Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

We open on the campus of the University of Kedon at Brestone, a college in a quiet woodsy area that’s known as the best pre-adventuring college in the Kedon region. Adventurers are expected, when possible, to have a bit of education before they start adventuring full-time, so most adventuring guilds, wizard colleges, and temples tend to ask for university or equivalent experience. That doesn’t mean, however, that adventurers tend to graduate college with no levels of their chosen field at all! There are adventuring fraternities on the UKB campus, one for each class, and on this autumn semester, it’s time for the five-week rush event.

Five weeks, five parties, each hosted by a different frat, each with a test of skill, and this year, the first one is held at the fighter frat, and on this fateful night, two strangers are added to a groupchat called “Affirmative Friends!” by a mutual friend, who is drunk and enthusiastic and already at the party waiting for and encouraging them to arrive.

Erzsi Riswyn (she/her, human) is one of the two. She’s a warlock by contract, though she and her patron haven’t established a magical connection yet. At the moment, mostly she’s delighted to finally be out of Tidegrove, the small grassland town where she grew up feeling stifled and discontented, and very grateful to her patron for getting her out of there. Her patron is Ninki-487c (they/them), a planetar (in this world, planetars and solars are the embodied spirits of actual plants and suns) who crash-landed on this planet over a decade ago and who has chosen warlocks based on who wished on them as a falling star that night.

Erzsi’s wish was made in the wake of the mysterious death of her adventurer aunt, Meseru, a wish to get out of her tiny town and away from the grief. When Ninki showed up on her doorstep with their right-hand woman, Bountiful Graylock (tiefling, she/her), and invited her to be a warlock and eventually join NASA (the Ninki-487c Aeronautics and Space Agency, of course, though functionally it’s a bit more like a nascent Starfleet), Erzsi was immediately happy to sign on to leave the planet someday without looking back.

She’s left, though, with a few questions. One is a mystery: part of her inheritance from her aunt is a book hand-written in a language nobody knows or even recognizes, one that not even Tongues or Comprehend Languages can translate. That one doesn’t come up in her everyday life, anyway. No, the big question is what her major should be, because that touches on what she wants her life to look like. Ninki and Bountiful have given her way too much freedom to choose, and she’s desperately afraid of choosing wrong.

On the other hand, Moryellë Greencote^1-1 (he/they, sky elf, call them Moryë) is feeling fairly confident in his life path at the moment. Sky elves (mechanically high elves/sun elves from 5e) in this world often live in multigenerational communes centered around common interests, and the Greencote is a loving family centered around public services and infrastructure. The many guardians and elders in the community have fostered Moryë’s interests, and their plan is to become a registered nurse.

To do so, in part for scholarship reasons and in part to expand the ways in which he can heal people, Moryë has joined a temple as a paladin. The order they have joined is called the Order of the Silver Scalpel, but the god of the temple is commonly known as the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up Again (they/them). They’re a god largely of emergency medicine, and they are, as gods go, very young, only a few hundred years old. In this world, gods can be born out of undirected prayer energy and wild magic, and in this case, over the years enough people prayed without an aim for someone to be healed just enough to live to create a god out of that energy. That suits Moryë, who isn’t terribly religious and is using the temple as a means to an end. As far as anyone knows, the god has no name, no favored appearance, not even much of a personality.

Moryë is less sure, however, about the fraternity system and whether it’s really worth his time. They don’t feel they fit in well with other paladins, so if he joins a frat, he’ll most likely see if the cleric frat will accept him. They’re planning to go to the fighter party, and expect to have some fun, but that’s all he’s really expecting.

The mutual friend, creator of the groupchat, is Chad Tahyrst (human, he/him). He met Erzsi on the intramural Ultimate Frisbee team, and Moryë during orientation, and he’s diving into the social part of college with enthusiasm and joy. He’s a fighter (and axe specialist), and he’s in college biding his time and planning to join an adventuring guild as soon as he can, after being raised by a beloved single mother. He doesn’t have a major yet, but he’s not worried about that. He’s mostly excited to be attending this party, several drinks in, already through the obstacle course that is this first party’s test of skill, and he’s even made out with the head of the warlock frat! He just wants his buddies to show up to make the night perfect.

Erzsi and Moryë do show up, introduce themselves, and get through the very muddy obstacle course that is the test of skill, before getting briskly cleaned off by a wizard frat upperclassman there on cleaning duty, Lillyjoybee Tillymore Carrowframe (gnome, she/her). Inside, they meet Chad, spectacularly drunk, and the head of the warlock frat, Erevan Inquae (half-elf, he/him), who hands Chad off to them.

They all get drunk and have a lot of fun, until the night is winding to a close and they have to pick up their weapons from the upstairs bedroom where they’ve been left. There, what appears to be a sticky puddle of leftover soda turns out to be an ooze, and the three of them together gain their first adventuring level killing it (though Chad’s extreme drunkenness does hamper him somewhat). There appears to be a whole twelve-pack of this soda, from the Quicksilver Soda Company, all of it expired, and they take it back to Lilly, the wizard, who safely casts Fire Bolt several times and dispatches several more oozes that had been lurking.

Erzsi and Moryë both receive gifts that night: Erzsi receives a necklace dotted with meteor stones, a focus from her magic, and a note welcoming her to properly being a warlock from Bountiful and Ninki. Moryë receives a dream, faint images, and the borrowed voice of one of his parents saying that they’re building a good foundation.

From there, the three of them are bonded and very fond of each other! The next few weeks of parties go thusly:

In the second week, the druid frat hosts, and upperclassman members of the frat test the skill of the rushers by going into wildshape and inviting the prospectives to hunt them down. The party does this handily, while also assisting a fellow prospective, a wizard who mistook an owlbear for her upperclassmen and provoked it. Also at this party, Moryë meets a sad barbarian junior named Elsbeth Kishori (human, she/her), a fellow nursing student who has been trying to rush at these parties for years but can’t seem to get past level two no matter what she does. Moryë learns, through another dream sent by the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up Again, told through nature metaphor, that something is in fact wrong with Elsbeth, that her inability to get further adventuring levels is something that’s been done to her.

The third week’s test of skill is brought to you by the rogue frat, and they’ve set up a dungeon in their basement, including a deeply obnoxious rainbow floor puzzle, an even more obnoxious stone dragon puzzle, and an assignment to set up a trap for the group that follows you. Also this week, the party has been introduced to the joys of the library, where their wizard friend Lilly works as a work study student. Moryë, while trying to maintain Elsbeth’s medical privacy, tries to figure out more about what could possibly have been done to her.

For the fourth week, the wizard frat hosting means a reunion with Lilly! The party fights the frat house defenses, pillars and lampposts that have been Awakened and enabled to move in case of attack. Around this time, research continues into what’s going on with Elsbeth. Since she and Lilly are in the same class, they ask Lilly about her, and Lilly, after talking around the embarrassing freshman year crush she’s now over since they’ve barely interacted in two years, says that Elsbeth was one of the best prospects that first year, that she was incredibly popular, that she made out with a bunch of people at those first few parties, which pings the party’s interest.

This is because they’re starting to suspect that Elsbeth was unwillingly involved in something called a circle casting, where a group of people with magical power or adventuring potential and skill can work together to cast a spell of a higher level than they could do alone. People can be tricked into consent by thinking they’re consenting to other actions (like kissing, for instance, thus the interest in Elsbeth’s partners in making out), and once consent has been given, it can be hard to revoke, which is why circle casting needs a lot of structures to make sure it’s safe for everyone involved.

The fifth week is where everything starts really happening! The fifth and most difficult of frat rush is an invitational—each week traditionally has fewer and fewer people attending, either dropping out to try again next year or receiving an invitation to the frat they want and not going any farther. The party all got their invitations to their respective frats around the third week, though Moryë got an invitation to the paladin frat first and is still sorting that out.

This year, the warlock frat is hosting the fifth rush party, and the test of skill is a special treat that will let them leave with a very nice party favor: they’re scavenging ingredients for magic items. Full magic item homebrew rules for this setting can be found here, but in brief, you find certain categories of things, more specific and powerful the more specific and powerful the item you want is, and a practitioner who knows how to make magic items combines them into an item for you. The party spends the week looking for items: stealing from a lounge in the student union, befriending crows, making an enemy of a giant eagle, and generally helping each other out until the night of the warlock party comes.

Or rather, until the night of the warlock party comes and Chad is missing.

A hunt around campus for him doesn’t turn anything up, but Moryë and Erzsi track him as well as they can, ask questions of anyone who might have seen him, and use a combination of adventuring skills and investigative work to find him … on an altar in a clearing in the woods behind the warlock frat house, under the effects of a Sleep spell and about to have the adventuring potential drained out of him by Erevan, head of the warlock frat. A tense battle follows, and while Erevan runs away, the party catches up with him and remands him to justice.

The sordid story comes out afterwards: Erevan has been claiming to be the warlock of a powerful archfey who has been contracting with a member of each generation of his family for quite some time now. However, the archfey didn’t in fact choose him, and to make up for the lack, he’s been tricking people into circle casting, starting with Elsbeth, and essentially siphoning off their XP as they earn it. Chad was the pilot of a new attempt where he was going to take all his adventuring potential at once, gaining Erevan a great deal of power and killing Chad with the shock.

Erevan is arrested, and the Feywild and the Nine Hells (which, in this world, have the job of administering the flow of magic in the universe) start squabbling over custody of him.

Chad gets to spend a few days with his mother, Nencia, and Elsbeth gets to see her uncle Gildo (a fellow barbarian and owner of Kishori Dungeon Cleaning Services, where she plans to work now that her potential has been unlocked). Moryë gets a grateful dream from their god for solving the problem.

^1-1Moryë’s full name is Moryellë Khatari Láratëa Erdelindë Greencote! Commune sky elves have five names including their commune/family name, given as blessings and connections to the commune. In order, Moryë’s mean: ink-glass (which could mean obsidian but also stained glass, a common craft in his commune), part of a foundation (a name given by a Dwarvish member of the commune that can be translated to elvish as Pertalma), flat/blessed road, and wheat-singer (birds that sing in wheat fields, essentially). Moryë’s family has any number of nicknames for him based on these various names, but Moryë is by far the most common and the one that will be used in this summary.^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

Chad, Moryë, and Erzsi are a team now (since they aren’t officially a party registered with any guilds or unions, they’re sometimes referred to as the Affirmative Friends Groupchat, though they will get an official name many arcs from now), but more importantly they’re friends, and they settle into their freshman year to learn things and get to know each other. They attend frat parties, and Erzsi makes sure the warlock frat updates its bylaws to prevent any future Erevan situations. Moryë, with the cleric frat, drives the drunk bus on party nights and learns how to brew healing potions. Chad, in the wake of his traumatic experience, looks into majoring in psych with the thought of eventually going into social work as well as adventuring.

For spring break, Elsbeth invites the three of them to her uncle’s vacation cabin on Achir, an island in the Archipelago. The Archipelago is what it says on the tin, but the islands that make it up float well above the surface of the ocean, hanging in the air. There are many islands, of varying sizes, and some of them are definitely spring break party destinations, but Achir is much quieter, and half the island is taken up by a pseudodragon nature preserve.

The Affirmative Friends (and Elsbeth) spend a few delightful days, but they also discover that there’s some kind of magic going on, and that the local wildlife, especially the pseudodragons, is very alarmed. On top of that, word is going around that a baby dragon was blown off course during a recent windstorm and has gone missing. The team, with Erzsi and her fondness for pseudodragons in the lead, eventually solve the mystery: a giant crab from the Elemental Plane of Water has been traveling between the planes at night to fish in the waters, with help from an amulet stuck in its armor after it killed a courier from a city on the Elemental Plane. In a battle that almost leads to Moryë getting yanked to the Plane of Water on the crab’s back, they kill it.

They also find, with assistance from the pseudodragons, the missing baby dragon! Sabumi (he/him), a blue dragon (this table doesn’t believe in Evil Dragons vs. Good Dragons, so no worries about the chromatic nature), is injured and mistrustful, but with Moryë taking the lead this time is helped out of the cave where he’s been stranded since the storm. His mother Ayastal (she/her) of Clan Sinamaya comes to fetch him and express her gratitude, and Erzsi takes advantage of this to deflect a bit of Clan Sinamaya’s gratitude to NASA, gaining them some experienced engineers to work on spacecraft there.

Back on campus after spring break, Erzsi gets a package from her mother, Sarolt (she/her), who has been going through some of her dead aunt’s things. There are two things of interest inside: one is a glove, with a symbol from the book Erzsi can’t decode embroidered on the palm. The other is a picture of her aunt, Meseru, with members of what must have been her adventuring party: a tiefling woman with magenta skin who’s probably a martial class, a human woman in cleric’s robes, and a half-orc man dressed somewhat like a cowboy. On the back of the picture is written The Shields of Aniel, but there’s no location or more information than that.

However, Erzsi is very good at research, and in a textbook for the geology class she’s taking as a gen ed, she finds a rock formation that looks like the one in the picture and is able to identify Sauria, a demiplane best known for having plentiful dinosaurs. She doesn’t know why her aunt was there, but she starts doing some research, including getting in touch with Golda Ginsi (halfling, she/her), a rogue who writes travel memoirs about her adventures and was in Sauria around the same time her aunt was. From this deeply vain and annoying woman, Erzsi learns that several adventuring parties went to Sauria around that time to deal with a particularly large infestation of tyrannosaurs, and that the only half-orc man Golda remembers was a handsome ranger named Golfim. Erzsi starts looking into Golfims.

