Session 33, Arc IV

Not All Is Silver and Gold

Played 10 January 2026 Watch the session

The party found themselves aboard their ship with three unconscious Veurim soldiers bound to the deck—a half-elf woman bearing a distinctive sword-and-particles tattoo and two drow males who appeared to be brothers. After waking the half-elf with a splash of water, they attempted to extract information about the Veurim Empire's plans. When magical compulsion failed against her iron will, Bones resorted to delving directly into her mind, enduring waves of psychic agony that left blood streaming from his eyes and ears as he aged visibly before his companions. Through the pain, he witnessed fragmented memories: sandstone pillars rising from desolate landscapes, nighttime docks where forty souls boarded a ship in secret, and a cabin where shadows crept over maps. He heard whispered words—Tribicrin and Abyssarium—and saw papers detailing routes to Stonerane. Pushing deeper still, he uncovered her origins in Lyikdia, where she had been beaten and abandoned in the desert before being recruited into the Veurim ranks, and glimpsed a scarred half-orc commander named Thatch who seemed to hold significant authority.

The interrogation revealed troubling information about the war's origins. The half-elf claimed the Veurim Empire's aggression was retaliation for an attack by the Galvosh—Northern elves—that had occurred a year prior. She recognized the mark on Yomidrogo's face as a death sentence placed by those who had kidnapped him, though the one who marked him had already fallen to the party's weapons. When tensions escalated over accusations of racism and the woman's stone-cold demeanor, Kailyn struck her unconscious. The party then interrogated one of the drow prisoners, learning they had been transporting mysterious glass shards as cargo. After gathering what intelligence they could, they confined the prisoners to the ship's brig, where Bones maintained his disguise as one of the drow to continue his infiltration.

Below decks, Bones listened as the prisoners discussed their failed mission and the creature that had consumed their crew. The female prisoner, whom the others called Lance / Zethka, expressed concern about returning to their superiors without the precious cargo of shards they had been transporting. Through careful deception and psychic manipulation of Curly, Bones extracted further revelations: their mission had been to reach Zilaphela and assassinate the king, and the Veurim Empire was preparing a massive war effort with new weapons. The female prisoner also revealed that the Veurim trained their soldiers in magic, a practice forbidden in many lands. When Curly finally released them at the docks of Alenez, one of the male prisoners suggested meeting at a temple in Stonerane, giving Bones a potential lead to pursue.

At the bustling port city of Alenez on the island of Droshdech, the party was greeted by Rupert, an ancient and slightly senile retired wizard who called himself the Mayor of Alenez—a social title rather than an official position. The party's condition had worsened dramatically; their skin was sloughing off in sheets, revealing bone beneath, and they desperately needed the healing touch of a cleric. Rupert offered to guide them to Fjelon, a village to the south where such a healer was said to reside. While Curly delegated the loading of timber, spices, medicinals, and woven goods to his hapless crewman Gary, the party prepared to fly south on their rocs, Brad and Campbell, with Rupert gathering his meager possessions to join them.

The flight through the thick jungle canopy was interrupted when they encountered a massive murmuration of birds that refused to disperse despite Kailyn's attempts at persuasion. When Cyrran unleashed fire to clear a path, an illusory elephant materialized in the sky and plummeted earthward, only to dissipate as a far more terrifying creature emerged—a massive roc from the abyss itself, with shadowy wings and cruel talons. The aerial battle was chaotic and desperate. The creature's stunning screech sent Brad, Cyrran, and Zarabella into freefall, their bodies locked in paralysis as they plunged toward the jungle below. Rupert's quick thinking saved Brad from certain death, while Campbell fought valiantly alongside his brother. The turning point came when Kailyn summoned storm clouds above the abyssal beast and called down a bolt of lightning that shattered its skull, sending black ichor spraying across the sky. As the creature dissolved into nothingness, its final words echoed in the ancient tongue of the abyss: "I will return."

