The Prison of Ser Vindictus
The gorge was wide and the bridge was narrow, and the sky above it was full of wings.
They came in fast — massive, ragged shapes dropping from the purple-grey clouds of the 273rd layer. Vrocks. You'd fought worse. You held the bridge.
The tower was closer now. Dark stone, angular, wrong in the way that Abyssal architecture is always wrong — built to keep something in rather than keep something out. You crossed.
The front doors were locked.
Crowley took care of that.
Inside, the prison was dim and cold and smelled of old death. Shapes moved in the shadows — ghouls, or something like them — watching from the edges of the dark. From somewhere far above you came a sound. Low. Rhythmic. Wrong.
You went up.
She was at the top.
Encased in dark red light, crouching motionless, enchained by three floating rocks. That's what you'd been told to expect. That's exactly what you found. But the light wasn't light — it was something that had been feeding on her, seeping in like ink into water. She was still mostly herself. Mostly.
She didn't recognize you as friends.
The fight was fast and brutal and desperate in the particular way fights feel when you're trying not to kill the person you came to save. She was strong — very strong — and whatever had been holding her in that tower had been in her for a long, long time.
Crowley got the collar off.
The sound was like a thunderclap without the thunder. The dark red light shattered outward — not violently, but completely — and where there had been corruption there was now white and gold and the clean, aching presence of something holy returned to itself. She rose. Wings unfolded. Marble skin, white feathers, eyes that had not stopped being divine even while the Abyss tried to hollow them out.
Ser Vindictus opened her eyes.
Behind you, below, the tower was filling with sound. The shriek of Vrocks. The scrabble of ghouls closing from every direction. A lot of them.
She didn't hesitate.
She gathered you up — all of you, somehow — and she flew.
You cleared the tower in seconds. The portal blazed briefly behind you, and then it was gone, sealed shut by something you couldn't name and didn't have time to question. The 273rd layer fell away. The Abyss fell away. The screaming fell away.
And then you were standing in a field.
Green. Quiet. The smell of bread from somewhere nearby.
Crowley knew this place.
Next session: Brookside. And whatever home means now.