That's So Raven

The landing was soft.

Green grass. The sound of water over stones. Somewhere nearby, bread.

Ser Vindictus set you down in a field and you stood there for a moment just breathing, because you had been in the Abyss and now you were not, and the difference hit you like cold water. Outside the edges of wherever this was, something enormous howled — not with a voice, but with the sound of a storm that had never learned to rain. You could see shapes out there, moving in the chaos. You did not look too long.

Inside the bubble — and it was clearly a bubble, a held space, an argument against the plane that surrounded it — there was a brook. A gristmill. A chapel.

Crowley recognized it immediately. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

The chapel was small. Stone. A handful of pews. And lying motionless on the altar, as still as carved marble but unmistakably alive, was a woman in a deep sleep.

Ser Vindictus walked in, saw her, and went to her knees.

The protection you'd felt the moment you crossed into the bubble — the clean air, the stillness, the sense that the Abyss was held at bay — it was coming from her. She was the lamp. She was the reason the bubble existed at all.

In the corner, barely visible behind a tower of scroll-cases and ink jars, a dwarf in grey robes looked up at you over his writing. Nimri Greyflame. He had come here years ago to stop this from happening. He'd failed. Now he wrote food and water into existence, scroll by scroll, for whoever still needed feeding.

She'd done it, he told you. She'd given up everything she was — her power, her divinity, her self — and put it into the ground under your feet. The bubbles ran on her. If she woke, they might die.

A figure came out of the shrubbery near the chapel door: a wood elf with red hair, a bow she had pointed at you before she recognized who you were. Shaylin. Her tribe had made it into the forest. She had been keeping things alive here with Nimri's help, coming back to the chapel regularly, keeping the flame lit.

She led you to the others.

The second bubble was smaller and more crowded — wet mud, stripped trees, beds propped up on scavenged lumber. In the center, a shrine to the woman on the altar burned with an oil flame that nobody ever let go out. Around it: dozens of survivors, and four people you had never met but Crowley clearly had.

Emmith greeted him like a man who had spent years deciding what he'd say when this moment came and had settled on something measured and quiet. "You finally came back, huh?"

Theravos had not decided anything of the sort. He came out of a tent already angry.

Josh Huckler came out of what could charitably be called an inn, and offered what could charitably be called a drink.

Orin stayed in the shadows.

Crowley introduced you to them. Then — finally — mentioned that the woman on the altar in the chapel was his sister.

He hadn't mentioned it until now.

Next session: The cave. And what's living in it.