19 Kythorn 1492

It was an eventful night.

Pessius had a dream?

Having spent the last day in a petrified state, your body fairly collapses after being restored to the familiar flesh. A small trickle of healing provided by a subdued Gwydion staunched the bleeding, but you're still painfully aware of the mangled mess of pain that lives where your left shoulder and arm used to be. You think of your daughter, of the risks Zanalor took to get you back, and for a moment resign yourself almost happily to the thought of retiring from the danger and drama of your old life. These thoughts, still new to you, are short-lived. A slate-faced Silverhand - you can never read her very well - informs you that she's sent for "one of her best." You are led upstairs as Zanalor and the others make a hasty exit from the Inn.

In only a couple hours (which in your pain feels like so many more), she enters your room above the Flagon and Dragon with a sour man in tow. You dimly recognize him - she calls him something like "ghost" - as a priest in Waterdeep. He bends down and asks you to calm yourself. "You may want to let your mind wander.... this may not be pleasant."

You are not a trusting sort but are utterly spent. You nod and close your eyes, reaching out with your divination for the arcane paths that have always been an easy road for you. To your surprise, you feel yourself pushing against some invisible block, a wall between you and your magic. This is more terrible than anything, and you open your eyes to see the face of the priest muttering feverishly over your bead with Lareal, back against a wall, muttering herself but looking at you with disgust. You try to move, to speak, but feel trapped in this same invisible crystalline prison. Suddenly, a streak, a fracture in the air in front of you as if a long black blade was carving at glass.

You feel a shattering and you are suddenly falling through the night. Below you, far below you, a city. Waterdeep dressed in early morning hours. You look around you, and see odd meteors streaming like you, starting to glow in their descent. You look up, and see elves in cloud chariots pulled by fiery horses, coursing through the starry skies. You reach out as if for help, and a hand that is not your hand - stronger, scarred, but feminine - stretches out a finger and press one of the stars as the night sky seem to be now cast in some kind of wooden relief. The star depresses like a button, and the sky swings open to reveal a staff humming with power.

This hand reaches forward but the staff springs forth in dizzying explosion of stylized daffodils. You cradle a few in your hand, and look up from the small vase on your bedstand to check yourself in the mirror, a stranger staring back with bright red hair and beautiful grey eyes. You straighten your purple wizards robe and run to open the door to you chamber, whispering "Acamar..."

You are running through the door and onto an evening field of red and gold, a great open space where rows of ancient elven archers to your left and right raise their bows and loose arrows, each release in time with a droning chant that you can't place because your are flying with the arrows as they climb high into the starry sky to pierce a pair of eyes that close and start weeping blood.

The blood falls into a silver statue. You will yourself closer even as the silver starts to melt, first the left arm and then every where the blood has touched, the silver smokes and soon bursts into spouts of bright blue flame. You will yourself still close to make out the detail, but these flames soon fill your vision and though painful and blinding - you can feel a great pounding behind your eyes - you can’t look away.

The fire soon fades into a brilliant blue mane of a giant lion, who regards you expectantly before his eyes turn angry. The lion opens his enormous jaw to reveal a cavernous grin of sharp canines that even now seem to stretch towards you. These fangs are stylized into some kind of symbol or rune, in fact that's now all you see, and before your mind can digest what it might mean you see them sinking into flesh, and your mind recoils as you see it’s Zanalor who seems to be ripped and mangled by the rune. He turns to you, his eyes telling you he knew or maybe blaming you - because his pains are always for you - even as the life fades. Your own fill with tears at a feeling of powerlessness and you fall into yourself, falling into darkness and shadow and… a glimmer.

Falling and falling feeling your power growing even as the glimmer resolved itself to a crystal, no an octagonal room with eight paintings and full of crystals and orbs all rushing towards you until you slam into the floor on your side, your left arm screaming in pain. You look up, and for once understand where you are though take no comfort. In this room, your Blackstaff teacher of divination eyes you appraisingly, asking now what you've seen in the cracked crystal in your hand. For a moment, you wonder if this has all been a dream or a portent, that perhaps all of your imagined travels have been just one possible future, but you think then of Myrtle and a feeling that cannot be false warms you. You regard him* with hatred, rise to throw the crystal at his head and grab the staff from his hands. As you struggle, this office fades except for the rough stone floor and this wizard seems to turn to another silvered statue, the staff between you a familiar black staff. You try to pull it free, but before you’re able the stone pavers at your feet begin to bleed. Your now standing before a large stone, blood pooling or streaming down and you remember, briefly, the smell of blood and a forest somewhere in your memory.