At the end of their freshman year, everyone heads off to internships and work for the summer: Chad goes home to work at an ice cream shop, Erzsi goes to the city of Telcontëar where NASA is located to try out rotations of a few jobs to start figuring out what she might want to do there, and Moryë goes to a local hospital. At the end of summer, though, they all get a call from their wizard friend, Lilly.

Though she’s a divination expert, she’s also fielding most of the credit for identifying a whole new species of ooze that seems to entirely come from expired soda from the Quicksilver Soda Company. This means that when something goes catastrophically wrong at the factory and a few workers are trapped inside, the owners of the company call Lilly. Elsbeth is busy in a different dungeon with her uncle’s company, but Lilly knows she has some competent adventuring friends, and calls them to help her clear out the soda factory.

Inside the factory, it’s clear the oozes have formed a sort of hive mind and found ways of combining and shifting forms. They’ve killed a few members of staff, including a custodian who was doing research on them, and trapped an intern in the break room. The team goes through the factory dispatching as many of them as possible while also putting together the pieces that lead to the conclusion that Myra Tsambra (cave elf, she/her), head of R&D, has been tweaking the recipe in ways that are both delicious and dangerous—including use of potions of Haste that are almost certainly the reason behind this disaster.

In the final battle, against two large ooze monsters, the team ends up in mortal peril, trading off unconsciousness and death spirals, and Moryë’s deity, the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up, who has previously been content to communicate rarely and in dreams, intervenes directly for the first time, giving Moryë and Lilly shocks to the heart that leave them both alive, but with branching lightning scars on their chests. By the skin of their teeth and with the god’s aid, they all survive the factory, and their evidence gets Myra imprisoned.

Still shaky, they all go back to UKB and the familiar rhythms of college life. Erzsi is still putting off picking a major, and Ninki and Bountiful are still refusing to choose for her, though everyone is still full of advice about her strengths.

While she’s picking, the party is taking a class together in the Arcane Studies department on spell creation from Dr. Orsik Rakahln (he/him, dwarf), a retired adventurer whose studies focus on dark arcanists and who is Lilly’s on-campus mentor. In their lab while they are trying to test out spells, there’s a disaster caused by a freshman wild magic sorcerer by the name of Tashkai (human, he/him), whose spell page turns into a massive dragon made out of paper and starts attacking. The Affirmative Friends take care of it, and adopt Tashkai in the process, discovering that his wild magic surges are frequent, intense, and tend to be not quite the usual ones.

Dr. Rakahln’s attempt at rescue is belated, since his TA was in charge, but heartfelt.

Chapter Text

Moryë has, over the past year and a half, not precisely grown used to visions from the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up Again, but at least has an idea for how they go: snatches of images, usually taken from nature, metaphors for the problems the god is trying to help Moryë solve. When he goes into trance one night early in spring semester of their sophomore year of college, Moryë is visited with a wholly different kind of vision.

First, the voice of a man he doesn’t know, older, speaking in Gnomish, asking who to call on to solve a problem he’s having. Then, without warning, Moryë is plunged into the thought process of a deity, as the god tries to answer what is apparently a Divination. Eventually, Moryë sees the flashes of a few faces: that of an elderly Gnomish man (who looks startled and then a little annoyed), a dragonborn woman on a boat, a half-elf in a lab, and then Moryë themself, fighting oozes at the soda factory. It’s Moryë’s face that the god settles on, and the god tells the seeker his name before seeming to realize that Moryë has been caught in the tide of this spell and kicking them out, waking him with a hell of a headache and also some psychic damage.

Sure enough, though, some two days later, Moryë gets an email from Heal-All Fizzlegrace (he/him, gnome, legal name Zildri but don’t call him that). Heal-All is clear that he disapproves of being asked to call on a college student, but says that he runs a clinic for recovery from magical trauma called Talltrees, in the middle of a region called Egron, at the edge of a redwood forest, and over the past days and weeks, there have been increasingly strange and obviously magical events happening in the forest, culminating in two of his patients being knocked unconscious.

The name Heal-All rings a bell for Moryë, and after some research in the religious literature they have largely been ignoring, it becomes clear that Heal-All is the only current living saint of the god, the last living from the initial group of twelve saints, the ones who were praying for the right thing when the god went from undirected energy to a real deity. That’s good information but not really what makes Moryë agree to ask their party members to take a few days off classes—that’s his increasingly friendly and mutually respectful relationship with the god, both of them appreciating each other’s practicality and desire to solve problems.

Erzsi and Chad are more than willing, so the three of them travel to Egron and go to Talltrees. Heal-All greets them, a little wary of their youth and closely questioning Moryë to make sure they feel pressured by neither Heal-All nor the god. They also see the signs of Heal-All’s sainthood, which tends to leave physical marks depending on what acts lead to people being sainted: Lichtenberg scarring up his arms and a faint tremor in his hands that explains why he’s working here, and not a heart surgeon as he was before he was sainted and went from mundane to having a few levels of cleric in one fell swoop.

Nobody in the clinic, staff or patients, know what’s going on, though they report things moving, strange lights and sounds, and other signs that something isn’t right. It’s clear that the answers aren’t to be found at Talltrees, though a few patients have useful theories (most relevantly, though not to this adventure, they meet Stranger, a tiefling woman who speaks very little and seems very alarmed).

The party goes out into the forest, and start running into strange phenomena, both good and bad. An encounter with some massive carnivorous plants trying to digest a pseudodragon gets Erzsi a pseudodragon’s loyalty for life and a new companion along the way (his name is Sunstone and he is silver). The bones of a long-dead ground sloth rise and become a real ground sloth, forcing them into battle. They meet a treant of the forest, Ventinaissa, who warns them something is in the wind and gives them a few gifts to help them on their way.

Eventually, they follow the worsening phenomena to a quiet forest pond, where hovering above it is a large ball of pure magic. There’s wild magic everywhere in the world, to greater or smaller extents, and sometimes it gets stuck like grit in an oyster and starts collecting more of itself into what’s usually called an aetherpearl. They’re very rare and they’re very dangerous, and tend to cause large and strange wild magic surges in areas.

The team decides to defuse the pearl, which starts lashing back with pure magic when they start attacking it. It’s a hard-fought battle, but each attack it makes seems to diffuse it somewhat, as well as the attacks they make on it, and eventually, in one last burst of magic that the party chooses in the moment not to channel into any effects, it’s dispersed entirely, though in the burst Erzsi is granted an extra spell slot (look, we all know warlocks don’t have enough).

They return to Talltrees only a little the worse for wear, and Heal-All fusses over them and has another conversation or two with Moryë, tentatively setting himself up as a mentor (in large part because Moryë shows his own lightning scar and draws a parallel between the two of them that way).

Back on campus, not long after, Erzsi is approached by a fellow member of the warlock fraternity, Khainan Zerala (she/her, dwarf), who presents her with a money order for five thousand gold. She’s the warlock (and future personal assistant) of an archdevil named Nexaph, Senior Alderman of the Mountain with No Bottom^3-1, who is also the administrator of the Mountain’s ^3-2Fiend Squad. Fiend Squads are groups of competent devils and adventurers from the Hells who usually take care of things like aetherpearls, and Nexaph, hearing what they did, is showing his respect for them by paying them the finder’s fee a Fiend Squad would get for dealing with the problem.

After this, Khainan and Erzsi are friends, and Khainan, a much more traditional warlock, introduces Erzsi to certain warlock traditions around trading favors, sharing tea, and any number of other things.

The semester, however, must go on! The party bends their minds back to academics, but as spring break approaches, Erzsi also finds Golfim Heycott (he/him, half-orc), a ranger with a livestock consulting business in Sauria—the half-orc man from the picture of her aunt’s adventuring party. The party books tickets to Sauria and asks Golfim if he’s willing to meet them, which he agrees to. (He also, around now, gives her the names of the last two members of the Shields of Aniel: Honor and Tilda Henalca, a married couple, a rogue and a cleric, who are now living on the Elemental Plane of Earth.)

They arrive in Sauria at the start of spring break to a bustling canyon city. At the top of the canyon, at an outdoor restaurant, they meet Golfim—and his mount, a stegosaurus named Kessie. Erzsi explains that she’s trying to solve the mystery of her aunt’s death, finally get some answers, and after assessing, Golfim asks “Miss Riswyn, do you believe in aliens?”

Erzsi, as the warlock of a planetar who crash-landed on the planet, is willing to believe, and Golfim, after a moment of surprise at how unsurprised she is, tells her that her aunt’s adventuring group, the Shields of Aniel, were protecting the legacy of Aniel, an alien who was, as far as she knew, the last of her kind. Her ancient ship, which had been dwindling in population for generations after it lost contact with other ships of its fleet as they left their dying planet, began crashing and fell through a portal from the PMP into Sauria. Aniel took refuge with the Tiyamuabi, a clan of kobolds in the Saurian desert who protected her by becoming very insular, but in her waning years, she wanted to pass on knowledge of her planet and language, and the Shields of Aniel, on Sauria to deal with a tyrannosaur problem, were her choice.

Tragically, when she died, the ship that she was attuned to had an explosion, and it caught several of the Tiyamuabi elders who were there to ease her passing, as well as Meseru Riswyn, who was the most personally fond of Aniel and was with her when she died both to comfort her and to try to take over attunement of the ship, though she failed at that.

With that information given, Golfim invites the party out into the desert to meet the Tiyamuabi, an invitation they accept. They travel across the desert, through a cactus forest, and end up killing a tyrannosaur that had happened on some locals, a heroic act that makes the Tiyamuabi immediately inclined to like them even if they hadn’t come with Golfim’s approval.

They meet locals, including the local cleric (whose predecessor died with Aniel), and get a sense for Aniel’s place in the community before Golfim leads them out to the remains of the ship, which have been left as a memorial, hidden in the rocks of the mesa the community is built into and around.

On the ship, though, it’s clear it hasn’t been a memorial the whole time: someone has made a mess of the papers and books and stolen a not insignificant portion, by Golfim’s reckoning. Nobody knows who, though some local teenagers, some years ago, heard sounds and saw lights that made them think the wreck was haunted, so that’s probably when it happened. However, there are still papers: transcriptions of conversations in Aniel’s language, records about her life and history. Erzsi also gets to explore the rest of the ship, though it’s largely cleared out, and learns a few first words in the language that will help her decode the diary. She also learns one very important thing that was stolen: as well as the diary, Meseru also wrote a primer, a basic guide to the language with vocabulary and grammar, and it’s nowhere to be found.

They leave the Tiyamuabi disturbed but hopeful, and with another errand to run: Meseru had a safe deposit box in Sauria’s biggest city, and as her heir, Erzsi has a right to the contents. Within, she finds a few things: boxes of records and transcripts in Aniel’s language, more material to help her learn, as well as Meseru’s spellbook, but most important of all, she finds an emerald telescope, a magic item that allows the stars to be seen no matter the time of day or weather conditions. It also comes with possible plans for another magic item: a ruby lens to add to that telescope that negates time dilation so the bearer can see the stars as they are at this exact moment.

After a quick stop to participate in a local footrace, the party returns to the Prime Material Plane, where Erzsi gives NASA custody of the alien papers and tells Bountiful and Ninki about what they know, though she keeps enough material to start learning the language. She also passes off the emerald telescope and the plans for the ruby lens, since one of NASA’s current goals is actually identifying Ninki’s star (they got rather turned around whipping through orbit before they fell).

Back at school, life goes on! Moryë, after the most recent level up, has learned Find Steed, and while the party is having a quiet patch, he summons his steed, most commonly in pony or elk form, a fiend spirit named, in closest translation Moryë can make, Siltha (he/him). While they practice together, Chad struggles with his academics (that -1 intelligence modifier is a killer during testing weeks) and Erzsi does the same, though in a different way—after two years, she’s run out of gen eds, and she needs to pick a major. After consultations with a lot of different people who decline to make her decisions for her, she decides on a linguistics major with three different minors, taking nobody’s advice by trying to do everything.

As summer comes, the party finds internships once again! Chad ends up as a camp counselor, a job he loves, and where he’s well-placed to enact a rescue when there’s a griffon attack.

Erzsi returns to NASA to work a different rotation of jobs, and ends up working frequently with Gashak Rishnak (they/them, half-orc), the warlock next most senior to her and the only warlock not chosen for wishing on a star (they hacked into NASA and Ninki and Bountiful recruited them). They’re an arcane engineer, working on the ruby lens project, and they and Erzsi end up breaking into the house of two now-dead wizard husbands to go through the dungeon in their basement before an estate sale and get some magic items that will be useful for the lens. Erzsi ends up technically being the rightful heir to the dungeon, if not the house, but that’s complicated and she hasn’t done anything about it yet. But she got a Portable Hole in the bargain, and she and Gashak agree that the married wizards, who did ballroom dancing on the side, were disgustingly in love.

