LeBeau Family manor. He set off.
Benny LeBeau found Bronn on the way. The two of them found Barnaby at the well, sitting too still, his shell suddenly too large for him. Benny LeBeau opened the bag to look inside and saw the well looking back. The book was gone. The rubies were gone. Their fortune for the year had evaporated in a single night.
A street further on they found Strom face-down beside his pony, smelling of ale and dried blood, eyes rolled white. Zog Ironheart came running when he saw his son in the road. Callie Tosslecobb arrived a moment later. They loaded Strom into Barnaby’s cart, unconscious and useless for what was coming.
The Parting
Before they turned toward the manor, Benny LeBeau took a moment that mattered more than any of them yet understood.
He found Danton LeBeau still shaking from the night — still piecing together the truth that the parents he had known were not the parents he had thought, that the brother he had been told ran away had in fact run for him. Benny LeBeau gave Danton LeBeau fifty gold. He gave Callie Tosslecobb another fifty for the trouble of taking Strom home. He embraced his brother in the cold morning. There was no certainty in the parting, only a thin hope that they would meet again under kinder skies.
After three sessions of work, he had pulled his brother free of the fate that had once been his own. The weight of it landed on him not as relief, but as a quiet, surprised pride.
The party that turned toward the manor was a strange one. A son returning to a house that had cast him out. A cleric still half-mad from the arena, armed with a sack of potatoes. A tortle who had lost a piece of his soul to a stranger’s hand. A half-orc mayor who had sworn to commit no crime that night and had been talked into it anyway, on the grounds that this was Benny LeBeau’s home, his heritage, not a break-in. They were short a fighter. They were short a book. They were running out of morning.
The Walk Home
Blastran Starweave had been walking the same morning, in worse company.
When the fire had taken the palace, the LeBeau Family had refused the King’s escort to the dungeons. They had their own — Lord Javier LeBeau’s personal Reaper at the front, then Lord Javier LeBeau himself, then Lady Amelie LeBeau, then Blastran Starweave in Danton LeBeau’s mask, then a Siren at the rear. Five figures slipping out of the smoke into the cool dawn.
The night air sobered him. He knew, walking, that he could have stepped into any window and Misty Stepped clear. He knew he was meant to. He chose, instead, to keep walking — for duty, or curiosity, or because the brandy he had been given was good, or because he was young and easily led and already in too deep to feel the floor under him.
Lord Javier LeBeau talked the whole way back.
By the time they reached Harlon’s Hill the family’s secret had leaked into the open air block by block. The niter mines at Atrata had not come to the LeBeau Family through luck. The fortune that gilded their walls and bought their seats at the King’s table came at a price — a pact, a pledge, a sacrifice that shaped each new generation of the family into something not entirely human. Benny LeBeau had not been disowned for rebellion. He had been rejected. There was something in his blood the pact would not take. Some flaw, some impurity, some red-haired accident of inheritance, that had left him unfit. He had been cast out not because he had refused but because the pact had refused him.
Blastran Starweave listened from behind a mask he no longer dared to remove. Twice his disguise cracked — a fumbled tone, a wrong inflection — and twice the family read the strangeness as nerves and fed him cake and reassurance and the promise of a life unblemished by bad luck.
The Study
The manor swallowed them at the white gate. They climbed to Lord Javier LeBeau’s study — a room hung with portraits of every LeBeau save one, the boy whose place had been quietly closed over so that no gap remained.
Each portrait clutched a different number of black poppies. There were no windows. There never were, in this house.
Lord Javier LeBeau put on a black iron half-mask and a red hood. Lady Amelie LeBeau put on her ivory mask. The Siren stood watch in red. A red cloak was offered to Blastran Starweave and he accepted with a forced smile. The Reaper poured brandy from a clean bottle into four crystal glasses.
Blastran Starweave sniffed his glass. The brandy was only brandy. He drank.
Then Lord Javier LeBeau crossed to the grandfather clock in the corner and set its hands through a sequence — almost two, back to one, round to twelve, down to six, finally three — and the whole clock swung outwards from the wall on a soft mechanical sigh. Behind it, a spiral staircase descended into the earth.
They went down.
The Sanctum
They went down past the cellar, past the stone, into the bedrock the city was built on. Torches were lit by hand. The Reaper carried the brandy bottle and refilled the cups as the air grew colder and older.
At the bottom, the staircase opened into a low cloak-room. Beyond the cloak-room, behind two great doors, Blastran Starweave could hear chanting.
This was The Sanctum.
It had been a church, once, before The Ghostwalkers had taken it. It still arched fifty feet overhead in cold stone, and the ribs of its old devotion held up the dark above the altar. There was no glowing circle. No focus. No rubies. Only the chanting, and the raised dais at the far end.