Your mind flies to a forest - maybe the same maybe different, some small corner of your mind is aware that you are following these divination paths pulled by energy instead of directing it - flies to a forest and towards a mountain where another statue, skeletal and horrible, holds forth not a staff but a grim contract. Your sight somehow takes in the ethereal spectres of ancient dead in the crypts around you, and while this teases something from your training you realize too late that familiar figure of Nuitt has stepped forward, a cheeky comment belying his dread underneath. He grabs the contract and is swallowed in shadow as he lays himself down in a sarcophagus. You fly into the dark coffin towards another glimmer, some shifting dim blue grey on a horizon when you feel a chill salty wind at your back and a hand on your shoulder.

You spin, expecting to see Nuitt but instead find the face of the Drow gunslinger you helped not long ago. He smiles at you sadly, clutching an odd feather in his hand, before turning and running into the wings of a giant shadowy dragon.

When these wings fold and unfold again, you see a figure kneeling before a large dark man with dark wings who slowly opens his eyes, releasing a brilliant swarm of radiant insects that push you to your knees. You ward off the assault and shield your eyes, only to find the Blackstaff in your hand. You swing your staff - your staff - forward at the dark figure, only to find an old man catching the your swing of the Blackstaff and measuring you and your power through the length of wood. And you feel - as you have privately felt so many times before - that your power may not be enough.

You look into his unfamiliar face, but something in his eyes is a warning. No, just one. Just one eye, and not unfamiliar. This eye is looking back at you and you find your hand turning to stone and watch as it creeps up your arm, a terror and a dread familiarity settling into your spine. The pain that never really left your arm is now throbbing in time with a pounding in your head. You looking fitfully to your left and right, seeing some skeletal Xanathar laughing and your friends also turned to stone. You nose fills with salty air, the pounding behind your eyes returns pushing you to be somewhere else. Someone whispers something.

You turn your head, and start running down the long wooden hallway, dimly registering the doorways, the outstretched hands, but still running. You pass eight paintings, and pass them again, and your lungs start to burn with your efforts. You know you are getting nowhere, lost in some other kind of prison, but still running until the hallway, the floor, the world itself seems to fracture in a jagged stab of ice. Sulphur.

A long hallway but now of greenish metal, and a crouching figure of a huge, impossibly beautiful man with thick black hair and your own red skin. You’re horrified and screaming, not at him but watching yourself bow your head, freed but defeated. “I finally understand." You reach out to take his hand. The flesh of that left hand and arm chars, your red skin burning away to reveal a sinuous, oddly muscled arm that is bleeding from many wounds and ending in a taloned claw that is grasping its twin from the Arch Devil. You blink.

Your eyes fly open, quickly adjusting to the dim light of the bedchamber. The bedclothes are soaked and in bloody tatters on the floor. Sitting near the one window that looks out uselessly on the perpetual dim of Skullport, Lareal Silverhand looks back at you. She was softly singing something that sounded almost like a lullaby, and in a language you shouldn't know but seemed to make sense of. Seeing you sit up, she stops and rises, crossing not to you but to the door. As she opens the door and without turning, she addresses you in her impenetrable tone.

“Your friends are finishing breakfast and asking how your are. What do I tell them?”

As you think of your answer, you understand you are changed. Perhaps in some profound way, certainly physically as your left arm is the horrific mirror of your dream. But also in a way Vajra had told you months ago. You now have The Third Eye.

(welcome to level 10, Pessius)

Zanalor had a dream?

The rooms of the Flagon and Dragon are crowded, with Silverhand’s retinue, the drow of House Moonrise, and others filling the small inn beyond its berth. Returning from the Xanathar Lair and taking what refreshment you could, you quickly asked after Pessius. Calal refilled your wine and nodded to one of the tables near the stairs. "The Mystral priest there came down from Waterdeep with Lareal. Must have been the witch, which I’m sure put him in the foul mood he’s in. He’s looked in on her not two hours ago."