Moryë ends up on a hospital ship called the Sunfish, run by a paladin named Abis Eretu (she/her, dragonborn), the woman from the Divination vision. They respond to an earthquake in a seaside city named Illveit, where Moryë works closely with Siltha and local emergency response to enact rescues and get to the local city defenses in the lighthouse. Along the way, since it’s a dwarvish city, they introduce themself to those they help as “Khatari,” their dwarvish name, meaning “part of a foundation,” and develop a bit of a personal legend that they are one of the city’s defenses, a supernatural being rather than a person (not that they did this on purpose. Or, come to that, know about it at this point).

All of them have a busy summer, and one made all the more difficult by the news that Myra Tsambra, she of the soda ooze experiments, has escaped from prison.

^3-1In the Hells, people are introduced not just by name but by title as well. This title can indicate position, organizational affiliation, or any number of other factors. Titles can be claimed or gifted, and some titles come with status—some people are archdevils because they have the inherent power, others are archdevils because the holder of a certain position has access to power or status that means they are called archdevils. (Nexaph, for the record, is the “inherent power” sort.)^{return to text ↩}

^3-2The Mountain with No Bottom is one of the Nine Hells in this universe, and is the one dedicated to wild magic. The rest of the Hells are dedicated each to one of the eight schools of magic, and in history, are responsible for those schools existing in the first place.^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

The Affirmative Friends are back on campus for their junior year of college! Erzsi buckles down into her new major and takes up a work study position in the campus library. Moryë continues to build their relationship with the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up. Chad continues to struggle academically while also beginning to struggle with his future: his post-college plan was always to work with an adventuring guild full-time for at least a few years, but he’s increasingly unsure if he wants to adventure with anyone but his current party, and they don’t want to adventure full-time. Their friends Lilly and Elsbeth are on to the next chapters of their lives (Lilly to an arcane library sciences graduate program on Xanthilisia, a jungle island, and Elsbeth to her uncle’s dungeon cleaning business), but they’ve still got their frats, when they want company besides each other.

They’re all also very nervous about Myra Tsambra’s escape from prison and by how thoroughly she’s disappeared—and as it turns out, they’re right to be.

Perhaps a month into the semester, they wake up to a foggy morning on campus, but Erzsi is the first to notice that the fog smells a little sweet and sharp, just like soda—and it’s not long before her worries become much much worse. Out of nowhere, a huge soda ooze appears, the size of a kaiju, and begins laying waste to the campus, hurting buildings and people alike. Worse, Myra is with it, and seems to have become part of the soda hivemind.

The party finds each other and tries to engage with her before discovering they’re immediately outmatched. They retreat to help with campus evacuation instead, missing calls from their loved ones to get to work. They liaise with the local head of emergency services, trying her best to get the campus evacuated so the monster can be dealt with, and they get in touch with the university president, a dwarvish man named Bali Kinbarak, holed up in the basement of the student union with some other survivors. He immediately annoys Erzsi by not handling the emergency well enough.

They also get a call from Lilly, deeply concerned and trying to find a way to help them. When she was working in the campus library, she learned about the university’s defenses, and while she’s under a magical NDA now, she tells them to look up the legend of someone named King Thainarv.

The Affirmative Friends make it to the defenses (past a competent library sciences student who is unsure about letting them through and also past ten riddles to get them the passcode to the room where the defenses are) and find several things. Among them are control amulets for a fleet of Shield Guardians, a map of campus with small red dots for each life on campus that show them the places that still need to be evacuated, and what looks to be a table with a top made of sand and 20 careful tally marks inscribed in the sand.

This, they discover after looking up the legend of King Thainarv^4-1, is an Astral Table, an extremely powerful last-ditch defense. When a person erases a mark on the table, they relive the day on which they erased the mark once. (That’s right, it’s a time loop mechanic!)

To start, Erzsi erases a mark to make sure one of them survives to restart the day, and they use the map to find two concentrations of students that don’t seem to be evacuating.

First, they go to one of the larger class buildings, and in a large lecture hall, they find their friend Tashkai, a wild magic sorcerer who had a badly-timed surge and created a bubble of magical protection around himself and several dozen of his classmates. It’s strong, but not strong enough to withstand a soda kaiju, so the party takes the time to break through the barrier and then help Tashkai and his classmates get off-campus. As part of this, the party changes their minds, and Moryë goes back to the library and erases another mark. (Chad declines to do so.)

Next, they go for a smaller group in one of the dorms at the center of campus, where the monster is spending enough time that they may be trapped and unable to avoid its notice. They find a group of students and their RA, Maliconar Lunton (he/him, cave elf), who has put together some ramshackle armor and found a dueling sword somewhere and taken an unexpected level of fighter in his instinct to protect his residents. Maliconar (also known as Mali) proves himself competent and they help him and his residents evacuate as well. However, this required Chad to draw the monster’s attention away, and he led it off to the sports fields, where he engaged with it and died where his party members couldn’t see, but could unfortunately imagine based on the sounds.

There’s not much else to do but engage with the monster themselves, though, knowing this day isn’t permanent. They go to test the monster’s defenses. The monster and Myra attack them brutally, and it doesn’t take long before the remaining two of them fall—Erzsi digested in the monster’s stomach, and Moryë thrown against the side of a nearby building, snapping his spine and cracking their skull open.

They wake up, though, on the same day. There’s some disorientation, but they immediately get to work, knowing they don’t have much time before the attack. They discover that Kinbarak, the university president, does not have a time loop code phrase, but that the competent library student does, and they get to work evacuating the campus by sheer stubbornness and charisma and start calling on what help they can, including Lilly and Elsbeth (Lilly hopping on a Teleportation Circle from her faraway island, and Elsbeth driving as fast as she can. Other help is coming, but they’re the first two to arrive).

Early on, they erase two more lines from the table, fairly sure they won’t win today, and they get to work. Today, the monster starts taking the campus library apart, and in the struggle, Chad is killed and the monster and Myra disappear down the campus storm drains. Moryë, grieving but knowing they have another day to solve the problem, casts Gentle Repose before they leave him. When Elsbeth and Lilly arrive, they go hunting for the place where Myra has been hiding, looking for clues to her defeat.

They find a dessicated patch of forest, but not many answers. The acid has etched into the bark of the trees, and Myra had few belongings: a stolen wallet and ID, and a notebook that proves that she’s lost all sense of reason and personhood separate from the hivemind of the soda ooze.

The four of them sleep in Elsbeth’s car that night, uneasy and knowing that the monster and Myra escaped and could be wreaking terrible havoc anywhere. The next morning, Erzsi and Moryë wake up once again on the same day, and they erase their marks, begin the evacuation, and gather their allies, this time using the shield guardians from the campus defenses.

On this third day, they defeat the monster, but at great cost to the campus infrastructure, and they decide to try one more time.

On the fourth day, they wake exhausted, with the slight disorientation that comes with every new day of a time loop, and they call on their allies, they get to the campus defenses, but they don’t erase marks. Instead, they make retreat plans so they can do it if the fight doesn’t go their way, and they go to their chosen field of battle, the campus’s biggest parking lot.

It’s a brutal fight, but they succeed, defeating Myra and the monster both, and cling to each other and their friends in the aftermath. Heal-All, one of the allies they called, arrives to check them over and fuss over them, and makes his opinions on students having to save the day clear to the university president, much to Erzsi’s satisfaction. He also gives Moryë a gift: a diamond big enough to cast Raise Dead, knowing that he doesn’t have the power to cast the spell yet but that one day it’s likely they will.

Lilly and Elsbeth, after some reassurance and care, go back to their regular lives. The Affirmative Friends, with so much trauma hanging over them (even if Chad is blissfully ignorant of the worst of it), make the wise choice and get themselves some therapists, who they will visit regularly for the rest of the campaign. They also get a week off, and Chad goes home to his mother Nencia while Moryë and Erzsi go to the Greencote, who are deeply concerned and sad for what happened to them (and who discuss with Moryë building a safe room, in case of more people with grudges against the Affirmative Friends). Erzsi doesn’t go home to her mother (and asks Moryë to be the one to call her), but is comforted by the warm atmosphere of the Greencote.

Back on campus, Erzsi joins the campus safety board and discovers that the head of campus security is much more competent than the university president (he was at a wedding on the day of the time loop). She also asks Bountiful for lessons on how to be more businesslike, and starts channeling that image when she needs to, learning some of the soft skills she might end up needing.

The party also buys coffee for the competent library student and for Maliconar. The former is delighted and the latter baffled at their parts in the time loop adventure—especially since Mali, as it turns out, is a lit major and a poet with no intentions whatsoever of being an adventurer. However, they decide they like him, and make a habit of spending time with him.

^4-1 King Thainarv’s legend, in brief, goes thusly: there was a king who loved knowledge and wanted to know everything. He wanted it so much that he feared death, for he would no longer be able to learn as much about the world, so he brought together a group of powerful spellcasters, who as a circle created the table and inscribed one mark into it. That very night, he erased the mark, and lived in that day for months and months, gaining knowledge and strength, until one of the casters followed him, understood what he was doing, and killed him before he could erase the mark again. It is worth noting that this extremely powerful circle spellcasting, usually involving 5+ casters (and sometimes other adventurers) with the equivalent of the ability to cast 9th level spells, is an example of what would commonly be called a 10th level spell. ^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

After a difficult and traumatic autumn, the Affirmative Friends are delighted to be invited to a winter solstice party at NASA, and even more delighted about the occasion: with help from the emerald telescope and the work of Moleo and Reteny (he/him and she/her respectively, both human), two more of Ninki’s warlocks, Ninki’s star has been identified, and will be in the sky to be viewed on winter solstice night.

The party goes shopping, and on the appointed night, they go to the party, and chat with the various attendees. It’s the warlocks, though, who catch their attention. Bountiful, of course, as the day-to-day head of NASA, is busy, always at Ninki’s right hand, without guests to keep her company. Gashak is there with their girlfriend Mariel (she/her, half-elf), a social work grad student, and they’re together but it’s pretty clear they’re playing commitment chicken and not talking about anything. Moleo brought a boyfriend who breaks up with him in the middle of the party, and Reteny brought a sister she seems to have a difficult relationship with. The two remaining warlocks, Kilviri (she/her, dragonborn) and Borneth (she/her, wood elf), have respectively brought nobody and a grandchild with, again, a difficult relationship. It turns out, as Erzsi considers over the night while waiting her turn to see Ninki’s star, that the kind of people who are willing to go to space for possibly the rest of their lives are the kind of people without good connections.

For Erzsi, though, that’s no longer true. She has Chad and Moryë, both of whom love her and whom she loves, which is worrisome, in the longer term, given the plan is to someday leave the planet and them behind. However, the party reaffirms their commitment to each other, and to finding a solution that will keep that from happening even if Moryë and Chad don’t actually want to go to space long-term with her. Moryë is more explicit than the other two with this affirmation: any type of relationship they want to have, however long they want it, Moryë wants that with them.

(It’s going to take multiple years for the other two to realize all the things this could mean.)

They get about a month into their next semester before another adventure presents itself: Ninki asks if Erzsi and her party will come to Telcontëar for a meeting without letting anyone else know they’re there. When they go down, intrigued by this invitation when business almost always filters through Bountiful, they are invited to a lunch at a fancy restaurant on a train, where Ninki meets them with a woman presenting herself as a half-elf, who introduces herself as Ivy. She’s actually Jalikivri, a powerful copper dragon with the biggest hoard in Telcontëar,^5-1 and she has a job to offer them.

Recently, a piece of her hoard, very precious to her, was stolen. It’s a large painting depicting a historical event (the invention of the spell Prismatic Wall), and it was cut out of its frame and taken away while she was attending a gala on the Elemental Plane of Fire. She even is quite sure who has taken it: Etantillian, Keeper of the Tundra Gate.^5-2

Jalikivri asks that the Affirmative Friends steal the painting back for her. Every summer solstice, Etantillian throws a huge and lavish party with important and interesting people from every plane in attendance, and Jalikivri believes these three, with their growing reputation, could gain invitations. She’s willing to pay them dearly not just in gold but in magic items she’ll tailor to them personally.

After a day to think, they agree, and interview with her as she decides what magic items will suit them best. That done, she issues each of them a list of ingredients they’ll need to make the items. Her plans are unknown, but Moryë and Chad will both receive weapons (a pair of scimitars and a greataxe respectively) and Erzsi’s is harder to be sure of, but she’s been asked for a quantity of thin wire.

The next few months are very busy, not just because of academics but because getting ingredients for magic items and planning heists are time-consuming!

On the magic item side of things, the three of them start searching for and creating necessary items through clever thinking and trial and error. One of Moryë’s items, though, is “darkness given form,” something that stumps them until they learn about a Feywild fiber called allcats (from the phrase “all cats are grey in the dark”), a sort of flax grown in complete darkness. When exposed to light, the flax fibers take on the colors of what they’re surrounded by. However, getting Feywild fiber is difficult. Erzsi, though, finds a member of the warlock frat whose patron needs a favor, and exchanges the favor for allcats seed and fiber.

