That's So Raven

You had made it.

Seventy-seven people behind you, alive and standing on a craggy hilltop in the Dessarin Valley, breathing air that smelled of open sky and dry grass instead of cold stone and rot. Somewhere below, the valley stretched out in every direction. You had run the gauntlet of the Shadowfell, paid the toll in the Temple of Filth, and walked through the portal on the other side.

But the valley was already at war.

Three Chasme — giant fly demons, black-eyed and humming — circled above a gnoll war party. And below them, answering with lances and crossbows and the screams of birds, a wing of Feathergale knights: riders on vultures, on hippogriffs, on a griffin, on a wyvern. You were above it all, on the hillside. You had maybe one round before it stopped being their problem and started being yours.

You joined.

Round one: the Chasme activated their Drone. That resonant, massive buzz that hits the inner ear like a spike. All five vulture riders dropped. Both hippogriff knights. Seven fighters fell from their mounts before you took your second breath — each one hitting the hillside from two hundred feet up. Two knights left: the wyvern rider and the griffin. Everyone else was already gone.

AC marked his targets. KeYs hit first — hard — and Falkor's breath weapon burned through nine gnolls in a single arc of radiant light. Ubys pushed his hands into a Chasme and pulled thirteen points of necrotic back into himself.

The robed figure behind the wall of force watched all of this and cast a Fireball.

You had learned by then that you couldn't reach him through the Wall — it ran all the way into the Ethereal, and Misty Step wouldn't clear it. He had made himself a glass booth in the middle of a battlefield and was using it as a spellcasting gallery. Then he called up the Brazier.

The fire elemental arrived before you could stop it. While you fought on two fronts — demons above, fire below, gnolls between — the wizard dropped a Cone of Cold into the cluster and AC went down. Ubys hauled him back. Then a Fireball. Then the last Chasme tore into Dhuxtyn — thirty-something damage, and the necrotic cut into his maximum HP like a blade left in the wound.

Dhuxtyn went down. So did Moist.

KeYs and Falkor killed the last demon. Forty-four damage between them. It hit the ground.

The wizard — reading the room — broke his Staff of Power.

Retributive strike. Fifty-fifty odds: either he detonates everything within thirty feet, or he vanishes to a random outer plane. He got the second. He left. The staff detonated anyway — sixty force damage, DC 17 to halve it — and then the battlefield went very, very quiet.

Ubys dropped Prayer of Healing over the fallen. The gnolls scattered. The fire elemental dispersed when the command broke, and someone picked up the Brazier from the grass where the wizard had been standing.

Captain Dunkel Spireward descended on his wyvern.

He walked the bodies of his fallen riders himself. Every one. A weathered knight who had clearly spent decades watching people die in his service, and had not yet found a way to stop doing that with his eyes open. He thanked you for your help. He did not weep.

You had the refugees. You had the Brazier. You had a valley full of gnolls in every direction.

You had made it, and it was already getting complicated.

Next session: The aftermath. Captain Dunkel Spireward wants to talk. And there are seventy-seven people asking where home is now.