Quick facts
Campaign: Campaign 2 · Session: 83 of 83 · Arc: The Gallows · Where: Saline Coast: the festival square, Mercenary’s Rest
Masha dismissed her dragon before it could be destroyed and cast a wall of fire in a ring around Khalor, forgetting in the moment that gold dragons are immune to fire. Khalor flew out of the ring, breathed fire on Ellery’s back, and then saw that Arghen was visible again. “That’s who I’ve been looking for,” he said, and he landed and closed a talon around him.
As Daask Bruiser gloated over her, Nelda cast a powerful phantasmal killer that showed him his deepest fear: he looked down to find his hands covered in long nails and pink nail polish, and he dropped his axe. He recovered enough to slam a Coghaven-made detention orb into Catman, trapping him inside again. Wilbur held his gun to Daask’s face, told him, “You’re smaller than I will ever be,” and shot him in the head, then told Nelda they wouldn’t tolerate what had been done to her. Khalor banished Ellery to a harmless demiplane. He then pounced on Arghen and carried him away at tremendous speed, and when Ellery reappeared inside the still-burning wall of fire, he was long gone.
Masha used a spectral hand to wrench the detention orb out of Daask’s grip, and he screamed about the cat’s “tricks.” Nelda froze him in place with hold person, and Escher put an arrow through the back of Daask’s throat. He died still held, his last sentence unfinished.
The party retreated to the Mercenary’s Rest, quiet because Bran hadn’t been there in a while, and found Bran on his knees, crying into the waist of a blonde elf. Wilbur put the pieces together. She was Elara Sunshadow, the sorceress Bran, Sylas, and Victor Blackwood had lost years ago at the Obsidian Spire, a dungeon said to hold something that could rewrite fate. In the fight against the spectral wraith guarding the Spire’s heart, Bran and Sylas ended up on opposite sides of a chasm with Elara caught in the middle. Bran hesitated, and Sylas has blamed him ever since. Both men loved her. The party recognized her as one of the people they had seen in the vats in Coghaven days earlier, and Elara thanked the Fellowship for her life. Minutes later Sylas stepped out of a tree that grew in the middle of the tavern and embraced her.
Wilbur examined the detention orb. It bore the Coghaven cog, Coghaven technology supplied to the Velvet Truffle Company, and ran on a timer, so Catman would be released on his own soon, and forcing it open would be dangerous. Then the dragon’s sickness took hold. Wilbur shook it off, but Nelda fell asleep sitting upright, exactly the way Arghen used to. That confirmed that Arghen’s long, unnatural sleeps had come from Khalor all along. Kip’s greater restoration woke her, and when he cast it on Wilbur too, Wilbur felt refreshed, like he’d just had a good cup of coffee.
The group took stock. They were a member down but had someone back, they praised Masha for her dragon, and they reasoned that Khalor wanted Arghen alive or he would already have killed him. Their debate over whether the Saline Coast could still be saved, perhaps through an underground rebellion, was cut short when a brick wrapped in a VTC poster crashed through the window. A voice outside shouted, “Fellowship, we know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up.” Bran told Wilbur they would buy him time. His old companions cracked their knuckles, drew magic weapons, and walked out the door, and the party heard Bran order “you motherfuckers” off his property as the fighting started. The Fellowship called Captain Teft to meet them at the nearest exit and slipped away.
← Session 82 · Campaign 2