The favor requires attendance of an auction in a coastal city called Sokwa and bidding to get a bell marked with “fertility symbols” (it’s a magic sex toy). They get it after a brief bidding war with a mysterious man whose skin is completely covered, to the point of wearing a large hat with fringe dangling down and completely obscuring his face. (He immediately acquires the nickname Hat Man.) One of the star items at the auction, along with a magic sword, is a painting: an island with ruins on it in the middle of a purple sea.

Heist planning requires a lot of preparation! Erzsi asks Khainan and her patron Nexaph for information and grows closer to Khainan as a result. They all also ask Jalikivri if she knows anyone who might be willing to share information about Etantillian, and are reconnected with Golda Ginsi, the adventurer who wrote a book about Sauria and helped them find Golfim. She, wannabe socialite that she is, is very proud of her attendance at these lavish parties, and is happy to talk about Etantillian, though the party also gets information from Dog with a Bone, a goblin paladin who says frankly that Etantillian is known to be a thief of anything that particularly interests him.

The party hasn’t yet received their party invitations, but there’s one factor working in their favor in a big way: Moryë’s growing reputation after the events of the earthquake in Illveit, when people started misidentifying them as a spirit of the city and one of its defenses. Moryë isn’t willing to let that stand, and prepares to make a statement through the temple he’s part of, but before doing so, prays to the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up, asking if there’s any statement they would like to make on the matter.

The god, after some thought, provides the following: “A city can also be a motherfucker.”

Given the god’s domain has previously been very much about the healing of people in emergency situations, this is quite an expansion and a statement of the god’s increasing interest in and awareness of the world as a person, and not just a force of divine energy. Moryë passes this information to the temple, and they’re shocked, but start chewing over this information.

Sure enough, between that and NASA’s growing reputation (it’s about a year out from launching its first shuttle into orbit for a month’s testing mission, though Kilviri, warlock and head of engineering, has announced her pregnancy and retired from the first space crew, which has shaken things up and put Gashak on the list of people going to space), the party receives their invitations to Etantillian’s party: carved wooden boxes, each containing a multicolored stone disc, primarily blue and black. These discs are attuned to the energy of the Tundra Gate, and necessary for getting through the portal to get there.

Interestingly, Moryë has a similar stone, though the color balance is different. One of his guardians picked it up while working in the Elemental Plane of Water, and had just thought it was an interesting and strange rock, but apparently it might be a passkey to some plane or demiplane—not that Moryë knows which one.

Over in the magic item quests, a common ingredient for magic items is “something that requires danger to acquire.” When they ask around, Gashak connects Erzsi to Stureskali Tech, a company that builds personal protection constructs and is recruiting a red team to test out their newest model. The Affirmative Friends go and defeat X7Z, a competent model a bit too focused on its mannequin charge failing her upcoming spelling test, and take some pieces of the mannequin for trophies to add to the magic items.

While the Affirmative Friends are very competent, they’re definitely not experienced thieves, and they go about setting themselves challenges to practice. First off, they recruit their new friend Maliconar, a fan of marble racing, to hide a marble somewhere in his room for them to steal. After a very exciting heist including some creative use of their Portable Hole, they discover that Mali has hidden a different marble in the pocket of every single pair of his pants, and on discovering this bit of subterfuge and commitment to the bit, decide he’s their new best friend and they’re keeping him forever, to the point of asking him to share an on-campus apartment with them the next year. Baffled but pleased, he agrees.

After two years of very stressful spring breaks, the Affirmative Friends spend a pleasant one, visiting a spa town and honing their heist skills by poking their noses into the business of the locals. (And utterly failing at poking into the business of a goblin named Scuffed Shoes.) And then, when the school year is over, Chad goes back to his summer camp, but Erzsi and Moryë, before their summers begin, go to a party at NASA in honor of the space crew.

The party is successful, but there’s a lot of drama behind the scenes! Gashak’s girlfriend Mariel is trying hard not to freak out because Gashak’s been distant and upset recently. Kilviri, after her retirement from the space crew, seems to be in a perpetual bad mood. And as though that weren’t bad enough, there’s an attempt at corporate espionage that is foiled with help from Bountiful in her most terrifying Boss Ass Bitch mode.

Party complete, Erzsi settles into work at NASA while she waits for the summer solstice, this summer working as Bountiful’s personal assistant while also starting to put together a safety manual for the organization, since her current goal is to be NASA’s new safety officer. Meanwhile, Moryë returns to his home city of Haewood to spend the summer at the Greencote and take a class/internship at a local hospital that functions as a nursing practicum.

However, they all return to Telcontëar to go to the summer solstice party, picking up the outfits they commissioned from a tailor along the way and then going by Teleportation Circle to the country where the portal to the Tundra Gate is, going out into the wilderness, renting a sleigh, and climbing a mountain. When they get through, they land in a summer tundra, on the front lawn of a gracious and huge guest house, staffed by giants. The party is settled into a lavish suite filled with antiques, and gets a schedule for the two-day party, with a culminating gala on the shortest night of the year.

During the events leading up to the formal party, the Affirmative Friends do their best to establish themselves as unsuspicious while also casing the joint, a difficult balance. They travel by train to the center of the demiplane and Etantillian’s lavish and massive mansion, taking a tour and discovering that the painting isn’t on display in any public areas. They meet Etantillian’s niece Mardia (she/her, giant), since she’s the one running the tours, and hear that there’s a vault somewhere in the house where Etantillian’s greatest treasures are.

When the time comes for the big party, they put on their formalwear and show up looking like hot shit to dance and find a way to get to the vault. In the early parts of the party, though, they see several familiar faces. Golda Ginsi is there, and greets them, and so does the pilot for NASA’s upcoming space mission. They recognize Hat Man, all of him still completely covered, this time in opalescent veils. However, there are a few other exciting guests. One is Kalin Dimar (he/him, half-elf), the last person from the vision Moryë had during Heal-All’s vision, who turns out to be lay clergy of the temple, a low-level wizard and research epidemiologist. The two introduce themselves and hit it off as two sensible scientists.

Also present, to Erzsi’s shock, are the final two members of her aunt’s adventuring party, Tilda and Honor Henalca. Research has proved that they’re married, and that they have a good reputation as adventurers and live on the Plane of Earth. Tonight, they’re here with an archdevil, and when Erzsi approaches them, they’re overcome and delighted to meet her and introduce her to Honor’s uncle: Drekano, Minority Leader of the Assembly of the Songless City (he/him), which is the Hell devoted to abjuration magic.

All the people, and all the information, are very distracting, but there’s still a job to do, and the party is determined to do it. They duck away from the party and search around until they find the entrance to the vault, out in the garden. They go down a staircase into a basement and travel as stealthily as they can through a maze, and find a puzzle at the end to lead them into an elevator up to the vault.

Tempting as it is to look around the vault, they make quick work of finding the painting (in a box where it’s awaiting repair for the less than gentle way it was stolen). However, before they can take it, the elevator activates, and they are forced to hide and keep as quiet as possible. Etantillian comes in with a group of people to tour the vault, along with his niece Mardia. He gives a few ostentatious gifts to people (including to Dumuzi, Keeper of the Bayou Gate (they/them, dragon in the form of a hobgoblin), the Bayou of Lanterns being the Hell devoted to illusion magic) before departing with the party undiscovered. Mardia lingers a moment, and the party overhears her stealing something, though they aren’t sure what.

Unwilling to linger, they take the painting, put it in the Portable Hole, and go back the way they came as quickly and quietly as possible, and then spend the rest of the night sick with anxiety (though they are also intrigued to find Honor and Drekano loitering near the part of the garden where the vault entrance is, and suspect that there are apparently a lot of thefts happening tonight).

They dance a little more, are awkwardly introduced to Etantillian and suffer his munificence, and attend a few more party events the next day, though they leave early, too anxious to enjoy themselves and wanting to get away clean before anyone realizes the painting is missing.

Back on the Prime Material Plane, they return the painting to Jalikivri and visit her to watch her make the magic items that are part payment for what they did, and they get some magic items straight out of a legend for their troubles.

Chad gets the Axe of the Frog, which increases his jump distances and heights as well as giving him advantage during action surges (and is themed around frogs because he sacrificed his favorite childhood toy, a stuffed frog named Freddy, to make it).

Moryë gets the Ink-Glass swords, in a play on the name they choose to use most often: one sword of stained glass, and one sword of obsidian. They have different effects depending on which is the main hand attack and which is the off-hand attack, but are most commonly used in a way that allows him to refill his pool of Lay on Hands on successful attacks.

Erzsi gets Mind Over Matter, a set of filigree bracers and crown that supplement her AC and allow her to cast Fly and Levitate with the charges.

They all return to their summers, and Erzsi, as Honor and Tilda are passing through on their way back to the Plane of Earth, gets to have lunch with them, to talk about her aunt and aliens and how to get to know them. However, when Honor says that she’s never told anyone about the aliens, Erzsi senses some sort of magic activating. She prods a little, and finds the magic activating in a few different ways, and she can’t be sure, but it seems like perhaps someone’s cast Modify Memory on her.

Erzsi lets her party members know, but she keeps the information to herself for now. It’s about to not be the worst of her problems.

^5-1 Dragon hoards frequently function as museums, complete with archival storage and professional staff. Young dragons tend to have very focused collections that then expand out at least somewhat as they age. ^{return to text ↩}

^5-2 The Hells are buffered from the Prime Material Plane by demiplanar gates of various sizes. Each gate is protected by a powerful individual from a variety of powerful beings. Etantillian, for instance, is a storm giant, but dragons, fey, sphinxes, and celestials, among others, are also represented. The Tundra on the Road to Nowhere is the Hell devoted to divination magic. ^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

In the last weeks of Erzsi’s summer internship, Gashak asks her down to their office/lab at NASA. When she arrives, Gashak, who has claimed that it’s been taking longer than expected to make the ruby lens that will allow people to see the stars without time dilation, admits that it’s been finished longer than they’ve been admitting, and that they have something to share about it. Gashak invites Erzsi to look through the lens, with the help of the emerald telescope, and shows her Ninki’s star.

It’s dying.

The news rocks Erzsi, and when she shares it, rocks Bountiful even worse. If Ninki’s star dies, Ninki will also die, and Bountiful’s new priority is making sure that doesn’t happen. It’s all made worse by the fact that Ninki knew, which shakes Erzsi’s faith in them. It also becomes clear that Kilviri, Ninki’s warlock who has been withdrawing, must have known somehow or guessed, though she’s on maternity leave and doesn’t comment much on the matter.

Bountiful immediately starts leading the search for a way to fix the problem (Ninki feels fairly hopeless about it, though they admit they don’t want to die). Gashak, relieved to no longer be carrying the secret, returns their focus to preparing to go to space in less than a year (and also to apologizing to their girlfriend, who thought they were going to break up with her due to how withdrawn they were while keeping the secret).

Erzsi does her best to pick up the pieces as she prepares for her senior year. She tells her party what’s going on, and Moryë offers Ninki a listening ear if they need one (though Ninki, sensibly, asks to be connected with Heal-All instead).

Senior year begins on that sober note, though on campus all is fairly well! Moryë, Chad, and Erzsi have moved into an on-campus apartment with their friend Mali, accompanied as always by Sunstone the pseudodragon, and they all do their best to concentrate on their classes and figure out what’s next. Chad, in his last weeks of summer, spent time at a training camp for one of the larger adventuring guilds and discovered, very uncomfortably, that he’s far outstripped all the other trainees and most of the professionals in power, so he’s scrambling for next steps. Mali is debating whether he wants to stay on the Prime Material Plane or return to the Underdark and is trying to figure out his future either way.

Moryë also has an additional distraction: they’re asked to offer mentorship and help to a freshman cleric of their god who’s chosen to come to UKB this year. Gwirilind Rammasad (she/her, wood elf) is an overeager chatterbox who can’t seem to decide if she resents Moryë or wants to be him, and who’s ambitious but sincere in her desire to find favor with the god. Moryë is immediately exhausted by her, but gentle efforts to get her to try a little less hard and just be herself and treat the god like a person aren’t immediately successful.

When Elsbeth calls to offer them a dungeon clearing job during fall break, it’s a relief. About twenty miles off-campus, there’s an archaeological site, a temple to a dead goddess named Desophri, a dwarvish goddess of the sun and war. They’ve just opened up four completely subterranean levels of the temple (in common dwarvish theology, the closer to the heart of the earth, the more holy), and before it’s safe for academics to enter, someone needs to go in and clear out any mimics or other nasty beasts that might endanger them.

The party, more than willing to do a favor for a friend, takes Elsbeth up on the offer, and when fall break arrives, they put on their adventuring gear and head out.

Almost immediately, the dungeon proves itself eerie. On the top level, what they find is standard dungeon fare—dangerous fungi, mimics of varying sizes—but they also find one undead, and they find a lot of writing on the walls. All in dwarvish, all over the walls, again and again, it says “bless us again.”

On the next level, they find more of the writing, as well as some wyverns nesting in the remains of one of the rooms and some (non-soda-related oozes). They also find two more dangerous things. First, they find holes in the walls, aimless tunnels out of the dungeon (which is how the wyverns got in, it seems). Second, they find clergy dormitories, mostly picked clean, since the temple was abandoned deliberately rather than fled, with niches in the walls for altars, and in one of the altars, there’s a small illusory light spell that Erzsi realizes after a consternated moment projects a few words in Aniel’s language of all things—she doesn’t recognize all of it, but she’s quite sure one of the words is “light.”