In the cloak-room, masks waited on a wall of cubbies — a peacock of gold, a swirl of golden wind, a black raven, a black spider, Lady Amelie LeBeau’s ivory horse, Lord Javier LeBeau’s iron half. One mask was set apart, waiting for the new initiate. A golden serpent.
Blastran Starweave approached the wall. He brushed his hand across his face and through deft prestidigitation conjured a phantom mask in his palm, mimicking the removal of the Danton LeBeau disguise that was, in fact, still firmly in place beneath. The serpent went on over the top. The Siren saw nothing.
It was a small triumph. It was the last he would have for some time.
The Clock at the LeBeau Manor
Benny LeBeau picked the lock at the white gate with the concentration of a man who had spent ten years pretending not to remember this house. Zog Ironheart stood at his shoulder and pleaded one last time to be left out of any crime, and Bronn reminded him — gently, because Zog Ironheart was Strom’s father — that this was Benny LeBeau’s home. They were going inside Benny LeBeau’s home. Zog Ironheart relented on strict conditions: no theft, no murder, no harm done to children.
The house was empty. They climbed to the study and found the clock standing ajar from earlier in the night.
Benny LeBeau tried to remember the sequence and could not. He had grown up in this house and never seen the clock open. It was the others who solved it. Bronn, rattled mind and all, noticed the poppies in the family portraits — one, twelve, six, three. Lord Javier LeBeau had spelled them out on the clock face hours before.
The clock swung. The party went down — Benny LeBeau first, Zog Ironheart turning sideways to fit his shoulders through the opening, Barnaby forced through with reluctance, Bronn at the rear with a fire poker and a candelabra he had taken from a side table. They emerged in the cloak-room as the chanting on the other side of the great doors crested.
Six doors stood around them. Five lit. One dark.
The Pact
Inside The Sanctum, Lord Javier LeBeau asked his son a question, and Blastran Starweave — from drink, from peer pressure, from a curiosity that had carried him too far — answered the wrong way.
I, Danton LeBeau, accept this pledge.
The room folded.
The smell of swamp water filled the hall. Mammon slid out of the air with a crown of gold and the slow patience of an old creditor coming to collect. He had been waiting. He had been waiting a long time.
Blastran Starweave’s nerve broke. He went invisible without a word.
A moment later, the side door of the cloak-room burst open, and Benny LeBeau shouted his friend’s name across the floor of The Sanctum — and in shouting it, gave away the only advantage they had left.
Lord Javier LeBeau turned. The Siren cast Detect Magic in the same breath and saw through the Danton LeBeau disguise instantly. Blastran Starweave was an impostor. The pact was a fraud. And worse — far worse — a LeBeau son had returned uninvited to a house that had cast him out.
Mammon was not pleased.
Lord Javier LeBeau struck a desperate bargain on his knees. Spare these intruders. I will deliver my true son to you by dawn. Two bloodlines on the ledger. Mammon found this acceptable. He grew a tail. He grew claws. He advanced.
The Stand of Zog Ironheart
The Reapers did not wait for the negotiation to finish.
The Siren wove an Arcane Gate across the floor of The Sanctum, sealing the party in a doorless rectangle they could see through but could not cross. Another Reaper uncoiled a Slow spell that warped time around half the room. Crossbow bolts began to sing.
Mammon closed the distance to Blastran Starweave with a serpent’s slow inevitability and raised a bleeding claw to seal the pact on the wrong man.
Zog Ironheart — mayor of Dawnvale, sworn to commit no crime that night, possessed of a moral floor he had never once in his life agreed to step beneath — watched a demon close on his son’s friend, and chose.
Rage took him. His shirt strained. He charged across The Sanctum, lifted Blastran Starweave bodily off the floor, hauled him onto his shoulder and bolted, taking Mammon’s tail across his back as he ran. He yeeted the wizard apprentice out of the demon’s reach and turned to face what was coming next.
What was coming next was a storm of crossbow bolts.
The Reapers opened up across The Sanctum without urgency. Three. Then five. Then eight. Zog Ironheart took every one of them. He had no armour. He was a small-town mayor in his dinner clothes. The bolts went through him front and back until he stood like a hedgehog of dark feathers, and still he did not fall.
The Siren, holding the Arcane Gate against Bronn’s repeated attempts to break her concentration, tore a rift in the floor of The Sanctum and dragged half the party through to a fragment of Mammon’s own plane — boggy ground, shrieking voices, the stench of an ancient swamp — leaving Benny LeBeau and Blastran Starweave frightened and barely able to act.
