Umbral Essence
The city below you was Neverwinter.
Except it was wrong.
The shape was right — the port, the towers, the bridges, the layout of streets you'd looked at on maps since you were old enough to look at maps. But the color was off, the angles were wrong, the lanterns burned pale and cold, and somewhere through the city center a river ran green and wrong and glowing. Evernight. The Shadowfell had its own version of every city on the Sword Coast, and this was the one the party had landed next to, with 77 exhausted Brookside survivors standing in a dead vineyard wondering what came next.
The barn had the Umbral Essence logo on it. Crowley went over the wall to look inside.
Inside: gnolls on a bender, burning barrels they shouldn't be burning, forty feet from wine they were apparently not allowed to touch. And perched in the rafters, watching the gnolls with the patient contempt of something that could not die, a Bone Claw — a failed lich, a wizard who had tried for immortality and gotten something close but wrong. He was the caretaker. The gnolls were guests. He didn't like it.
He was willing to talk.
The intel he had: ~5,000 gnolls, most already through the portal in the city, headed to the Dessarin Valley. Mithraides had gone back to Brookside — apparently to catch the party. He had missed. The party was ahead of him, for now.
The portal was in the city. Inside a temple. The wrong kind of temple.
Nimri confirmed what the Grey-Robed Order knew about Evernight: it was governed by vampires and ghoul-kings, the flesh trade was the primary economy, and the further you stayed from the city center the better your odds. She knew of a safe waypoint in the Shadowfell, but getting to it without going through the city first — with 77 refugees in tow — was not realistic.
KeYs felt two dragons in the city. Not Zago. Not Falkor.
Lessie found the portal with her senses. It was in a cathedral. A cathedral dedicated to Orcus.
Zago and Falkor shifted into humanoid forms to accompany the party in. Falkor spent several minutes figuring out his hands. Then the six of you took the refugees, put Crowley's blood on their foreheads as an ownership mark, and walked into the city pretending to be slave traders.
The ghoul at the road wanted a taste. AC said no in a way that involved crackling electricity. The ghoul decided there was other merchandise.
The Temple of Filth was exactly what it sounds like. Stained glass made from stretched flesh. The smell of old offerings and fresh devotion. An Orcus cathedral, fully operational, in the city that never sleeps and never dies. A vampire priest met you at the door with the smooth courtesy of something that had been doing this for centuries.
He summoned the High Priest.
Ursuntos was ten feet tall and built wrong — a ghoul that had been given far too much time and authority to grow into the shape of his devotion. He carried a scepter of bone and wore a crown of dragon-bone and had, apparently, once eaten a priest of Bahamut alive over several days as a devotional act. Orcus had rewarded this. He was the most powerful religious figure in Evernight.
Crowley did a secret handshake in Abyssal that signaled Zariel's court. Ursuntos clocked it immediately — he knew whose hand it was — and was not pleased. Zariel and Orcus are not friends. AC explained he was off-script, here as a favor.
Ursuntos's price: a living sacrifice. No substitutes. No negotiation. That was the portal's toll.
Orin walked forward.
He'd been in the Abyss for two years, locked in a dying world, and he had come to terms with something the rest of the survivors hadn't. He handed his gear to KeYs — unhurried, deliberate — and he made eye contact with the people who mattered. He believed in what he was doing. He didn't scream.
The portal opened.
Ursuntos said something to AC as they filed through. "The ghoul army you requested is forming and ready, whenever your master requests."
None of you had requested a ghoul army. But apparently you had one now.
The portal opened into the Dessarin Valley — air that smelled like stone and open sky instead of cold and rot. Below you, on the valley floor, a battle was already in progress: Feathergale Spire's griffin riders circling against a gnoll force, ballistas firing from the tower walls, the gnolls — Mithraides' gnolls — pushing up the valley. You were standing on a cliff overlooking it.
And further down the road: Rivergard Keep. Moist's keep. Moist's parents.
You'd made it. All 77 of them. And Orin wasn't among them.
Next session: The Dessarin Valley. The gnolls are already here. The battle at the Spire is live. And somewhere in Rivergard Keep, someone's parents are waiting.