They follow some tunnels out of the dungeon, noting that the tunnels are perfectly round, definitely drilled out by some kind of machinery, and meet a young air elemental poet on vacation named Teforee (he/him), who claims to have heard noises at night and seen a few lights. Concerned, the party returns to the dungeon, and they continue working their way down.

On the second-from-lowest level, things get very odd indeed. Some of the drilled tunnels lead out what seems like aimlessly until it becomes clear that it’s a version of one of Desophri’s sigils. The “bless us again”s continue. In a storage room, the party finds what’s been drilling the holes: an advanced digging machine that seems to have become possessed by some kind of ghost. It’s a perilous fight, but they get it deactivated in the end. The other half of that level is a chapel, where two weeping and wailing undead fight the party before they’re defeated.

The chapel also contains statues with Magic Mouths that can be activated. Desophri took ceremonial spouses from among her paladins, and each spouse (there are a dozen or so of them) had a statue built and recorded a message saying what came of the temple while they were married. The final statue, unlike the others, is kneeling in grief, and says that they were her widow, which would always be their shame. The other notable thing on that floor was a small pipe organ with sheet music, some of which was notated in the same handwriting as the “bless us again”s, commenting on someone’s taste, whether it was worth practicing particular pieces again or not.

Even more nervous, the party heads down to the lowest floor.

The first thing they see, everywhere, are shades. These are less ghosts and more the recordings of moments that spirits become trapped in, not inclined to be dangerous, just present. They largely seem to be clergy, going about their business, attending some kind of service, playing a larger pipe organ than the one upstairs, and so on, working around the structure that dominates the room: a huge, intricately-carved bier. This isn’t only a temple to a dead goddess, it’s her tomb, and Moryë can feel the curdled divine energy spilling out into the room.

Almost immediately, though, a small army of undead attacks, breaking cover from among the shades, and the party and Elsbeth have to join the battle. In the middle of it, though, the undead general appears, and completely changes the course of things: this powerful undead, who will not speak, is one of Aniel’s people, an alien who somehow found their way to this place and this temple, hundreds of years ago and hundreds of years before Aniel crashed in Sauria.

It’s close, but the party kills the undead, and Moryë lays them all to rest, finding another side to their god, one that knows when it’s time to let go, when emergency medicine can’t save someone and it’s time to stop trying.

When they look around, they find an anchorite’s cell, and when they go inside, they find a mix of Common, Dwarvish, and Aniel’s language, as well as some pictographs, inscribed carefully on the wall, something of a Rosetta stone for the alien language. It tells the story of the anchorite’s history, which goes like this:

There were some dozen aliens on the anchorite’s ship, which had been traveling away from its home planet for a long time and hadn’t had any contact with other ships in ages, as it was with Aniel. They had a technological malfunction and ended up crashing on this planet, in the woods near Desophri’s temple. The group fractured when Desophri’s devotees found them, and only three, the anchorite included, went with them. Eventually, the larger group came to try to convince them to leave, saying they were moving on, but only one from the temple group went with them. The last two stayed with the temple, one as a warrior, one as a cleric and later an anchorite.

When Desophri died, and her body came to the temple, they decided to shut up the holiest parts of the temple, both because it seemed respectful and because the bodies of gods can be dangerous. The anchorite stubbornly chose to stay, though their cell was directly below the bier. One cleric chose to stay with them, to ferry the food down to them from a small opening and keep them company. The last thing the anchorite wrote was that they hoped Desophri would someday return and “bless us again.”

The party’s worldview is rocked by the story, but the dungeon isn’t quite clear. There’s still the body of a goddess within, and Moryë is just about sure that the corrupted divine energy is the reason there are so many undead in this temple, and that given others might be buried here, it’s by far safest to try to deal with the divine energy. However, it’s a maelstrom of magic, dangerous to deal with, as Chad and Elsbeth, without any magical skills, try to support their more magical friends. It’s Moryë, in the end, who decides to show the same compassion to Desophri as he showed to her undead followers, and lays her to rest with a prayer.

Inside the bier, when they peer inside in the wake of the magic, are the remains of what seem to be two dwarvish skeletons overlapping each other, and one huge diamond where the heart would be.

In the wake of this, after talking with the head of the archaeological site and several other people, they return home to a worried Mali watching Underdark telenovelas in their apartment, and allow themselves a moment to breathe.

In the coming weeks, several things happen. Erzsi, aware that this secret can stay under wraps no longer, starts planning a joint press release and interview with the campus and NASA, revealing the existence of aliens. However, that means that she finally has to tell her mother how her aunt died, which is only kind to do in person, and she plans a trip, with Moryë and Chad to support her.

Before the trip can be made, however, Erzsi is invited for lunch with Bountiful, who comes several hours’ drive up from Telcontëar to see her and tell her that some of her research on how to save Ninki has been fruitful. She’s found a legend that implies that there’s a powerful circle casting, a tenth level spell, that could be done to create a new solar for Ninki’s star, though two people would have to join their souls together into one being to make it happen. She’s still looking for the exact ritual, but she begs Erzsi, knowing she has no right to, to get as many levels as she can so she’s ready when the time comes to help cast the spell. (It is becoming increasingly obvious that Bountiful is in unrequited love with Ninki, but Bountiful is simply not going to talk about that.)

Moryë also, in this time, has some things to puzzle over, specifically about the births and deaths of gods. Some, as Moryë’s god was, are born from prayer energy and come into the world with no specific form, but others are born with a form. Moryë has also been noticing that the god is more and more of a person, able to communicate with more words and less metaphorical concepts, and the combination leads them to inquire if the god wants help finding a form, or has any questions about things like gender, given Moryë’s had his own chances to think about that in the past. The god, in response, shares their difficulties with finding an appearance—when a god is born, if their followers have not believed them into being with an appearance, they can choose to do as the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up Again has done, becoming formless, or if they have saints, they can overwrite them, becoming them and combining with them. The latter, they think, is what Desophri did, but Moryë’s god didn’t, and now, in trying to find their own identity, finds themself struck by the knowledge that, essentially, you can’t dream a new face, but they don’t want to steal from their beloved now-dead saints.

There’s clearly much thinking to be done about that, but no time to do it in. They need to go to Tidegrove before news starts leaking.

Chapter Text

Erzsi, Moryë, and Chad travel across the country to the Grassland of Floods and through the biggest local city of Fauxpeka, before driving the two hours it takes to get to Tidegrove, a small farming community in the grassland. The biggest tourist draw the town has is the grove of entirely out-of-place trees on the edge of town, but other than that, it’s a small town, with harvest festivals where they weave grass into hats and not much by way of entertainment aside from getting drunk in the grove on a Saturday night (there’s been a lot of music in the grove lately, drifting over the fields) or getting slushies from the 8-12.

(It’s Kansas. Erzsi is from Fantasy Kansas.)

Erzsi’s mother Sarolt greets the party awkwardly but happily, not quite sure if she should treat Moryë and Chad as future in-laws or friends or party members. She and Erzsi, her friends definitely note, are awkward with each other, Sarolt trying too hard but also clearly knowing nothing about the life her daughter has chosen for herself. Erzsi speaks to her alone, tells her what caused the death of her sister so Sarolt will be prepared when the news starts coming out, and Sarolt is heartbroken—but also, in the course of the conversation, hurts Erzsi deeply. All her life, Erzsi has been compared to Meseru, the aunt she’s always wanted to emulate, but in the course of the conversation, Sarolt says it in a way that’s clearly not a compliment, and Erzsi is forced to wonder if it ever was one.

Since Erzsi needs space, the party goes out into town. They stop at the Grove, tall and made of trees not otherwise found in the region, and go downtown to the 8-12 and to the library, Erzsi’s favorite childhood haunt. Her favorite librarian, fondly referred to as Mr. Gedeon (he/him, human), greets her happily and says he’s been keeping up on NASA’s advances and her exploits. (Moryë and Chad are both amused and slightly appalled to discover that Erzsi’s childhood mentor is very very hot.) Also in the library is a girl of about eight, reading one of the many books on space exploration.

Erzsi and Sarolt try their best to mend things (much as Sarolt doesn’t fully understand exactly the nature of the mending that needs to be done), and the next day is awkward. Everyone’s very relieved they’re only there for a long weekend and don’t have to come back for the foreseeable future.

The next night, Erzsi is restless, and then sees light and feels a huge change in magic at the exact moment. When she looks out of the window in the direction of the grove, barely visible from her mother’s window, she sees that it’s all lit up. At almost the same moment, the house phone rings: one of the neighborhood children is missing.

The Affirmative Friends would be more shocked if the two things weren’t connected than if they were, so they get their gear on and head for the grove as fast as they can, looking for Blythe Gyrhidal (she/her, human).

In the grove, they find a child, but not Blythe. Blythe is about eight, but this is a tiefling child of about twelve, crying, and Moryë can immediately sense incredible amounts of divine magic: the child is a deity.

More importantly to the Affirmative Friends, though, they are a child, and when asked what’s wrong, the god says that they are the god of the grove and also the god of the bridge, newly born, and that they have two saints who went missing sometime during that birth. They also say that their name is Hazrebel and also Joy, and are styled as Hazrebel/Joy (they/them, deity in tiefling form) thereafter.

Once Hazrebel/Joy is somewhat calmed, they explain what happened to the best of their knowledge: two children in two different places, one here in Tidegrove and one in what the party recognizes to be the Hells, a well-known bridge in the Crownless Scree (the Hell focusing on necromancy), came up with imaginary friends. As they each built out the story of their friend, they started dovetailing more and more, until all three were playing, singing and dancing, in a liminal space between the planes. That night, the level of belief and power had become enough, and Hazrebel/Joy was born, but the power shunted them out in the grove and sent the children somewhere unknown.

The party springs into action. They speak to Blythe’s parents, who are deeply concerned, and ask Sarolt to look after them. Moryë calls Heal-All, as the only expert in sainthood they know, who agrees to come down as soon as possible, and Erzsi calls Khainan to ask her patron Nexaph to investigate in the Hells even though he isn’t from the Scree. Moryë also calls on Siltha to explain the situation and dismisses him back to the Hells to travel in his more formless fiend spirit guise to bring word to Nexaph.

Word from the Scree is that an orphaned child named Zishi (he/him, tiefling) who has been claiming to see a new god on the bridge has gone missing, so the children weren’t shunted to the other half of Hazrebel/Joy’s domain. Concern soon rises that Blythe and Zishi might be trapped in the space between planes, which is dangerous to be in for any length of time.

Accessing it is difficult, so the party calls Lilly, who being at a graduate institution full of powerful wizards has the biggest ability to help them. She gets in touch with some professors and her supervisor in the library program, Tilmawilin Nerion (they/them, sky elf), and they arrive as quickly as they can, about the same time as Heal-All, who is baffled and not very good with children but takes charge of Hazrebel/Joy to free the party up to go into the space between planes as soon as possible.

Getting to the space between planes is no easy task, but the spellcasters figure out a way: casting powerful teleportation magic at the same time in Tidegrove and the Scree, each aimed at each other, might replicate the same conditions. Nexaph, on the other end of the phone, is more than willing to be the caster on the other end, and the two groups make the casting and the party steps into a blank white space, with a series of lights there to tell them when it’s too dangerous to stay longer and they need to go out the other side of the magical tunnel the spell resonance is drilling.

The children aren’t visible, and when the party calls for them, they can’t see them either. They spend some time wandering the space between planes, and eventually they find a set of glowing footprints, child-sized. They’re slowly fading, but the party follows them until they stop, and when Erzsi tries to figure out where they’ve gone, she realizes they lead to what might be termed a worn spot, probably a Teleportation Circle where the membrane of the world is a little thin.

However, just because she can see it doesn’t mean she can go through, and the party is starting to run out of safe time in the space between planes. Erzsi decides to try for power rather than finesse, and puts together a quick and dirty circle casting, drawing on her party members to blast a hole in the universe before tumbling through and into a place none of them recognize, though it’s in a transport hub, so it doesn’t take them long to figure it out.

They’ve landed in the Bayou of Lanterns in the Hells, the one based around illusion, and when they ask, the startled devil on duty says that no unattended children have come through the circle all day. They reach out to other municipal circles in the Bayou, but nobody has seen Blythe and Zishi, though Erzsi would swear that the place they went through and the hole she ripped are fairly close together.

Nexaph connects them with the Bayou’s Fiend Squad, and the municipal worker helps, and it transpires that there are two private Teleportation Circles known in the Bayou, one on the grounds of a secret society and one in the tower of a wizard who spends a lot of time in the Astral Sea. The party is also warned that there’s a hurricane coming to the Bayou, and it could pose severe danger for the children but also will curtail the party’s ability to explore both places.

After consideration, they decide to try the wizard tower and let the Fiend Squad (at least those that aren’t battening down hatches for the storm) reach out to the society. They take a raft into the Bayou’s waterways and go to Loopback Village on the Bayou’s border (though not without getting on the wrong side of an attacking plant on the way), where they waste no time breaking into the wizard’s tower and looking through the floors for the child saints (while dealing with the tower’s security).

