That's So Raven

The treasure turned out to be someone else's.

You sorted through it anyway — gems and gold and scrolls and a carved silver raven that Ubys called dibs on before the sentence was finished — and it was only when you reached the spear and the figurine that the number of zeroes started adding up to something that didn't belong to a gnoll operation. This was a hoard. Curated. Accumulated over years.

You'd deal with that later.

KeYs felt it first: a bronze dragon, within three miles, in distress.

The one time you'd found a dragon signal on this plane and it was this.

You moved.

The scene you walked into: ropes. Dozens of them, driven into the earth with stakes, held by gnolls who'd figured out that if you had enough rope and enough bodies you could hold anything down. Two demonic creatures circled with their stinger tails — hyena-shaped, wrong in the way everything here was wrong — and a shaman stood in the middle of it conducting the whole operation like a man proud of his work.

The dragon was huge. Bronze. Old. And losing.

Crowley recognized him.

Zago the Sheep Eater.

You didn't debate it. Moist sent his familiar forward before you even finished reading the field. The venom loosened. The ropes went next.

The gnolls discovered what it meant to have a dragon's full attention restored to them, and it was educational.

The shaman went down to snakes. The demons went down to Falkor and KeYs and forty damage from AC's trident in one clean blow. The pack leader — held prone, wrapped in green constricting muscle — went limp in the vines and stopped moving.

Zago slumped. Then he raised his head and spoke to Crowley in Draconic.

He knew him. He remembered the strange kid who was always more interested in the keep than in anything else. He thanked the party with the kind of grace that comes from being very old and very nearly dead and choosing to focus on the former.

He told you what he knew: the keep, the portal, the binding stone under the floor. Cut the tether and the plane goes free.

And then he looked at Falkor.

He said something in Draconic that KeYs translated slowly, like a person reading a letter that keeps surprising them. The hatchling had a spark in him — something waiting to connect. Zago offered to show him what that meant. One day. Just the two of them.

Falkor looked back at KeYs.

She let him go.

Zago gave his first lesson immediately — a roar that shook the ground and startled everyone and made absolutely clear that whatever Falkor was, he had some becoming to do. Then they took to the grey sky together and were gone.

You stood in the field with five snakes and a plan.

Next session: Bedagar Keep. The binding stone. And whatever's left of home.