The Greyflame Hall
The forge took things from you.
Not cruelly. You gave them willingly, one at a time, in exchange for something forged and sharpened and changed. The smith didn't haggle. The temple didn't ask twice. You named what you were willing to lose, you lost it, and the fire made it into something else.
Crowley gave up the first time he and Surtaitas tried to kill each other. Walked away not knowing what it had cost him — only knowing the blade was different now, heavier with purpose, and that for some reason he couldn't quite place, swimming felt like something other people did.
Ubys gave up his wedding day. He recited it while the forge burned and then it was gone — not painful, just absent, the way a word disappears from the tip of your tongue. He came out of it not knowing what he'd had. The armor held lightning like a fist holds water. He just couldn't swim in it.
Dhuxtyn gave up a woman he had loved. She had belonged to the Seelie Court, or at least slept with someone who did, and he wanted her gone. He got what he asked for — except the forge kept something of her anyway, pressed into the silver of the pan flute's new charm. When he plays now, it plays in her voice. And unless he's playing, the dead are invisible to him entirely.
You came out of the forge and Griggen showed you a door.
Not a door. A portal. One of the ancient ones — Netherese-built, not reproducible, just an old fact of the world that still holds. On the other side was not the Shadowfell, not the Material Plane, but something else: a deep underground space that smelled of pipe smoke so thoroughly saturated into the stone that it might as well have been structural. Centuries of it. Every blend. Griggen had been smoking down here for a very long time.
The mechanisms were everywhere. Not machines — not gears for gears' sake — but purposeful arcane devices, intricate and patient, built for travel between places that shouldn't connect. His clan's work, across generations. Sitting in the smoke-smell of it, you could understand how they had found twelve worlds before they found this one.
Ubys looked different here. Younger. The Shadowfell's claim on him had released: no silver at the edges of his eyes, no years added to his face. He looked almost rested.
Then Griggen explained some things.
The beetles in the dwarven mine — the ones you killed and shadow-dusted without knowing what they were — they were apocalypse beetles. Sent by the outer gods when a world has gone too far. Their secretion is what makes the grey flame burn. When you destroyed them, you destroyed Clan Greyflame's supply on this world.
He wasn't angry about it. He said it the way someone says a bad harvest: a fact, already done.
Mythrades — the one Ubys executed with Voidfang, the one who died easily, too easily — is a clone. Or a simulacrum. Something made to spread through worlds, gather knowledge, and carry it home through death. When the party killed him, they did not stop him. They sent his accumulated knowledge straight to the one in Evernight, the one at the center of the soul-siphoning machine, and that one is now better informed than before.
"In a way, yes, you are correct," Griggen said. "By executing him, you did deliver the knowledge to the Mythrades that is collecting all the souls in the Shadowfell."
The knowledge in question: the last known location of a scroll from a great lich. A scroll called — he didn't quite remember the name — the Lexicon of the Sepulcher, or something like it. That location was the piece of knowledge the Shadovar won at the auction. And now the Evernight Mythrades has it.
The room of candles was quieter.
Griggen walked you through it — wall to wall of grey flame candles, all dark. He gave you three to take with you. Explained again how they work: light one, say the word, and if you say it again, you all return to that moment. The candle still burns either way. It is a finite reset, not a permanent one.
"Best used," someone said, "right before you're about to run."
"Right before you can't," someone else said.
The question of what to do next took a while.
Evernight was the obvious answer — the lab, the machine, the Mythrades at the center of it. But Evernight is a city of undead in the middle of the Shadowfell, and the party is not subtle, and that particular Mythrades is presumably not a clone.
The Temple of Orcus was the other answer. Vindictus — an angel, possibly a bound deity-fragment — is captive in it. The Knights of Vindictus have been looking for her. If she can be freed, she might be a weapon. If she won't fight, her power might be.
"Get with us or get out of the way," someone said.
The party voted for the temple.
Griggen's portal back to the Material Plane empties out under the Toke Inn. The Netherese portal, the same one his dead scouts came through months ago, is the door home.
You will start from there.
Audrey Spring Bloom has been sleeping in her cage and eating goodberries and accumulating a well-deserved rest. Lessie has not forgotten her.
Next session: back through the portal, the Toke Inn below, and the Temple of Orcus waiting.