Benny LeBeau broke her. Three Scorching Rays crossed The Sanctum in a single breath, each of them sparking with the heat that had been building inside him all session. The Siren bloodied. Her concentration rattled.
Blastran Starweave — still in the gold serpent mask, still half-disguised in his own mind — finished her with a Shatter spell channelled through the Arcane Gate itself, exploiting a loophole the Siren had not anticipated. Two Reapers went down. Ribs cracked. Cloaks crumpled.
But the Siren held on. Bones cracking, breath rattling, she held the Arcane Gate the way a drowning sailor holds a spar. Zog Ironheart — already past any reasonable limit — broke from his crossbow assault, charged across The Sanctum, locked his arms around her waist, and suplexed her into the stone floor of an underground church. She still held. He cracked her skull on the stone a second time, and only then did the Arcane Gate go out.
Burning Hands
For a single moment in the middle of the fight, Benny LeBeau was the brightest thing in The Sanctum.
The Spark inside him had been climbing all session — from the masquerade, from the Scorching Rays, from a night that had been steadily teaching him what he could do — and somewhere in the chaos the heat reached the inside of his skin. He glowed. White light came through him from underneath. Small flames flickered in his footsteps where he stood.
He spread his hands.
A cone of blue flame bloomed across The Sanctum, scoured the front rank of the cult, set the pews alight, and drove Mammon himself a single grudging step backwards. The air in the great hall caught and held the smell of burning cloak.
It was the brightest he had ever been. It was not enough.
The Pitchfork
Mammon was not finished with Zog Ironheart.
The serpent walked up behind him as the Siren bled out on the stone, and offered him, too, a pact. A way out. A way to live. A way to go home and see his son.
Zog Ironheart — who had only ever wanted to be a father and a mayor — refused.
Mammon’s pitchfork went into him once. Then again. Then a third time. Then a fourth. Each tine found a fresh wound. Each twist went deeper than the last, until Zog Ironheart hung in the air on the prongs of the demon’s weapon with twelve hit points left and the look of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
He turned his head toward the door of the cloak-room, where Benny LeBeau stood frozen.
Look after my boy, he called across the burning hall. Tell him I was always proud of him.
Sanctuary
Bronn moved without thinking.
Sanctuary — that battered first-level spell he had cast and miscast a dozen times across the campaign without ever once seeing it stick — finally found its moment. He hurled the ward over Zog Ironheart as the next volley of bolts ripped through the air, and the bolts twisted off course at the last instant, all but one. The spell held. For the first time in Bronn’s life, Sanctuary actually held.
He used the seconds it bought him. He reached into the rift, took Blastran Starweave and Barnaby by whatever he could grab, and hauled them out of the demon-touched ground onto solid stone beside him.
And then there was Master Neil.
Blastran Starweave threw a Bonfire across the floor of The Sanctum at the Reaper who had cast the Slow spell that had nearly killed him. Flames bloomed up the figure’s robes, and the wizard inside the cloak howled in a voice Blastran Starweave had known for years.
You’ll regret this, Blastran.
The voice of his teacher. The man who had signed his apprentice papers. Neil the magnificent. A Reaper. A Ghost Walker in plain sight.
Blastran Starweave shouted something less magnificent in reply, and turned to run.
Into the Dark
There were six doors in the cloak-room. Five lit. One dark.
The party went through the dark one.
They did not know where it went. They did not know if the staircase behind them was still passable, or if Mammon would follow them up through the manor, or if the Reapers would close it off. They did not look back to see whether Bronn’s Sanctuary was still holding over Zog Ironheart or whether it had finally given way under the weight of pitchforks and bolts and burning cloaks. They only ran — into the unlit passage, into the dark beneath Godmere, leaving the brightest thing in the room behind them.
Zog Ironheart was still on his feet when they went. He was still fighting Mammon when the dark swallowed the door.
Session ended with the party in the unlit tunnel beneath The Sanctum, leaving Zog Ironheart alive and fighting, fate unwitnessed.
- Benny LeBeau — out of The Sanctum, carrying his father’s last words and a brother safely home.
- Blastran Starweave — out, in a gold serpent mask he never asked for, his teacher’s name newly poisoned.
- Barnaby — out, hollow, missing the sun from his first memory and carrying a bag with a well inside it.
- Bronn — out, sack of potatoes still in hand, the first Sanctuary of his life still ringing behind him.
- Strom — unconscious in Barnaby’s cart, in Callie Tosslecobb’s care, on the road home, knowing none of this yet.
- Zog Ironheart — still in The Sanctum, on a pitchfork, refusing.