The Pixie Price
Ubys looked different here.
You noticed it the moment you stepped outside the cathedral — the moment the Shadowfell air hit him properly. His features had changed. Not dramatically. Just enough. Older-looking. Silver at the edges of his eyes. Exactly as though the plane had been waiting for this version of him and was relieved to finally see it.
"Are you okay?" someone asked.
"I feel fine," he said.
No one said anything else about his face. You moved on.
The mages were ash now, laid in rivulets along the cathedral floor — because nothing scatters here, nothing drifts away. The Shadowfell keeps its records.
One of them had a scroll. You took it.
Then you stepped outside.
The exterior of the Church of Sorrow was a Shadowfell mountaintop. Dark woods below. No stars in any configuration you recognized. Ghouls at the tree line — just enough movement to know they were there, not enough to know how many.
And then you heard something.
A creaking. Like a gate, or iron rubbing against itself in the wind. And ten feet off the ground: a light.
Not just any light.
Lessie recognized it the way you recognize the smell of your own house — immediately, somewhere below thought. A prism-scatter, rainbow-shifted, Feywild-specific hue. The kind of light that has no business being in the Shadowfell at all.
The light was in a cage.
The cage was on a pole.
The pole was mounted to a saddle.
The saddle was on Brigharth — a Drider, half-drow and half-spider, the size of a large horse, picking his way up the hill with a crew of cloaked figures and an ogre trailing behind. At the edge of his light, the ghouls paced but would not come closer.
Inside the cage: a pixie. Providing light. Barely.
"You may want to enter the light," Brigharth said, "before the hunger gets you."
He explained the arrangement the way someone explains something that stopped being strange to them years ago. The pixie lived in the cage. The pixie's light kept the ghouls away. When the pixie died — "I go through them so fast; this is the sixth or seventh" — he found another one.
Lessie told him they didn't like being shaken, and they lived longer with fresh fruit.
Brigharth said he would take that under advisement.
Ubys stood quietly nearby, in the way Ubys stands when he has chosen to accept something that is bad but not his to fix.
Brigharth and his crew were heading to the Church of Sorrow to collect a component — something from the choir, something to do with the Chorus — for a spell. He didn't know what the spell was. He was a mercenary. He was going to route the component through the Underdark afterward.
"You will see me soon," he said cheerfully, when the deal was almost done, "when we are taking over the realms with our new spell."
Crowley said he had heard that before.
The deal was this: you paid Brigharth 500 gold for the cage, and the pixie inside it.
The pixie's name was Audrey.
She was from the Feywild. She had been sold in the Shadowfell markets — you didn't ask which ones, and she didn't say — and she had been in the cage long enough to know that goodberries were a gift and that the people giving them to her might be different from the ones who had held her before.
Lessie told her they would get her home.
Yes, she said. I will take you where you need to go.
You couldn't release her immediately. The ghouls were still there. So for a while — while Moist called words over you and Prayer of Healing went through the group like warmth through cold hands, while you sat in the small circle of Audrey's Feywild light and rested — the ghouls orbited you at the exact edge of the radius, patient as anything.
You divided the gold you had been carrying since the Heiress's manor. 2,100 gold each. The Shadowfell is an expensive place to visit.
Brigharth's group went into the Church. You went east.
The forest was dark. The trees were recognizable shapes of trees that carried none of the meaning of trees. The berries were dark. The animals you glimpsed were darker versions of animals you knew, and Ubys advised you not to approach them without testing whether they would behave like the animals you were used to.
There was a lake.
There was something enormous in it.
You went around.
The road was there on the other side. Heading northeast, as Ubys had said it would. The terrain shifted — forest to foothills, foothills to the kind of landscape that has mountains in it.
And then things started to look familiar to him. Not to you. To him.
You watched Ubys orient to his home plane the way a compass orients to north.
A fortress on a mountain. A trail winding up to it. Below the trail, wrapped around the base of the hill: a city. Old in the way that things are old when nobody leaves them — not decayed, just very, very settled into its own patterns. The kind of place where every custom has a reason that was probably sensible hundreds of years ago.
A temple at the city's entrance, at the foot of the trail.
This is where I grew up, Ubys said, more or less, in the way Shadar-Kai say things like that.
The Fortress of Memories was above. The Raven Queen was in it.
You will not go up there tonight, Ubys told you. You don't go up there lightly. The risk is real: you may come out changed. You may not come out at all the way you went in. The answers she gives may not be in a form you can understand.
"But if you try sometimes," someone said, "you might find you get what you need."
Ubys smiled, a little. "My mistress does not work in the ways of mortals."
You made your list.
KeYs wants to know what Falkor is — what the Shadovar's belief about him means, whether it is true, and how to protect him from the people who want to use him to write the future.
Crowley needs to deliver what he has been carrying. The soul. The ceremony. What comes after.
Ubys wants to understand what the Queen sees in the missing souls — the worlds that ended without their dead arriving. And what she needs from him, in this particular life.
Moist wants to know about the torch. About the grey-robed people whose dead would have passed through here. About what is in the Shadowfell that could undo the Blight.
Everyone wants to know why she gathered you.
Tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever the temple's protocols allow: the fortress.
Tonight: you are in the city at the foot of the mountain. There is a forge at the temple. There is a library somewhere. There are people here who knew Ubys, in one form or another, across many lifetimes — and who might be able to tell you what you're walking into.
Audrey sits in her cage, which is no longer a prison exactly, and gives off light.
Next session: the Shadar-Kai city, the temple, and an audience with the Raven Queen.