They find the children at the top of the tower, exhausted and overwhelmed and scared. Blythe has become a paladin, and she was the one leaving glowing footprints behind her, the sign of sainthood that her body has chosen. Zishi, who doesn’t have the benefit of having heard Mr. Gedeon’s stories about Erzsi, is even more mistrustful, but he and Blythe have bonded, and he admits he’s become a cleric. There are glowing filigree marks on his throat, and his voice has a strange resonance.

With a storm coming in, the party doesn’t waste time. Erzsi uses Teleportation Circle to get them back to the municipal circle, and at that circle gets them sent to the Crownless Scree, where Nexaph is waiting for them. The party and the children spend an exhausted night in a repurposed emergency shelter, and Blythe speaks to her parents on the phone (Zishi’s favorite teacher checks in on him, but the orphanage he was sneaking out of most nights to play with his imaginary friend is in some disgrace). Nexaph, who proves himself both competent and kind, cooks everybody’s meals, which is a pretty weird thing to see a seven-foot tall acid green guy with a lion head and big antlers do.

Nexaph sees them off the next day, with Zishi choosing to follow Blythe back home to Tidegrove, but before Nexaph sends them away, he grants the Affirmative Friends official Hells titles: Erzsi Riswyn, Chosen of Ninki-487c, Moryellë Greencote, Beloved of their God, and Chad Tahyrst, Faithful Protector.

In Tidegrove, Blythe’s parents greet her with relief, and Hazrebel/Joy greets both of their saints with even more relief. The Gyrhidal parents prove their pluck by inviting a god over for waffles (Moryë, Erzsi, and Chad started Hazrebel/Joy off on trying foods and experiencing preferences and activities, and they’re taking to it like a duck to water. Moryë’s family at the Greencote, who got asked to put together a care package for a baby god, are proud but deeply baffled).

The party can’t stay much longer, but Heal-All offers to stay and train the saints a little, as well as preparing Blythe’s parents for what they can expect. (Blythe’s father is giving serious thought to becoming a monk so he can keep up with his superpowered eight-year-old.) Hazrebel/Joy, with regret, retreats to their divine plane to start learning what it means to be a god.

Back at Sarolt’s house, Sarolt tells Erzsi she’s proud and that Erzsi shouldn’t feel like she has to hide her adventures anymore, a well-meaning pronouncement that Erzsi is glad to hear and her friends deeply mistrust. Still, Erzsi thanks her and the three of them drive back up to Fauxpeka and head back to campus and preparations for the press conference that’s the reason they had to go to Tidegrove in the first place. (Not to mention they have to reassure Mali, who once again was left on campus fretting about them.)

While Erzsi prepares for and speaks at the press conference and the alien language immediately sets the world on fire with curiosity (Sarolt compliment’s Erzsi’s blazer), Moryë puzzles over godhood and identity and prays to their god, encouraging them to claim more of an identity if they want one. When they reiterate their problems with picking an appearance without feeling like they’re stealing and Moryë brings the quandary to his friends, Erzsi suggests introducing the god to video game character creation sliders, something that immediately begins to occupy the god’s attention.

Not all of it, however. When Moryë also mentions a name, it isn’t long before they receive a dream vision: the god would like a name. Or rather, for flexibility’s sake, like sky elves they would like five names. They’ve already thought of four people to give them names: Heal-All, Abis Eretu (captain of the Sunfish, who Moryë interned with), Kalin Dimar (epidemiologist who Moryë met at Etantillian’s party), and Moryë themself.

Sensibly, the four of them start a groupchat about it.

World-shaking revelations aside, life continues and college continues. The party finishes off their second-to-last semester with the knowledge that they’ve got decisions to make about their futures. However, over winter break, they decide to simply have a good time, and take Mali along with them. They visit a country called Omarbek (think Fantasy Iceland) over the break, where they see the sights and do a tourism board scavenger hunt, as well as spending some time at the Greencote. Moryë is eager to soak up as much family time as possible, knowing it will be scarce in the coming years,^7-1 and asks advice of the commune elders on how to start taking on a more responsible role in the commune. Meanwhile, Chad, Erzsi, and Mali all find themselves welcomed and comfortable in the Greencote.

Back on campus after break, they all settle into their last semester with trepidation. Erzsi, her path chosen, is the surest of her future, but her worries about Ninki and her changing priorities in life (from exploration to affirming her connection to the people who she loves) still unsettle her. Moryë has three years of temple service owed for his scholarship, and they’re trying to figure out how to spend them—going to Talltrees Clinic under Heal-All’s mentorship is tempting, except that Erzsi and Chad and increasingly Mali are all looking at living in Telcontëar, and the thought of being away from all three of them hurts.

Mali and Chad, meanwhile, are both terribly uncertain about their futures. Chad could go to graduate school for social work, his major, but he’s tired of school, so he goes looking for other possibilities. Mali, on the other hand, is finding himself wanting to do something more practical than continuing on with literature or getting a graduate degree in creative writing for his poetry, and on Erzsi’s suggestion starts looking into science communication programs.

Early in the semester, Chad comes to the group with a small unofficial job: the head of the monk frat has asked him to look into something, claiming that one of the freshmen in the frat has noticed something strange about the house, rumblings and strange sounds. The party meets Avmary Heidelton (she/her, halfling), a very serious young monk who shows them what she’s seen. They follow her tips into the basement of the monk frat house and find a swarm of flintmoths, creatures that eat stone very slowly but that when provoked start using a lot of energy and eat stone much more quickly. In the resulting confusion, Erzsi is cut up very badly and several foundation pillars of the frat are badly destabilized, but the flintmoths are defeated. Though the monks have to move out of the frat so there can be some repairs for sure.

Moryë, who has been continuing to be driven to distraction by Gwirilind, his freshman mentee, sensibly sets her up on a playdate with Avmary. Gwirilind resents it a little, but she and Avmary do manage to become friends.

There are worries about the future but everything’s fine and everything’s going to be fine. Surely. Definitely things are going to get easier from here.

^7-1In sky elf communes, it’s understood that there can be difficulties as people change roles from child to adult, and adult to elder. It’s almost universal for people in those transition periods to spend significant time away from the commune and in minimal contact with it. At those times, commune members living away do some soul-searching to make sure that continuing with the commune is what they want, explore their identities and interests outside of it, and either establish or wrap up careers.^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

It’s a quiet Friday night in the Affirmative Friends’ apartment, perhaps a month into their last semester of college. The three of them are watching Underdark telenovelas, a common activity Mali has them hooked on, when Erzsi gets a phone call. She’s the VP of the warlock frat this year, and she gets a call from the head of the barbarian frat, warning her that there’s been a problem.

Tashkai, the wild magic sorcerer a year behind the party with unusually strong surges, had a wild magic surge mid-party (maybe wild magic sorcerers shouldn’t do kegstands) and dropped himself through a hole in the floor that doesn’t appear to lead to the basement (they checked). Even worse, Gwirilind, Moryë’s overeager mentee, threw down a rope and jumped in after them, and it’s been a few minutes and neither of them has been heard from since.

The party apologizes to Mali for ducking out of their evening and puts on their armor, heading to frat row and the barbarian frat, where the president meets them and shows them to the cleared-out living room, which doesn’t have much in it but a couch, a TV, a side table with some magazines on it, a hot firefighter calendar on the wall, and a big old hole in the floor. They can’t see much down below, but Tashkai and Gwirilind aren’t coming out, so the party ties their own rope and goes down …

Into the same room. Well, this one doesn’t have a hole in the floor, or other people in it, and does have the somewhat crumpled remains of a keg, but otherwise it’s the same room, no differences as far as they can tell, and when they look up, the portal in the ceiling disappears, leaving them in a confusing echo of the barbarian frat’s living room.

However, the barbarian frat living room has two doors and a few windows. Peering out all the portals shows what they remember from the barbarian frat, the rooms beyond … but as soon as they walk through a door, they’re just in the same room again. And again. And again. Every exit leads right back into the living room, and there’s no sign of Gwirilind and Tashkai.

As they move through the same room over and over again, though, they start to notice small unsettling differences. The calendar is on a different month, a mended rip in the couch is in a different place or absent entirely, the text in the magazines is different. They slow down and start cataloging differences, and the first real moment of alarm happens when they discover that in one iteration of the room, the text in the magazines has been replaced with the words “bless us again.”

There’s an immediate fear that this is somehow a continuation of what was happening beneath the Desophran temple, tied into the remaining unanswered questions there, but in the next iteration of the room, it’s gone, and the television is on, showing nothing but static, though there’s almost a whisper underneath it. Moryë uses Divine Sense to try to figure out what’s going on, but while there’s a sense of malevolence about the place, it’s diffuse, intrinsic to the location. Moryë and Erzsi also discover that they’re starting to lose their magical connections a little, having a harder time getting through to the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up Again and Ninki.

Within a few more rooms, though, it becomes obvious that this place is showing them their fears in strange and abstracted ways. The smell of soda ooze in the air or the glint of it in pools on the ground, the sounds of monsters tapping at the window or of familiar and beloved people screaming or calling for help. The television starts to flick on sometimes, showing scenes of horror, like the soda kaiju going to Haewood and crushing the Greencote (something they’re almost sure happened in the second time loop). The television seems to grow larger with every room, and everything else grows a bit more unreal.

The party is unsettled, not to mention angry at a place that seems invented to taunt them, but they don’t have much choice but to go forward, since going through any room takes them to a different one, not to the one before, and they still haven’t found Tashkai and Gwirilind. They spend the night in a room that has “bless us again” scrawled on all the walls.

The next day (though it’s hard to call it that—their phones imply that there’s some time dilation occurring), they stumble into a room that isn’t one of their nightmares: Gwirilind and Tashkai are in it. Tashkai is largely unconscious, with a broken leg set at the wrong angle, and Gwirilind is watching what seems to be the loop of a destructive tornado on the television that dominates one wall. She immediately demands proof that it’s really the Affirmative Friends coming to save her, and when she’s reassured, bursts into tears. She and Tashkai have been in this nightmare place for a subjective two days, and her magic is barely working. They tried to stay in one place, but the place kept conjuring monsters to chase them that made them go deeper and deeper into whatever this is. Moryë wants to scold her a little for going off half-cocked, but she’s too distressed to really be scolded, so instead they focus on next steps.

Moryë heals what he can, and Erzsi, after some debate, Banishes Tashkai and Gwirilind, since it’s become clear that they’re in some kind of demiplane. It takes much more effort than it should, and Erzsi doubts she’ll have the power to get herself and her companions out even after her spell slots recharge, so they determine to try to find another way out, if they can.

The continuation brings them still more nightmares, which they try their best to ignore and move through.

Chad’s companions are forced to see him injured and have to deal with a room where there are two of him and they have to figure out which is real (luckily, the often scoffed-at paladin ability of Divine Sense comes in clutch there). He has to face more than one room where the altar he was almost sacrificed on replaces the couch—sometimes empty, sometimes holding someone he cares about, like his mother Nencia. He also sees, a few times, including on the altar, a young girl with dark hair falling long distances or with a broken leg, who he explains is a friend from elementary school who he lost contact with, Tiff, who broke her leg while they were playing one day.

Moryë has to face injuries and disasters he can’t heal, very often to people they care about. Screams of family members and friends. Erzsi and Chad growing suddenly old and being left alone in their absence. Bodies from the time loops, and sights in a mirror on the wall of how he looked in death in the first time loop, with an echo of pain from it. Perhaps most distressing, other than seeing the awful things happening to Chad and Erzsi, is their continuing decreased connection to the god, until it’s hanging on by the thinnest thread.

Erzsi is forced to confront a nightmare of her mother walking up to her and saying “It’s your fault, you know?” In the first room, there was a painting on the wall showing a starry night, and as it changes and warps, she’s forced to see Ninki’s star going supernova or dying in a thousand ways. In the mirror, she sees herself constantly alone, no matter where she is. As with the others, people she cares about dying and her being powerless to stop it. There’s one room that terrifies her party members, showing a glowing Erzsi who isn’t quite Erzsi but who clearly combined her soul with Bountiful’s to make a new solar for Ninki’s star. (When Moryë and Chad share this fear, Erzsi admits for the first time that while she’ll do a lot and go far to try to save Ninki, she’s not interested in giving up her identity for it.) One of the worse ones for her is watching on the television as she has the conversation with Ninki again about them dying, only for them to say that it was their plan all along for someone to be willing to sacrifice themself to save them and then cast Modify Memory on her.

At one point, when resting, they’re almost sure they hear a voice from the mirror none of them recognize, saying “That’s not good, I’ll have to call—” before it cuts off.

Not long after, they stumble into a room containing two mind flayers feasting on a dead body (the room flickers from looking like a dungeon to looking like the frat living room as the person dies at pretty much the moment they enter the room). The mind flayers, which appear to be real and not projections of what they are all calling the Fear Dimension, immediately attack. Their focus on Moryë means that in one round they end up one hit point away from instant death, and Chad and Erzsi deal with the monsters just in time, even though Erzsi’s magic feels tenuous, not as connected to Ninki as she’s used to. Still, they’re killed, and Moryë is left with his skull cracked and pried open, leaking cerebrospinal fluid and blood. Moryë immediately heals themself as much as he can, but the encounter leaves all of them feeling shaky and scared.

