That's So Raven

The problem, Shaylin explained, was the cave.

Crowley knew which one she meant before she finished the sentence.

The gnolls had taken it — his old bear cave, the hiding spot, the place he'd known as a kid. They'd moved in, built a camp, and were feeding on something that turned ordinary gnolls into something worse. Whatever the Wraith King was channeling out of Bedegar Keep had a shape here: dark flesh on a stone altar, and gnolls eating it and coming back changed.

The camp needed the cave cleared. The cave needed to not exist as a gnoll stronghold anymore. You went.

Outside the cave mouth: six. Two bigger ones and four regular ones. They didn't see you coming.

Lessie was a dire wolf by the time the first one turned around.

The six outside went quickly — Crowley put one down hard, the hellhound took another, and then it was just clearing the field. You stepped over the bodies and went in.

The inside was lit by braziers. There were columns, and shadows between them, and at the back a pedestal holding something that smelled wrong — a mass of dark, pulsing meat that had no business being in the shape it was in.

The things waiting in the cave were gnolls, technically. They'd just been eating the flesh long enough that something demonic had moved in.

One of them raised its head and breathed out darkness.

Not shadow. Not dim light. Darkness. A 30-foot cube of nothing, absolute, where even darkvision stopped.

You fought in it. You fought through it. Moist dispelled the first wave of it; the things cast it again; Dhuxtyn — who could see through it in ways that were genuinely unfair — killed the last one from outside the edge while the rest of you were still swinging at things you could smell but not see.

Ubys waded to the altar and touched the flesh.

He didn't recommend it.

It came apart in shadows — decomposed, neutralized, gone — but whatever it was, it pushed back before it died. He stepped away from the altar and stood very still for a moment and did not explain exactly what he had felt.

On the pedestal where the flesh had been: a spear. Dark, old, clearly named. The Blood-Drinker Spear.

Behind it, deeper in the cave: more treasure than made sense for a gnoll camp. A lot more.

You'd sort that out next time.

Next session: What the hoard is, who it belonged to, and a distress call from something much larger than you.