Session 37, Arc IV

...Sailors Take Warning

Played 31 July 2026

The sky had turned a sickly grey as the party's vessel was battered by a ferocious, unnatural storm. The churning ocean heaved and roared around them, and from somewhere deep beneath the surface, something enormous was stirring. A single tentacle broke the waterline — thick as a man's arm, dark and murky, encrusted with barnacles — and the party knew with grim certainty that whatever lurked below was no ordinary creature of the sea.

Kailyn wasted no time. She called upon the fury of the storm itself, conjuring a vast cloud above the ocean and drawing down a bolt of lightning that cracked against the barnacled appendage with a thunderous boom. Garen moved swiftly across the deck, rallying Arri and Cyrran with a fierce battle cry that sharpened their senses and steadied their nerves. The ship groaned beneath their feet as the winds continued to build, and the crew scrambled to hold their positions against the mounting chaos.

The storm reached its full and terrible force, and the circulating winds became something monstrous in their own right. A sudden, violent gust swept across the deck with the force of a battering ram, sending crew members sprawling and tearing at rigging and rope alike. Brad the roc was flung toward the edge of the ship, managing to cling on with his beak in a desperate, undignified scramble. Arri was not so fortunate — she was hurled clean off the deck and plunged into the dark, churning waters below.

Then the ocean itself seemed to split open. A vortex formed beneath the ship, a swirling abyss that pulled at the hull with terrifying force, and from its depths rose something that defied comprehension. The Kraken emerged — a gargantuan, ancient beast, its tentacles rising high above the waves like the towers of a drowned city. The party stared in stunned silence for just a moment before the creature released a billowing cloud of thick, black, poisonous ink that swallowed the entire area in impenetrable darkness.

The Kraken's tentacles found the ship almost immediately, wrapping around the hull with a force that made the timber shriek and splinter. Water began flooding into the lower decks as holes were torn open in the vessel's sides. Campbell the roc swooped down bravely, striking at the creature with beak and talon, while Brad managed to push away from the hull and hover nearby, watching for an opening. The situation was desperate, and the party knew it.

Cyrran made a bold and reckless decision. He launched himself from the ship in a diving arc, plunging toward the Kraken and driving his blade into the creature's enormous head. The beast writhed beneath him, a dark, oily residue seeping from the wound as the water around it seemed to react to the strike. Cyrran clung to the creature as best he could, determined to press the advantage even as the ocean churned violently around him. Meanwhile, Yomidrogo took to the air on his broom, rising above the chaos and unleashing a devastating burst of lightning energy that scorched the Kraken's hide.

The Kraken was not without its own terrible arsenal. It crushed a vial of blood attached to its body, and the sky above erupted in a catastrophic lightning storm. Nine bolts of electricity tore down across the ship and the surrounding ocean simultaneously, killing crew members outright, deafening both Brad and Campbell, and striking Rupert and Kailyn down where they stood. The deck was a scene of carnage, and the party's numbers were dwindling fast. Dexter rushed to Kailyn's side, pouring powerful healing energy into her until she gasped back to consciousness, the purple orb at her side pulsing with a strange, comforting rhythm.

The Kraken pressed its assault with relentless, methodical brutality. Smaller, spear-like tentacles sprouted from its larger appendages and launched a coordinated strike at those still standing on deck. Garen was speared clean through the heart, lifted off the deck with an organ visible on the far end of the tentacle, and then swallowed whole by the beast. Ravikiel and several crew members were struck and flung sixty feet into the sea. The ship was being torn apart piece by piece, and the vortex below was widening with every passing moment.

The Kraken then grasped Cyrran and Arri in its tentacles and pulled them both into its maw. Inside the creature's gullet, it was dark, wet, and suffocating — the walls slick with slime and studded with barnacles, the air thick with the stench of acid. Cyrran drove his sword into a weak spot he found along the creature's throat, and the Kraken shuddered violently, a gag reflex rippling through its enormous body. Kailyn unleashed a thunderous burst of force from within the beast's belly, and the creature finally expelled them both — Cyrran managing to grab the side of the ship, while Arri struck the hull and fell unconscious into the water below.

It was Bones who saw what had to be done. He leapt from the back of a roc and plunged headfirst into the Kraken's open maw, falling down into the darkness of its gullet. As he descended, he drew the Staff of the Forgotten One from his pack and snapped it over his knee. The explosion that followed was catastrophic — a blinding implosion of raw arcane energy that tore the Kraken apart from the inside out, sending blue blood, bone fragments, and teeth flying in every direction. The beast was destroyed. And so was Bones.

The party surfaced into an eerie, sudden calm. The Kraken was gone, and the eye of the storm hung above them like a blue wound in the sky. They climbed back onto the wreckage of their ship and found the deck strewn with the bodies of the crew — barbed through the heart, burnt by lightning, or simply gone. And then they found what remained of Bones: a fine, black, still-hot powder dusted across the timbers of the deck. It was all that was left of him.

Kailyn dove into the water, driven by a desperate need to find the blue orb that had been seen sinking into the abyss. She swam deeper and deeper into the dark, cold water until she spotted a faint glow far below. But as she reached for it, she saw something else — a massive shadow moving through the depths, larger than the Kraken itself, closing in on the orb before it vanished entirely into the blackness. Kailyn turned and swam back to the surface as fast as she could, shaken to her core.

The survivors gathered on the broken deck and argued in urgent, grief-stricken voices about what to do next. Yomidrogo was insistent — they had to find a way to bring Bones back. Kailyn pushed back, her voice raw with her own experience of loss, warning that resurrection was never as simple as it seemed and that the person who came back was never quite the same. Cyrran spoke of a route through Stonerane and Valam toward the mountains of Harvadon, where he had read of a place that might hold answers. The debate was fierce, but the second wall of the storm was already beginning to build on the horizon, and time was running out.

Ravikiel guided them to a small cave hidden in the side of a nearby hill, where a teleportation circle lay concealed in the rock. The party landed their rocs and piled inside just as the winds began to howl again. Yomidrogo cast a protective dome within the cave — its walls shimmering with an otherworldly flame, a laughing face etched into the ceiling above — and the party settled in for a long, exhausted rest as the full fury of the storm's second wall crashed against the island outside.

In the dead of night, Yomidrogo woke to find something burning in his pocket. He pulled out a scrap of paper he had been carrying for weeks and found a single word scorched into it in frantic, scribbled writing: WATCHING. He looked up and saw the red moon hanging in the sky, a massive, unblinking eye staring down at him from its surface. And then Bones appeared — standing before him, solid and real — and in a voice that shook the air like thunder, he said: "Wake up." The paper crumbled to black dust in Yomidrogo's hands, and Bones was gone.