It’s all the worse when they examine the body. The person looks like they’ve been in the Fear Dimension for a while, and like they might have been a child, or at least a teenager, when they first came: their clothes are a bit too small and too short, and are definitely ragged and worn. There’s no way to identify them, but they treat the body with as much respect as they can, wrapping it in muslin they had in their Portable Hole for heist reasons and lowering it inside so they could keep it safe and preserved.

The rooms after that are some of the worst ones—that’s when the choice to find the correct Chad happens, but also Erzsi is subjected to a vivid surround sound reenactment of her aunt’s death. Moryë sees themself covered in lightning scarring like Heal-All has and like the ball of it on his chest.

When there’s pounding against the mirror, it seems likely to be just another horror, but when it shatters, it lets through a stranger with a quarterstaff and an air of easy power. This is Reassurance Groveward (they/them, tiefling), a famed though very private adventurer and monk, who explains that they’ve been sent to help and ushers the party out through the mirror.

They come out in what appears to be a comfortable and upscale antique shop, and they’re greeted, to their surprise, by the mysterious faceless figure they’ve been calling Hat Man. He introduces himself as Lanasophria (he/him, unknown), owner of this shop, which is on its own private demiplane and which is called Lanasophria’s Curiosities. It’s also a duty of his, though he doesn’t explain why it’s his duty or who if anyone gave it to him, to keep an eye on the Fear Dimension, which he says is called the Descent of Hope, a demiplane that overlaps the Shadowfell and the Abyss (as well as the Ethereal). He also tells them he’s impressed, that they made it some twenty percent of the way through without dying or being driven mad by the projections.

The party is deeply shaken and want to go home, so Lanasophria doesn’t detain them long. He gives them some tea and takes charge of the body they found, though, promising to find out what they can about the unfortunate soul. He also gives them each a business card made of what seems to be a thin slice of mica, which like Etantillian’s stones will give them a single-use access to this demiplane if they can find a wild portal to walk through. He also asks if they’re interested in jobs if he gives them references, since he likes to keep something of a directory of powerful and competent people (Reassurance being one of them). His shop is very much a supply shop for very powerful people, and what he doesn’t have, he can often source or make, and he also brokers jobs on occasion for those powerful people, as well as keeping an eye on the Descent of Hope, which people stray into every few years. He regrets deeply that his scrying never found the person who had clearly been there for years and died there, and says that mind flayers do come in sometimes, following the smell of fear to a place where they can happily feast.

Once they’ve had tea and a chance to calm themselves a little, Lanasophria sends them back to the frat house, where they discover that it’s been about twenty-four hours of real time and that Bountiful was getting ready to rip a hole in reality to come after them and particularly Erzsi. She gives Erzsi a hug instead, and drives them to the hospital, where they’re all scanned and checked over (though where unfortunately they take Moryë’s “I cracked my skull open” as “I got a minor skull fracture” and not “My brain was literally exposed to the air”). Moryë now has a new scar going from their eyebrow back into their hair, and some of his hair was ripped out, which he feels self-conscious and sad about.

At the hospital, they also see Gwirilind and Tashkai, both of whom are under monitoring for both physical and mental health and who refuse to be taken away from each other. Tashkai is guilty that his magic surges put so many people in danger, and Gwirilind is guilty that she had to be retrieved and couldn’t help Tashkai, and refuses to let anyone comfort her when they try.

The coming days are rough. Everyone, it seems, wants to check in on them, and Mali has been going out of his mind with worry and frets over them all and particularly Moryë extensively upon their return. Heal-All, upon hearing about everything, hears that Moryë closed his own skull up after major trauma and insists upon a full brain scan with a specialist (clearly known from his days as a surgeon, judging by their interactions), who discovers that Moryë regrew some of their brain matter, which alarms everybody. The Greencote is also worried, and when Moryë comes down for a visit, they talk again about emergency preparedness and how to make sure the Greencote can stay updated about Moryë’s status while also giving him the space he needs to grow. Moryë deals with the pain (and the cultural trauma of having some of their hair ripped out, which is regrowing but slowly, and white in contrast to the black of the rest of his hair) and all of them deal with the trauma, as the weeks follow and they all cling together, Mali very much included.

Gwirilind is also having a hard time, self-isolating almost immediately once she’s allowed to return to campus and declining communications from Moryë, her temple mentor, Avmary, and even Tashkai. When they show up at her door, she allows Erzsi to talk to her and pull her somewhat out of her spiral of guilt and trauma, her true desire to help and be competent while also having to contend with not being able to do everything herself. She goes back to spending time with Tashkai and Avmary, introducing them, and talks a little with Moryë and her temple mentor, though she’s definitely going to remain shaken for a long time.

Chad also finds himself shaken. When his mother Nencia comes to bring them all meatloaf, cake, and fuzzy socks (mostly an excuse to hug her son), he asks her if she knows how to get in touch with Tiff or her parents after she moved away, since seeing her in the Descent of Hope made him think about her, only to discover that Nencia has no memory of her. Moreover, when he looks up his elementary school pictures, or any other memories of her, or asks anyone else about her, nobody remembers her or his parents, and he’s left fearing that either he made her up completely (Nencia clearly thinks this is an imaginary friend situation that got out of hand) or that there’s been some kind of Modify Memory situation. It only gets more mysterious when he looks at public town records and finds that the files on who owned the house he remembers her living in are corrupted—he can see the name Opwood on them, what he remembers as Tiff’s last name, but nobody else seems to be able to.

A few weeks after the adventure in the Fear Dimension, the party receives a letter from Lanasophria with information about the body. She was a teenager when she disappeared eleven years ago, an orphan and a student at a boarding school on a scholarship from a mysterious benefactor. She tried to steal something from a clan of dragons and disappeared from the dungeon they put her in for temporary holding. They had assumed she escaped, and the school had assumed she ran away. Lanasophria assumes that she thought she was still in a dungeon, which is why she hadn’t wandered deeper and thus why she survived as long as she did. He’s let the school she was at know about her death, in case they still have a way to contact her benefactor.

Life finally begins to return to normal. Mali quietly starts changing his life plans: while Moryë is going to be in Talltrees for a year after graduation learning from Heal-All, the plan for after that is for the party to all be in Telcontëar for at least a while. Mali’s searches for grad programs grow very locally focused, and he starts looking seriously into sci comm with the intention to work at NASA if they’ll have him. Chad’s still unsure of what he wants, but he starts applying for some jobs.

All four of them attend a party at the cleric frat not long before spring break where there are magical drugs available, including one that allows people to build a shared dream world. Mali, as the literature nerd among them, takes control of the dream and takes them to the setting of his favorite books, the Seas of Tierne novels, about a traveler stumbling into a strange demiplane and getting to know the people there, a species of seafaring octopus-like people and another of treefaring monkey-like people. The setting is vividly described, especially the purple oceans, which makes the party laugh, thinking of a purple-sea painting in the auction where they met Lanasophria, apparently just fanart of an old fantasy novel.

It’s a delightful moment of healing that lets them all have a night with nothing to worry about, for once, and they plan to keep that going (without Mali, who must go to the Underdark to admit to his family that he plans to stay on the Prime Material Plane for at least a few more years) by spending spring break on the beautiful jungle and beach island of Xanthilisia, so they can visit Lilly during her grad program and soak up the sun.

Chapter Text

It’s time for one last spring break trip! The Affirmative Friends (sadly minus their roommate Mali, who is going to visit his family in the Underdark) take a trip down to Xanthilisia, home of the world’s most prestigious wizard university, and are met at the Teleportation Circle by their friend Lilly, who’s happy to tour them around and catch them up on what she’s been up to, taking classes and working in the campus library under the supervision of her mentor.

They head down to the beachside cottage they’re renting for the week, where Lilly stays with them for the night, catching up on a lot of things but especially how they are after their adventure in the Descent of Hope. She’s particularly concerned about Moryë, what with the major skull trauma that required him to regrow some of their own brain matter, and when they ask her privately, she offers to find a cosmetic potion that will help the new white streak in his hair grow out faster. Her life, by contrast, has been good—she’s busy with classes and the library and spending nights with lots of different people, which for sure has nothing to do with the ancient crush on Elsbeth that definitely hasn’t been resurrected by spending more time with her thanks to the Affirmative Friends. Definitely not. Would someone with a crush on Elsbeth help Elsbeth edit her Fantasy Tinder profile? Lilly thinks not. Check and mate.

(Lilly’s doing great.)

Romantic dramas aside, though, the party enjoys the beach for a day or so, and then begins to notice groups of people walking around the beach, clearly looking for someone. More than that, there appear to be two different groups walking around the beach looking for someone, and there appears to be illusion magic involved disguising those groups.

The party, very sensibly, mentions this to Lilly, who mentions it to Librarian Nerion, her primary library supervisor, who responds to this with an invitation to the party—not required, but if they would care to help with something, Xanthilisia would be pleased for their help. The Affirmative Friends never turn down a chance to help a friend, so they go to the library and meet Librarian Nerion, who takes them deep into the bowels of the library while explaining that this is happening in part because the library holds a portal to one of the Nine Hells, the Jungle That Thirsts (which is the Hell devoted to transmutation). The two groups that are searching Xanthilisia are devils from the Jungle and fey from the Jungle Gate, where the gatekeeper is an archfey who is called only The Keeper of the Jungle Gate (she/her).

In the library basement, there is at least one small guest suite, and Librarian Nerion takes the party to it, knocks, and lets them in. Inside, they are introduced to Vylaya (they/them, devil) and Hiscaris (he/him, fey), and their tale goes thus:

Vylaya is a courier for the House of the Traitor, a powerful family in Jungle politics. Hiscaris is a handmaid of the Keeper of the Jungle Gate. Both of them are bound in service by contractual agreements to those powerful forces. However, the Jungle Gate is labyrinthine, almost impossible to travel through without aid, and as a courier, Vylaya travels through it often. In that capacity, she met Hiscaris, and the two of them fell in love. And, as impetuous young people do, they decided they couldn’t wait the endless years to work out the remainder of their contracts, and they’ve eloped.

The party, doing their best to hide their contempt for this level of dipshittery and poor planning, does offer their aid in helping the young lovers to break their contracts. Hiscaris’s contract has a loophole where he can be released if he brings replacements for various services he does for the Keeper (things like a sweet voice lifted in song and counsel on dark days). Vylaya’s contract is stricter, and their release calls for pain and surety that the House of the Traitor’s secrets will remain secret. Since the two of them can’t move freely without being found by those hunting them, the party is going to act as their agents, searching for and making the components that will get them out of their contracts, with them helping as much as they can.

They spend a solid half of their spring break finding and making items. Moryë makes a weighted blanket from fine silk, they all convince some polyamorous purple wrens to go live in the Jungle Gate, they meet a professor of the university who makes miniature strandbeests (and in the process also meet a professor of the university who is also a building of the university), and so on and so forth. Hiscaris and Vylaya spend a good amount of that time off on their own quest to the Pit Gate. It was decided that the best way for Vylaya to keep their employers’ secrets is something called Stitchtongue, a very specific form of magic very few people know how to practice anymore. It binds someone to keep them from speaking of certain things through a tattoo made on their tongue. The Keeper of the Pit Gate, a renowned seer, is a practitioner, since some people want surety they’ll never speak of what they learn. Hiscaris and Vylaya are given, as price for the Stitchtongue, a quest by the Gatekeeper (though they don’t share what this quest is).

When all the items are collected, Xanthilisia brokers a meeting involving the young lovers, the House of the Traitor, and the Keeper of the Jungle Gate. The meeting is awkward, and the representative of the House of the Traitor in particular is less than pleased about being there, but they accept all the items and release the young dipshits lovers from their contracts. Hiscaris and Vylaya thank the party warmly and pay them in favors offered (though the party has little intention of taking them up on that) before they leave for the perilous quest the Keeper of the Pit Gate gave to them.

Chad, Erzsi, and Moryë, with great relief, spend the rest of their spring break on the beach.

Back on campus, the last semester of college keeps passing faster than anyone would like. Mali gets into a sci comm grad program in Telcontëar and starts preparing for that. Chad, after some debate, takes a job there in emergency dispatch, figuring there’s not much that’s going to faze him at this point. Moryë keeps preparing for a year at Talltrees, which is the right choice for him for many reasons even though the separation is deeply upsetting to the whole party. Erzsi, with her future decided to at least some extent, focuses her attention on continuing to translate her aunt’s diary. All of them together search for a house for rent down in Telcontëar, and find a three-bedroom (Erzsi and Moryë, they decide, can share when Moryë gets back, until they decide what comes next) in a quiet neighborhood that will suit them well.

Only two particularly interesting things happen before graduation. First is that the party receives another invitation to Etantillian’s summer solstice party, the same one where they committed a heist last year. They decide, after some debate, to attend, if only so they can both look not guilty for last year and find out if anybody suspects them. Second, right before a cheerleading competition, the mascot suit for the UKB Axe-Beaks gets possessed by a demon and runs away with the suit and the man wearing the costume inside it. The party hunts the suit down, with help from a cheerleader who jumps on the back of the car to join in the chase, and Erzsi discovers an Abyssal rune on the suit’s foot and erases it to get rid of the demon. (It turns out that the cheerleading competition was against a squad called the Abyssals, and what was supposed to be a prank with a neutral pseudo-demonic sigil went very wrong when they drew the sigil wrong and it turned out to be real.)

