Neftis
The city resolved out of the dark the way your eyes adjust after stepping inside — not all at once, but piece by piece, each detail arriving with its own small weight.
Obsidian stone with silver veins. Streets that wound upward. Glaciers in the mountains above reflecting back a faint blue light that kept the city in permanent twilight, the kind that makes it impossible to tell time. And at the top of the hill, sharp-spired and angular, a temple that the whole city seemed to have organized itself around, the way everything in a harbor eventually points toward the sea.
"Welcome to Neftis," Ubys said.
He answered your questions as you walked. His people had been elves, once. The Raven Queen — mortal then, a queen who channeled her people's faith trying to ascend, trying to arbitrate an old war in the Elven pantheon — had been betrayed by a ring of wizards. Those wizards became the Nagpa. And the elves who had followed her were banished here.
The Shadowfell kept their souls. So they reincarnated. Endlessly. Everyone had been everyone else's something, at one point or another across the centuries.
"We hope one day our mistress can deliver us back to the Material Plane," Ubys said. "But we make the best of it here."
There was a ceremony underway when you arrived at the Temple of Nine Feathers.
A black disc. A crystal vial at its center. Green wisps curling off it like slow smoke, trying to form a picture and failing. Hauris — Ubys's sibling, the one who watches souls — was conducting. You did not interrupt. You stood at the edge of the room and watched him try to trace the path of a soul and get nothing back.
When it ended, Ubys went to speak to Wepa, the wolf-of-the-Nine, quietly. You caught the gist of it.
The vessel was there. The soul was not.
One of the Nightweavers — Neftis's scouts, the aloof ones — had gone out on a mission somewhere in Letherna. One of them hadn't come back the right way. Their soul container was on the wall, and it was empty. Not damaged. Not lost. Vacated.
Hoth — the archivist — walked the party into a smaller library off the main hall.
Two figures were already inside.
The first was a dwarf in grey robes, smoking a pipe, easy in his chair — the way old men who have seen too many things are easy. He had a scythe leaned against the wall beside him and a book open in his lap. His name was Griggen.
His robes looked familiar. Not quite the same as the grey robes you had found on the dead scouts beneath the Toke Inn — but close. When asked, Griggen confirmed it: those scouts were of Clan Greyflame. His clan. They had gone through the Netherese Portal to investigate the Blight and had not come back. He had not known, until now, that they were dead. He thanked Ubys for the rites.
The second figure was standing in the corner, not sitting, not moving. Black robes so thorough that nothing showed — not hands, not face — only the faintest glimpse of brownish feathers at the edge of the hood, and the suggestion of a beak in the dark. They said nothing. They did not introduce themselves. They watched.
"We were hoping you might bring evidence of this with you," Griggen said, and looked at Crowley's necklace.
The ceremony was performed again. Griggen guided it. Hauris worked the salt and the disc.
The green tendrils rose — and this time they resolved into a place.
Evernight. Underground. A laboratory. Glass vats filled with greenish and purplish liquid, swirling. Hoses running to a central point. An emaciated figure at the center, levitating, being fed by whatever filled those vats.
The impression came slowly and then all at once: those vats were souls. Souls liquefied, distilled, fed into something that required them.
The figure at the center was a Nagpa. The shape of one. Whatever this thing was doing, it had been doing it to a dozen worlds already.
The bird-person in the corner spoke for the first time, in a voice like a distant cry: "It has been foretold. And it is written."
The room went dark.
The window shattered. Ravens — not one but a hundred, a flood of them — crashed through and filled the room, and then they weren't ravens anymore. They were her.
The Raven Queen stood in the room. The candles guttered low. Everyone who had never been in the presence of a deity felt the weight of it settle across their shoulders — not fear exactly, but gravity. The knowledge that certain kinds of things are real.
Ubys knelt. He suggested, quietly, that the rest of them do the same.
She walked across the room to where Falkor was. Became ravens again for the length of a breath. Reformed. She ran one long finger down the length of his neck.
"So that is what was in the egg." She paused. "I was wondering. My, have you grown quickly."
She had not seen that color in almost a century.
Then she turned to Crowley. "So you've fulfilled your end of the bargain to Zariel."
She had arranged it. The pact. It was real.
After the ceremony — after the vision of Evernight, after the furious exit of ravens dissolving back into darkness — it was Griggen who stayed to answer questions.
The egg. Most dragons were gone. The ones still being born came out of Avernus already corrupted — demon-dragons. Someone had smuggled an egg out of Avernus in the hope that a dragon hatched free of that place might not be that. Might carry something else. A vessel for what Bahamut left behind when he was lost.
The party. An ancient scroll — a language none of them could read, except for the names written on it in a script that could be read. All of their names. The scroll had been brought to the Raven Queen by people who broke their vows to deliver it, because what it foretold was terrible enough to justify the breaking.
The Raven Queen had read it. Griggen's clan had read it. And they had acted: "We have broken fate. And now we are writing a new future."
Twelve worlds, Griggen said. Twelve already gone. The same method: the Blight seeded into a world, cultivated, pushed to the point where it triggers a destruction sequence. Souls siphoned off as the world ends. Fed to the machine in Evernight. And the Nagpa — those wizards who betrayed the Raven Queen and became what they became — carrying the catalyst between worlds.
"That could have been what happened in Brookside," someone said.
"It could be what's happening here," Griggen agreed.
Crowley got his sister's soul back.
The trace had shown it: she had seen the others being taken. She had prayed at the last second — or something like it, something that looked like prayer from inside the ceremony — and her soul had diverted itself into a Godspark rather than be fed to the machine. A self-sacrifice. A choice made in the moment of destruction.
Griggen pressed the necklace back into his hands. "No harm came to this soul."
The Raven Queen was gone. Griggen's invitation was open: his clan hall, whenever they were ready, to talk through what they wanted to do next.
The forge at the temple — a weapon, a magic item to give up, a memory to share — was waiting.
The Twilight Library was somewhere in the city. Bahamut's records might be in it.
Neftis was quiet around you. Old and grey and communal and certain of itself in the way places are when they've been the same for centuries.
Audrey Spring Bloom slept in her cage, not glowing, full of blackberry seeds.
Next session: preparations in Neftis — the forge, the library, and what comes after.