Aurelion Mystery
The warehouse is behind you. The money is distributed. Someone has her amulet back. Someone else has their keys.
You are Level 10. You rest for a few days.
Then House Silmerhelve sends word: a noble house has a missing griffin, and they would like your help.
The Bellebranta villa is the kind of building that has been intimidating people since before anyone currently living was born. Ivy on the stone. Manicured gardens. A gardener who has served the family for four generations and will not tell you his name. He doesn't look at you like you're help. He looks at you like you're a problem he's been asked to accommodate.
Inside, Lady Bellebranta is waiting. Silver-streaked hair. Half-elf patience behind human efficiency. She does not waste time telling you she is worried — she tells you she needs Aurelion the Dawn Sovereign alive, and she tells you who to talk to, and she tells you when this needs to be resolved.
She points you to the Hall of Wings.
The cliff-face stables on Mount Waterdeep smell like griffin and old money. Portraits on the walls: celebrated riders, celebrated bloodlines, generations of bond.
Jaster Rell is the nervous one. Seventeen, maybe. The kind of nervous that happens when someone has been waiting for a specific conversation for several days and still isn't ready for it.
He tells you the truth eventually. He took Aurelion out. Unauthorized. Just once, just a flight north up the coast, over the Mere of Dead Men. Aurelion broke his control and dove for a blighted horse on the shore — something wrong, something glowing — and ate it whole.
After that, the griffin stopped being Aurelion.
Elira Voss, the house arcanist, has a sample. Black and parasitic, found in the bedding. She doesn't know what it is.
You do. You've seen it before. In the Abyss. In places where the ground itself had given up. You take the sample. Carefully.
The other griffins confirm the direction. Northeast, one sun ago.
You tracked him through the night.
The kill site near the Mere of Dead Men was easy to find — a blighted horse, half-consumed, the ground around it dark and wrong. From there, the trail led toward Kryptgarden Forest, toward a wealthy hunting lodge, toward a clearing with a bioluminescent stream and a griffin too sick to fly any further.
Aurelion the Dawn Sovereign was curled in a glade, seeping necrotic light, claws dug into the earth like he was holding on. He looked like something magnificent that had forgotten what it was.
Moist went in first — a python, vast and unhurried, coiling around the griffin before he could react.
KeYs went next, leaping onto his back, pressing Greater Restoration into the wound of him. It helped. Not enough. The blight is too deep for a single casting to touch.
Crowley used the chains.
Then the canopy came down.
A bronze dragon hit the glade like a weight dropped from a great height. Necrotic vines across its scales. Eyes like green lanterns. It said, in a voice that had once been a thinking creature's voice: "Release my brother."
Blight-madness. Two blighted creatures resonating off each other in the dark. That was all it was. That was enough.
Falkor hit it with his breath. KeYs hit it with something that made it afraid. Moist turned it into a lungfish.
The dragon crumpled into something very small that lay in the grass, confused, breathing.
You said a prayer over it. You left a note. The note felt inadequate, but it was what you had.
Aurelion is restrained. The dragon is not dead. You have a blight sample. You have a griffin sire worth more to House Bellebranta than most of your combined net worth.
You flew north toward Feathergale Spire.
Next session: the Spire has 64 refugees and a dwarven monk with answers. Aurelion is getting worse. And you need to find the gray flame.