The Godspark Gambit
KeYs drew her sword and told the guards she would not forget what they had done.
The Dark Mother nodded.
"Yes," she said. "I don't believe you will."
The two plate-armored guards lowered their weapons and pointed — politely but without ambiguity — at the portal.
You went through.
The transit swallowed your hearing for a moment, the way deep water does, and then —
Singing.
Not angelic. Or — almost angelic. The kind of sound that has the shape of grace but the weight of everything that never happened the way it should have. The Church of Sorrow resolved around you: pale ribbed vaulting curving overhead, stained glass windows whose colors had been washed by centuries of Shadowfell light into a uniform, diffuse blue. The murals on the walls showed a world. Maybe worlds. All of them somewhere they no longer are.
Above the nave, the choir floated. Incorporeal. Singing.
It pressed against the inside of your skull like grief is supposed to, the way grief actually feels when it finds the thing you have not let yourself look at yet.
Crowley stopped moving for a second.
His sister's soul hung around his neck and the Church of Sorrow knew exactly what to do with that.
Four shapes waited in the air.
Robed. Hovering. Very still — the way people are still when they have been patient for a while and expect to continue being patient.
The one in front flew toward you just slightly, arms uncrossed, as if he were going to offer a handshake.
"Welcome. We've been waiting for you for a while."
His name was Echelon — the lead mage of the four Shadovar who had come through ahead of you, at the Dark Mother's arrangement, to wait in this exact spot.
He had an offer.
He called it a test.
He gestured toward Falkor.
"We believe your companion may be a conduit to the gods," he said. "We would like to determine if that is true."
He explained it the way people explain things they have been thinking about for a long time: carefully, in order. The Shadovar possessed a Godspark — taken from a halfling cleric of Tamara, the draconic goddess, who had been "unfortunately the first one we found." They wanted to see if Falkor could serve as its vessel. And if he could — "he may be able to bring back the dragons to the realms."
Until Bahamut is restored, Echelon said, there will be no more dragons.
KeYs asked: what does that mean to you?
He told you he had concerns. Two of them. One: you were not strong enough to fulfill the prophecy yourselves. Two: there was a particular direction the Shadovar would like the prophecy to go.
He offered to pay you a large sum of money.
He said they would hate to kill you just to run a test.
Ubys said he had never known prophecies to be successfully manipulated. They tended to find their own way.
Echelon found this sad.
"That," he said, "is very unfortunate."
He reached up.
Two Shadow Mastiffs rose from the shadow among the pews like something that had always been there. Above them, the silhouette of drawn weapons in the air. Initiative crackled through the cathedral like the first thunder before a storm.
KeYs, already moving, made a raven's cry into the dark of the nave — just in case anything friendly was listening in the cathedral's deeper chambers.
You did not give them a long fight.
The Shadow Mastiffs died in the first round — breath weapons from KeYs and Falkor, the finishing blow from Crowley's blade Whisper.
Ubys marked Mage One with a bolt of radiant light and slipped sideways through the shadow, becoming briefly pale and translucent, and pressed the Wand of Magic Missile into Crowley's hands on his way past.
KeYs rode Falkor straight into Mage One — grappled it, dragged it down, poured everything into the descent. It did not survive the landing.
Crowley moved to stand beneath Echelon. He said an infernal word. The Iron Bands of Binding sailed up and closed — and Echelon, the one who had spoken for all of them, hung restrained in the air, held aloft by his own fly spell with nowhere to go.
Moist called a bear in Dutch. The bear came. Everyone in its warmth got twelve temporary hit points and the structural advantage of not being alone.
Lessie made a storm cloud near the ceiling and used it like a cattle prod on the second mage.
Moist's Phoenix — killed in the second round by arcane bursts — came back. Fired. Mage Two burned.
Dhuxtyn came through the portal in the third round, looked around at what was happening, and decided that he had arrived at a reasonable moment.
There were three fireballs. There was exactly one friendly lightning bolt that singed Crowley on its way through (he saved; he was fine; he was the boy who lived). There was a fourth mage who had been invisible since the first round and eventually decided, quietly, sometime around the fourth, to slip out through a broken stained glass window into the Shadowfell outside.
It did not come back.
Echelon hung restrained in the air above you when it was over.
"Do what you will with me," he said. "But we will be back."
Ubys looked at KeYs. "Am I permitted to dispense justice?"
"Sure," said KeYs.
Echelon added: "It's the royal we."
Ubys drew Voidfang — the Raven Queen's khopesh — and delivered Echelon to her care.
After, you thought: it might have been useful to ask him where the Godspark went.
The one who fled through the window probably had it. Probably.
Ubys set about decomposing the dead, and the choir sang above you, and the portal back to the Temple of Shar still shimmered at the far end of the nave, and the path to Letherna lay somewhere deeper in this cathedral or beyond its mountaintop walls — you were not sure which.
You had made it into the Shadowfell.
You had fought the ones who were waiting for you.
Three were dead. One was gone.
Falkor was unharmed.
Next session: deeper into the Church of Sorrow, and the road to Letherna.