Trouble in Yartar
You came to fight and there was nothing to fight.
Mythrades was already gone. The portal still breathed in that red-lit room. The ritual shapes on the walls weren't going anywhere. But Mythrades himself — the voice that had answered Crowley's taunt with "we do indeed have unfinished business" — was on the other side of something you couldn't follow him through. Not tonight. Not at half-strength with a gray flame torch and a sick griffin waiting back at the Spire.
Emmith was already heading for the door.
"I choose life. Life is good."
Crowley stood in the dungeon doorway a moment longer than he needed to.
You boarded up the door on your way out.
Sir Titus was still outside the sealed tower where you'd left him, standing watch over a building he couldn't enter. You told him what you found. Three guards dead of terror — faces locked, hearts stopped, died looking at something you didn't see. Ritual shapes in the cell. A portal still open. He was going to need mages, the real kind, with the kind of fire that closes things like that.
He said he'd speak with the Order of the Gauntlet. He said it the way men say things when they don't know what else to say.
Up close, you could see what the fight with the devil had cost him. He used to carry something — a brightness, a certainty. It was gone. Not damaged. Gone. You recognized the shape of it: a god who was waiting for something from him that he hadn't given yet.
He was standing outside a building he couldn't enter because he didn't have the power to go in.
The flight back to Feathergale Spire was uneventful. The Dessarin River ran silver under you. Four hours, maybe five. Nothing came at you from the dark.
Aurelion the Dawn Sovereign was asleep when you landed. Brick had kept him under — Sleep spell, every few hours, patient and methodical. The net was staked over him. His chest moved slowly.
Emmith picked up the gray flame torch and crossed the courtyard.
The procedure went like this: you pass the flame along the body, thorough, every inch. It does some damage — minor, like hydrogen peroxide on a wound, cleansing rather than burning. The gray light kills what it touches. But you cannot leave anything behind.
The torch woke Aurelion from sleep. The pain brought him up and his eagle eyes opened and found Emmith's.
First: panic. The body trying to fight a restraint it couldn't move against.
Then, slowly: something else. You had found him in a forest and not killed him. You had brought him somewhere safe and kept him there. You had come back. The fear didn't leave his eyes exactly, but it moved over to make room for something more like recognition.
He let Emmith work. The rest of you held the net and didn't say anything. KeYs spoke quietly near his flank. Moist kept a hand on the guidance until the check was done.
Medicine check, DC 20. Roll: 27. No trace remaining.
He woke up with scars.
The blight was gone but the record of it wasn't. He moved differently — still capable, still fast when he tested his wings — but the old grace wasn't there. Corvin would see it immediately. Lady Bellebranta would see it immediately.
What he'd been bred to be, he wasn't anymore. What he actually was, he still was entirely.
You spent the night at the Spire. Near dawn, someone noticed the blight sample was still in Crowley's bag of holding, sitting next to his rations like it belonged there.
"We've been carrying patient zero for safekeeping."
You burned that too.
Morning. The road south. You were an hour out of Waterdeep when you saw the smoke and then the fight below it.
A griffon cavalry patrol — city guard, Waterdeep colors — was running even odds against thirty gnolls pillaging the farmland south of Goldenfields. Even odds was not good odds for the people those farms belonged to.
KeYs went in low with Falkor and let the paralysis breath roll across the back of their line. Crowley dropped from Sigrin into the melee. The gnolls broke quickly after that. The griffon riders mopped up what remained.
The captain landed and came to you. He recognized Aurelion. He recognized that whatever had happened to the Dawn Sovereign's siring days, the animal that had once been the finest specimen in House Belabrenta's program was back in the sky and apparently part of your party now.
He offered to escort you in. He said he would report what he'd seen to his superiors.
The Hall of Wings looked the same. The stables cut into the cliff, the ropes and hardware on the walls, the smell of large animals and old hay. Corvin Hale came out at the sound of landing, reached for Aurelion's bridle, and stopped.
He took him through his paces on a long lead while you waited. He didn't say anything.
You swept the mew with the torch before Aurelion went back in.
Lady Bellebranta arrived by sedan chair, drawn by runners. The cold businesswoman from your first meeting — you remembered her voice, her posture, the deliberate economy of movement that came from knowing how much weight a room gave her.
When she saw Aurelion, something broke open in her expression. Briefly. Then it closed again.
"You've brought back Aurelion. I am not sure how I can thank you enough."
She walked to him. She checked his ear, worked her fingers along the eagle side of his mane. Her shoulders dropped. She had done this long enough to know what she was reading. She knew what the scars meant.
She could tell you were covering something. You tried; you didn't manage it. She pressed. You told her a mistake was made; the mistake would not be made again. Corvin told her Jaster had come to speak with you when you first visited the mews — and then left and hadn't been seen since.
"I've been warned," she said, "about his propensity for joyrides."
She didn't press further. She had other business to attend to.
She turned back to Aurelion. She held his head in both hands.
"I'm so sorry. Your pedigree is damaged. You always had a warrior's heart. Maybe you can find a new life with these people."
Then to you:
"I hope you will accept Aurelion as my gift to you."
Crowley got fresh meat from the stables. Aurelion only likes fresh meat. He offered it on an open hand and waited. The griffin was timid, not hostile — a start. He didn't have a name for what this was yet, this thing where a man who smells faintly of brimstone and moves like a fighter brings him meat and doesn't demand anything in return.
You asked about Jaster — what would happen to him, whether you could have him if he showed up again. You had Aurelion now, and Sigrin, and the mounts needed looking after.
Lady Bellebranta said she didn't know his fate. She called for Elira Voss, her house arcanist, and stepped back into her sedan chair.
She told you one more thing before she left.
The Silmerhelves — the family whose hunting lodge sits in the forest where that bronze dragon has been circling — are the ones with the affinity for dragons. Different family, different animals, different history than hers.
"I will send a party of griffins," she said, "to help escort your shipment."
And then she was gone.
You stayed long enough to sketch out the next moves.
The caravan is being assembled. Your people in Waterdeep — the ones who stayed behind — have been working on it. Bellebranta's griffons will fly escort. Feathergale Spire can patrol the route.
Umsheryoth is still out there, somewhere near the Silmerhelve estate, blighted and angry and large.
You have a griffin now. You have a plan. You have a torch that has been burning for weeks without going out.
Next session: the Silmerhelve hunting lodge, and whatever is living in the forest around it.