Aurelion Meet Feathergale
Aurelion the Dawn Sovereign is on the landing platform when you arrive. Iron Bands of Binding, Feathergale ropes, half a dozen knights who know how to handle a griffin — and he is still barely contained. The blight is taking hold again. Whatever Greater Restoration bought him, it is running out.
The sixty-four people sheltering inside are getting hungry.
Nimri Greyflame is in the refugee camp, moving between people he knows by name. He's been here long enough to know them all.
He comes when you ask. He answers when you tell him what you're looking for.
The story he tells is not a comfortable one.
The gray flame torches — the only thing you've seen actually touch the blight — are made from the secretions of star beetles. Beetles that come from somewhere else entirely. Beetles that appear, he says, when the Elder Gods determine that a world has been pushed past the point where it can save itself. When the tide has turned toward the end of things. When it's time, if not for salvation, then at least for whatever comes after.
"They are sent as a precursor to Armageddon," he says. "A beginning, not an end."
The beetles you killed. The iridescent ones from the mine near Leilon. Those were the beetles. Sent here because this world crossed that threshold. And you killed them, and the juice went with the dust, and that supply is gone.
Crowley is very quiet when he describes the prophecy. Light and dark coming together. The moon turning to blood. You have heard this before, some of you, in a different place, in a different lifetime. Crowley's face does a thing.
"This is not good," says Nimri.
You know where he can find an understatement.
The plan: fly to Yartar. Eighty miles north. Sir Titus has a gray flame torch you lent him. Four hours by wing. You leave Brick to keep Aurelion sedated and take to the sky.
As you go, something moves to the east. Large. Flying. Patrolling the edge of a forest. You don't say anything. You keep flying.
Yartar is a river town where two rivers meet, fortified and solid, with a temple to Tymora at its center. The Happy Hall of Fortuitous Happenings. Lady Luck. The same goddess whose shrine was desecrated near the Toke Inn when you first answered the raven's call, all those sessions ago.
Dare much and the Lady will keep you.
You walk past without stopping. There's no time.
The Shield Tower is sealed.
Boards over the doors. Town guards at the bridge, apologetic but firm. "There's some activity. Not for the public. I'm sorry for the inconvenience." He goes to get his supervisor.
Sir Titus comes instead. He looks older than you remember. He looks like a man who has been standing outside a building he can't enter and doesn't know how to stop thinking about.
"I didn't think I would see you again."
He tells you what happened. Mythrades, in the dungeon below the tower. Something went wrong. At least thirty guards compromised — "driven insane, lost" — before they could seal the building. The trial was supposed to happen three days ago. It never happened. He's been waiting for reinforcements. For Knights of Tyr. For someone with enough holy fire to clean the place out.
The gray flame torch is in the armory. First floor. He gives you the key.
Crowley pulls out Whisper and the building goes quiet around you.
Inside: darkness. Every candle burned to the ground. Weapon racks overturned in the armory, swords lying on the floor, and a chest in the loft with a faint gray-green glow leaking from the joins.
Emmith slams it open.
The light dies. The torch hits the floor.
It's still burning.
From below: a scream.
You debate. The torch is in hand. The door is behind you. Titus is outside.
You go down anyway.
Three dead guards at the barracks level. Their eyes are open and won't close. They died of fear. Literally — hearts stopped, rigor mortis immediate, faces frozen mid-expression. You've heard of this. You've never seen it.
Further down: cells, all open, all empty. But every few seconds, in a flash of blue-green light, you see figures. Soldiers, standing at attention. Facing the wall. Facing you. Getting closer each time the light blinks on.
When it blinks off, they're gone.
At the end of the hall: an iron door. The armory key doesn't fit. A voice from the other side.
You recognize it. The phrasing, the cadence — it's Mythrades. But the sound of it is wrong. Something else is making those sounds now. Something that is no longer quite capable of making a human voice but is doing its best.
"Would you like to enter?"
The lock clicks.
When you open the door, the light shifts from blue to red.
The walls: guards, ritually placed. The center: a portal. Dark and growing and breathing. The same kind of magic that brought you back from the Abyss — the same desecration of life, the same shaped opening into something that shouldn't be accessible from here.
Moist tries to close it. Twice. The necrotic energy stretches it back each time like a hand you can't hold closed.
"It is a waste of your time," Mythrades says. "My link to this world is far too powerful."
Crowley baits him. A roll that lands at thirty. An appeal to ego, to unfinished business, to the insult of running.
"We do indeed have unfinished business," Mythrades answers. "And I need to be sent back to my benefactor."
The portal starts to grow.
Next session: roll initiative.