The party arrived in Fjelon to find it abandoned and decaying, a ghost town where houses crumbled and vegetation reclaimed the streets. At the village center stood a broken statue of Auril, goddess of light and truth, her limestone form reaching skyward with an outstretched hand—a material foreign to this volcanic island. Nearby, a fountain lay in ruins, its waters long since dried. Using her connection to living things, Kailyn detected only two remaining souls in the entire village. The first was a man lost to madness, kneeling in his kitchen and repeatedly stabbing himself through the hand while offering moldy cheese and asking about his daughter Kailyn. The second was a halfling woman who explained that a year ago, all the villagers had heard a song—a calling that drew them eastward into the jungle. She had not heard it herself and remained behind, along with the mad man. When she saw the party's orb, she became agitated, claiming it had once been the light that illuminated and protected the town before it was stolen away.

After resting in the abandoned village, the party followed the orb's guidance as it began to glow with an ominous purple light, pointing them eastward through the jungle. They discovered a path where footprints showed the villagers had walked in perfect unison, as if compelled by some external force. Rupert's hawk familiar soared ahead and revealed their destination: a massive ziggurat temple rising one hundred and twenty feet above the canopy, constructed of volcanic rock and radiating powerful divination magic tinged with enchantment. The temple's architecture blended elements of both Auril and Lolth, the goddess of lies and darkness, suggesting a corruption of the light. When Bones attempted to send his familiar through the main entrance, the connection severed immediately, warning them of powerful magical barriers. Seeking divine guidance, Yomidrogo learned that entering through the front door would bring woe, but approaching from the top opening would be neither beneficial nor harmful. A more powerful divination revealed that they would find Auril's people within and receive the cure they desperately needed, though the goddess hinted that her followers might not be as truthful as they once were.

Descending through the open shaft at the temple's peak, the party entered a vast chamber where a stone pedestal stood at the center. Before they could fully explore, they heard approaching footsteps and concealed themselves in the shadows. Two hags entered the chamber—a smaller one named Daleth and a towering figure four times the height of any human, her skin covered in burns. Daleth presented a baby gnoll to the larger hag, who casually tore off its head and consumed it while declaring that their work was complete and the people had forgotten. Then came the villagers of Fjelon, hundreds of them marching in perfect synchronization, their eyes vacant and their movements mechanical. They knelt in a circle around the hags, and a man stepped forward with a serrated ladle and a mortar. What followed was a scene of systematic horror as he moved from person to person, scooping out their eyes with brutal efficiency while they chanted in the abyssal tongue, calling themselves the Covenant of the Hundred Seers who would reveal both light and darkness. Not one of them resisted or cried out; they simply bled and prayed.

When Bones destroyed the mortar full of harvested eyes with a bolt of fire, the battle began in earnest. The larger hag proved nearly invulnerable to flame, shrugging off walls of fire that would have incinerated lesser beings. She paralyzed Yomidrogo with a gesture and unleashed waves of necrotic energy that withered flesh from bone. But the tide turned when Daleth, to everyone's shock, turned on her mistress with crackling lightning and slashing claws, screaming accusations: "You killed her! You killed my sister!" The revelation that Daleth blamed the larger hag for her sister Ira's death added a new dimension to the conflict. Rupert transformed himself into a massive tyrannosaur that shook the temple with each thunderous step, and in a moment of primal fury, the great beast clamped its jaws around the hag and bit her clean in half, ending her reign of terror.

But victory proved fleeting and hollow. As the larger hag's corpse lay broken on the temple floor, Daleth teleported beside Kailyn and seized her by the throat, her fingernails drawing blood. She revealed a purple orb hidden in her robes—a twin to the one the party carried—and made her desperate offer. In exchange for Kailyn's ability to breathe underwater, Daleth would cure the entire party of their flesh-rotting curse and bring back Rayne, Kailyn's lost love, exactly as she had been in life. The choice was agonizing: sacrifice a single magical gift to save her friends and reclaim the one she had lost. After a tense silence, Kailyn reached out and shook the hag's hand, sealing the bargain.

The moment their hands clasped, the true horror revealed itself. The eyeless villagers collapsed as one, their blood flowing through the air in crimson streams toward the corpse of the larger hag. The hundreds of harvested eyes rose from where they had scattered, hovering like grotesque stars before attaching themselves one by one to the hag's reforming body. Flesh boiled and writhed as the creature grew, transforming into a seven-foot mass of meat and sinew covered in independently blinking eyes that stared in every direction at once. The party found themselves face to face with Yaga, the Thousand-Eyed Remnant, an entity of nightmare and prophecy whose gaze promised that their trials had only just begun.