You slip your coin to the half-drow and push aside a soldier to seat yourself, unannounced though not unfriendly, at the priest’s elbow. You pepper your short conversation with more esteem than the usual Liadon interrogation, with respect for a man who has been helping your wife. It’s becomes quite clear though that this man, Meleghost Starseer – while he is a powerful priest in the Church of Mystra and a friend of Silverhand – is wearied and worried from his efforts with Pessius. His assurances that "all will be well"ring in hollow pantomime of a useless mayor in Barovia, and you are also unsettled by the two guards you find soon after outside her door on the second floor.

Not to be kept from her side, you take to the roof and make your way to her window in the early afternoon. You can see into the chamber, where Pessius lies wrapped in sheets with her face frozen in the faraway sleep that her dreams sometimes bring to her. More immediately, a stream of smoke from Lareal Silverhand’s pipe causes your eyes to water; as you glanced into the room, the calm face of the Open Lord sitting near the window stares back at you without so much as a blink. "She is mending. She’ll need you. Right now, she needs me." Her hands are resting on the hilt of glimmering sword and even her silver hair seem to threaten objections. Though every fiber in you yearns to leap through the window, you recognize that a return to the common room is not a retreat. You nod once, think better of shooting a warning to the powerful Open Lord, and go back to the common room.

That night, half-dozing outside Pessius’ guarded door, you’re chilled as two clear crystal eyes pierce the gloom. A great silver serpent floods your vision, and even as your spirit remembers what it means to commune with your Arch Fey, you vision clears to see it is actually a great ice dragon, a stylized carved throne. Sitting on that throne, smiling slightly as she waits for your mortal senses to adjust, waits the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. Beautiful and alien. Fey. "Titania." Her skin glows – not unlike yours – like sun-warmed honey, her eyes like your sunsword, all beneath waves of hair shimmering in rich red gold. When she speaks to you, it warms you and sounds a little like the rivers you played in as a small child. She speaks to you like she is addressing one.

"Little Liadon. It has been a time. And I know you are pained. But the time is coming when you will need more than your quick steel and strong words. The time," she sings, sitting forward and lowering her voice, "is at hand when a man is no longer enough. You need more of my power for the trial ahead. The summer children also do not sleep easy. Under their feet, as not far beneath your own, stirs a great peril." She sits back, her hands making a steeple under her chin. "I fear an old evil has been left idle too long. You have found strong friends. I will make you fast. Fearsome. I will honor our pact, but ask you to do more. Be more. Be better."

She reached to touch your hand, and your shadow blade brings unbidden into your fist. "You must be my steel. My eyes. My will. We lend you our strength for your work ahead. You must make haste, put aside your vengeance to fight a greater peril. You must, again, put others before yourself." She sees you stiffen.

"You are good, Zanelor Liadon. You think not, but you think of others always. Not so good, as you must be willing to walk where the righteous will not." Your mind shifts to the warlock Peter, pausing, considering, hesitant. "You must be ready to run when the battle is lost." You and Nuitt, barely alive in arena, in the crypt, with you the voice of reason. "I know you are brave. And I know you are loyal. And if you will not be good, have a care….." Images swim before your eyes. A clownish gnome at the end of your sword, a dinosaur running rampant through houses, a prisoner disembowled, a hapless dwarf running from Pessius, fire streaming from her fingers. "Where some may go, you must not follow."

"She is good. I won’t leave her."

"Yes, Liadon. You love her. But you will both have a choice. I have chosen you, my warlock. In the end, she cannot."

You wake with your back a hot mess, two different guards at the door and the smell of breakfast from the kitchens below. More people telling you what to do.

Peter had a dream?

Eirwyn comes to you at night, offering soothing hymns and chants during your medications, guiding you to be stronger and to help others find strength in your service.

At the end of your rituals, she comes to rest a hand on you. Not on your head like some benediction, but on your shoulder and then along your cheek in an almost tender and affectionate gesture. Surprised, you look up to see what looked like worry cross her divine, usually implacable features.

"Peter, you will serve well. I have made you stronger (hello, Celestial Resistance!) But you are just one man, and in the company of others who are themselves flawed. You must always remember these and be mindful. To be good, to be righteous, does not go to the grey areas where others like to live." She looks at the walls of your room as if looking through them at an unseen host, and her face, returning to yours, darkens. "You must take care of these soldiers, for the need is great. But do not let them draw you down the path of blood. Like them, you must be fierce and fearless. But you cannot sacrifice the good when seeking the greater good." Taking this charge as wisdom, you nod and thank your Celestial, but she lifts your face one more time. Hers is grim. "Be careful on the path of others. They stride over a rift so deep it passes beyond salvation."

In your fitful sleep, you dream of a story your mother used to tell you back in the deserts of your childhood. A man, at the urging of an old friend and desperate to find water for his family, was pulling a camel towards a distant oasis. The camel would not move, stubborn and set on turning back to camp. The man, near delirious himself, grabbed the water cans and ran into the desert. The camel watched as he foundered in the sand and was struck by the snakes that the camel could sense though the man did not. The camel returned to the camp to feed the family as well as it could.

Breakfast in the dim morning does not warm the soul.

Nuitt... well, no. Nuitt didn't get a lot of sleep.

The rooms of the Flagon and Dragon are crowded, with Silverhand’s retinue, the drow of House Moonrise, and others filling the small inn beyond its berth. Returning from the Xanathar Lair and taking what refreshment you could, you watch as your haphazard party quickly scatters. Gwydion finds a corner with some of his unit, Peter ran around asking if people knew of his celestial. You joined Zanalor at the bar, as much because there was on open seat as anything else. Zanalor, single minded as every, was already asking the half drow Cailel about Pessius. She turns to fill your goblet as she tells Zanalor about a vested man near the stairs. "The Mystral priest there came down from Waterdeep with Lareal. Must have been the witch, which I’m sure put him in the foul mood he’s in. He’s looked in on her not two hours ago."

Zanalor slips Cailel a coin and shuffles off to make his usual polite introductions, and you resign yourself eating alone.

"You don't like the wine? Not fancy enough for you?" Cailel seems harried by the unexpected press of people at her inn but for the first time you notice she's really rather lovely.

You reach into your monks robes. "Let me show you something...."

She grabs your goblet and downs the wine as you pull out the empty wineskin from Barovia. Her eyes register a little disappointment until you explain how this magical artifact works. Saying she doesn't believe you, she smiles and pours you another.

In the late evening, she finds you again. She wraps her hand in you robe, explains that you have something to prove, and pulls you up the stairs, past a dozing Zanalor huddled against a wall, and into a room where she closes the door and spins almost laughing to you. You notice that she's both managed to disrobe you, and that this room is a makeshift infirmary with 10 bloodied cots. Six of them are occupied by the wounded soldiers from the skirmish outside, and only two of them seem to be doing very well.

She pulls a nearby cot closer to one of the wounded. "It fills when you spend the night with the dead? How long does it take?"

You express your answer using a combination of kata and some new moves she teaches you over the next couple hours. When you wake in the morning, she is languidly drawing on the full wine skin while deftly arranging her blouse, which she had to offer... Your own body is a mess of bruises, caked blood, dirty cot, and drow loving. You wonder if you're supposed to say something meaningful but she smiles, says it was fun, and promises you a good breakfast as she leaves the room.

You wonder briefly at the lack of drama, but then quickly worry at the diseases that must be coursing through your system. With this thought, though, you feel surge of new power, you body and mind pure. Level 10, bitches. It's a new day for you.

You fairly skip down the stairs.

Somewhere far above the resting heroes, Malsanos gets a letter and the druid has a vision.

Above and across town, Malsanos gets a crack on his window and a wicked looking crossbow bolt lodged in the wood. A small parchment is wound around it, which he quickly retrieves after a careful scan of the street. He goes back to practicing his quick draw with one hand while the other unravels the missive.

"Yawning Portal at dawn. Bring Friends. Someone is after what is rightfully yours. Plunder and power." It is stamped with the sigil of the Bregan D'aerthe

To be revisited someday when we start bum bum bum bum The Lair of the Mad Mage!!!!.