The cheerleader from the chase, Exoliana Hiersai (she/her, human), turns out to be an enthusiastic chatterbox freshman. The party, thinking that the other underclassmen they’ve adopted (Tashkai, Gwirilind, and Avmary) need both a tank and someone to make them take themselves a little less seriously, introduce them.

Underclassman matchmaking aside, graduation is approaching. The party invites their loved ones (Erzsi invites Ninki, Bountiful, Mr. Gedeon her childhood librarian, and her mother Sarolt, very much in that order. Mali has two relatives in from the Underdark, Chad has his mother and Elsbeth, and they both give their extra passes so Moryë can invite as much of the Greencote as possible (as well as Heal-All) with their limited passes—though Erzsi takes one of the extra passes to invite a member of the Greencote as well, Nairëlinda (she/her, sky elf), one of Moryë’s guardians who has unofficially adopted Erzsi) and prepares to walk, hoping their luck holds.

Obviously, it doesn’t.

The graduation speaker is a silver dragon and a scientist, and he’s giving a fairly boring speech when he abruptly interrupts himself, turns to dragon form, activates a spell, and eats the university president before starting to use a breath weapon attack. The spell activates runes under the seats where the graduates are sitting, and the party, scattered alphabetically throughout the sports field where graduation is happening, starts running.

The battle that follows is brutal, and largely only survivable because Ninki joins the fray. Some graduates and audience members are killed, but far fewer than there could be, as Erzsi and Ninki take to the sky, Chad and Elsbeth jump up on the dragon as he tries to take off and try to hold on, and Moryë tries to manage things from the ground and heal as much as he can. Mali, in the audience, steps up as well, directing people safely off the stands and out of the danger zone of the runes (while Khainan, Bountiful, and some others try to blast the runes away and deactivate them), and finds himself taking a level of bard when he never expected any adventuring levels at all.

When the dragon falls from the sky, he lands directly on Moryë, barely stopping short of knocking them out and terrifying his party members, friends, and family. Luckily, there are people around more than willing to heal up Moryë and anyone else who was hurt (though sorting out reviving at least some of the dead will be a longer-term issue, especially with the university president too digested for Resurrection to work), and the party gets to cling to each other, their families, and Mali, who gets extra fussing-over for accidentally gaining a level of bard.

There are no immediate answers for why the dragon attacked, but they’ll hear some weeks later from Dr. Rakahln, the head of the Arcane Studies department and their collective favorite professor, that the runes were a more sophisticated and powerful version of what Erevan intended to do to Chad way back in freshman year: anyone who died on the runes would have their power and potential filtered and brought into the dragon’s control. He seemed to be planning to create a demiplane, and also was convinced that there might be less magic available to the Prime Material Plane soon and wanted to stockpile some (in the least ethical possible way).

In the meantime, though, the party, Mali, and their invited guests all go out for a somewhat traumatized lunch. Sarolt fails to impress anyone by needing her emotions managed the whole time, including by Erzsi and by Nairëlinda, who would quite like to have a breakdown herself. Still, they all pull it together and get some graduation gifts. Erzsi gets a Briefcase of Holding from NASA, since the Portable Hole isn’t all that convenient, and Mali gets a first edition copy of his favorite book, The Seas of Tierne.

Moryë might get some graduation gifts, but also gives one: after a great deal of thought, they’ve chosen what name he wants to give the God of Getting This Motherfucker Up: Síranyailë, meaning “the river, wandering,” a name acknowledging the way the god is growing and changing and learning. In return, the god shows them the physical form they’ve been working on in a dream, though for their voice they use a chorus of their saints, still trying to figure that out. The dream takes place at sea, and there’s the smell of smoke on the air and the haze of it on the horizon: the god admits that they’ve been smelling smoke for a while now, but haven’t yet found where the fire is, before waking Moryë up.

Moryë and Erzsi are at the Greencote for a night or two before they head to Telcontëar, and Chad’s with his mother Nencia. Mali is with his father and grandmother in a hotel in Haewood, near the Greencote, and while looking at his new first edition copy of his favorite book, he finds something startling. Under the dust jacket, stamped and gilded, is a character that looks abstract at first, until he looks at it long enough to realize he’s almost sure it’s a character from the alien language Erzsi is just starting to become fluent in.

He sends Erzsi a picture, waking her up with the excitement, and she confirms that it’s from the language, and what it means. There, on the front cover of every first edition copy of The Seas of Tierne, someone who speaks Aniel’s language has written find.

Chapter Text

Almost as soon as they’re settled in Telcontëar (and nesting like anything, buying all sorts of furniture), the Affirmative Friends (and Mali) start doing research into The Seas of Tierne, now that it’s become clear that the book series has something to do with Aniel’s people, especially shocking given they were published well before Aniel crash-landed in Sauria and yet well after another ship crashed near Desophri’s temple. The author, Laerel Aneisatos (she/her, water genasi and elvish lineage), lived on the Elemental Plane of Water but traveled extensively, and the party talks to one of the foremost scholars of her work trying to puzzle out references and any other clues, though there are few. Most relevantly, in the third edition, a proverb was added to the book and then removed in every subsequent edition, saying “if the time isn’t right, the stones must be.” There’s also a passage in a later book in the trilogy that implies that some characters go into the space in between planes where the party went looking for Hazrebel/Joy’s saints in the Tidegrove adventure, which intrigues everyone.

The scholar is also in the same area where Kalin Dimar, clergy of Síranyailë and epidemiologist, lives, and Moryë has lunch with him, where they discuss naming the god and the fact that they’re still figuring out things like preferences. Kalin Dimar assimilates the information of the god being far more of a person than he previously assumed and immediately starts planning to make a spreadsheet of what kinds of offerings the god likes best.

Meanwhile, NASA is preparing its first space mission, where four crew members, including the next most senior warlock to Erzsi, her friend Gashak, are going to spend a month in orbit running experiments. NASA throws them a party, where the Affirmative Friends meets those on the crew they don’t know (and most relevantly meets Irsunat (he/him, dragon), captain of the mission, a member of Clan Sinamaya, who work with NASA thanks to Erzsi being one of those to rescue a child of the clan way back in the party’s freshman year), and a few days later, with the whole world watching, the crew launches and goes up into orbit.

Things don’t go wrong then, as you might expect. They go wrong about two days later, when Ninki Sends to Erzsi telling her to be ready in ten minutes and asking if she could possibly bring Moryë. They proceed to fly across the city and give a brief explanation: a wild portal from the Elemental Plane of Fire opened up too close to the shuttle to dodge and blew a hole in the ship with magma. Ninki is going up there on a rescue mission, and wants Moryë as a healer and Erzsi as a very powerful spellcaster (she’s surpassed even Bountiful these days) who can cast Teleportation Circle as an evacuation method to be there.

They agree, and take off right away. Ninki has protection on them to prevent anything bad from happening as they go up through the atmosphere and into near-earth orbit, where they eventually manage to intercept the shuttle, with a big hole in the bridge. They get on the ship immediately, relieved to find it still mostly pressurized, and start enacting rescues, looking for the crew members while Ninki tries to get control back of the ship in order to land it safely. The pilot and the engineer are badly injured but brought in easily enough once the engineer is found in an airlock. Gashak and Irsunat, however, are less lucky. Gashak bleeds out just as Erzsi finds them, and Irsunat, in a moment of instinct that saved not just his life but the life of the pilot, Yselia (she/her, human), switched to dragon form and threw his wing over the hole in the front window of the bridge, which is now badly injured. Ninki seals the bridge off again and Moryë saves Irsunat and runs to Gashak in time to cast Revivify, bringing them back just in time for Erzsi to open a Teleportation Circle back to Telcontëar.

The crew is immediately rushed to the hospital for more healing than Moryë could give them, and Erzsi goes with Gashak, since Ninki is still landing the ship, and keeps watch over them until their girlfriend Mariel comes. Mariel, as soon as Gashak is awake, blurts out an awkward proposal before remembering Erzsi is in the room and everything gets awkward. (Erzsi leaves the room and doesn’t hear Gashak’s answer, so there’s no way of knowing if they’re engaged or not, though they do move in with each other officially that summer after a few years of maintaining separate apartments but spending almost every night together.)

Bountiful, shaken by this setback, wants to use this opportunity to change plans on the ship they’re building, make it less for exploration and more for getting to Ninki’s star, where they assume the ritual to make a new solar will need to be performed. She proposes that they make a major magic item, a sort of wormhole drill to attach to the ship that would allow it to teleport, and starts looking into options for making that happen, and what ingredients such a powerful magic item would need.

Gashak, while in recovery for their severe injuries, starts looking into Chad’s childhood friend, who disappeared and all records of whom are now lost. When they start digging, though, it’s hard to stop digging, because what they find is that the memory gap that everyone but Chad has about Tiff, in combination with records about her and her parents being corrupted, tracks with a group commonly known as the Blank Assassins. They carry out jobs all over the world and possibly the planar system, but nobody can remember them—not their faces, not their names, not conversations with them. Any physical or digital records of their names and appearances become corrupted, and when people look into them, they can easily end up in trouble. The only real anomaly is that Chad remembers Tiff at all, if she’s somehow involved with these people.

There isn’t much to be done about that at the moment, though, and summer solstice is coming ever closer, bringing Etantillian’s party and Moryë’s departure for their year with Heal-All ever closer. The team decides to concentrate more on the former than the latter by planning out their outfits, and eventually the day comes and they pack up, returning to the gate and leaving Mali back at home in Telcontëar.

In the Tundra Gate, they’re given the same lavish suite and settle into the party with much less stress this year, now that they don’t have to steal anything. They take a train tour of the demiplane, enjoy some music and activities, and go to the big gala. Famous pop star Telora Quickfoot (she/her, half-elf) ^10-1 is there and flirts with Erzsi, and they see Lanasophria again, and ask him about Laerel Aneisatos and the scene in her books about the space between planes to see if he’s familiar with it, since the scene contained a hooded figure that reminded them of him. It doesn’t ring a bell for him, but he offers to look into the matter.

Erzsi also has a moment of alarm, far less pleasant than being flirted with by a pop star: she finds, at the end of a dance, that she doesn’t remember any of it. Not the conversation, not the face of her partner, none of it. There’s a Blank Assassin at the party.

The Affirmative Friends are on high alert, and get nervous when Etantillian’s assistant approaches and says that Etantillian would like to invite them on a tour of his vault. However, Etantillian doesn’t seem suspicious of them in the least—they’re just important enough now to merit a tour, where they do a decent job of pretending they’re seeing things for the first time with a few other luminaries before returning to the party and the dancing.

It’s perhaps an hour later when Mardia, Etantillian’s niece, comes to bring a terrible announcement to the party: her uncle has been murdered in his vault, by some kind of poison gas. The party immediately melts down into fear and paranoia, until someone takes charge: Rurehi, Keeper of the Scree Gate (they/them, sphinx). Rurehi starts asking questions, and almost immediately gets on the party’s bad side during their introduction, but after they push back, Rurehi pivots and adopts them into the investigation.

At Rurehi’s side, they start unearthing secrets as the gala ends but everyone is asked to stay. Zone of Truth helps to clear many people, but discoveries are made. One of the security guards was having an on-shift tryst with an archdevil, and Mardia is induced to explain why she was stealing something from her uncle’s own vault last year—it was a silver torc, an artifact from the Jungle That Thirsts said to have belonged to a member of the Eight, and when it was stolen it led to bad blood between two political groups in the Jungle that are always at odds anyway, and she returned it discreetly to curry favor in hopes of someday replacing her uncle, something that will now never happen because she’s too young and she’ll probably be too old by the time the next one is chosen.

They also can’t quite dig secrets out of Tenzey, Abbot of the Monastery of the Future (they/them, devil), who had no love for Etantillian, who was known to restrict access to the Tundra for people he considered unimportant when the monastery’s policy is that everyone has the right to think on their future.

In the end, the investigation concludes that the Blank Assassin (who attended as the guest of a politician from the Prime Material Plane, discovered when the assassin presumably leaves and the politician discovers months of patchy memory) committed the murder, but there’s no way of knowing who hired them, at least not yet. On that somewhat unsatisfying note, the investigation concludes, and the Affirmative Friends are released from duty with Rurehi’s thanks.

Back in Telcontëar, Erzsi, Chad, and Mali prepare to say goodbye to Moryë, something nobody is happy about. Moryë asks Mali to do his braids the day he leaves (something that is an important show of trust and affection in sky elf culture) and then gives all three of their closest companions something to think about: knowing Erzsi doesn’t want to spend her whole life in space like she initially thought, knowing Chad and Moryë are willing to join her there for perhaps a few years but not forever, why not consider the Greencote? The people there care about all of them for their own sakes, not just Moryë's, and they’d be welcome to start that process someday, if they like. Moryë asks them to think about it, and goes to Talltrees for the next year, with only rare visits planned.

^1-1 Yes, referring to exactly who you think that refers to. There’s also a boy band called the Compass Points and who could forget up-and-coming halfling pop star Tempell Palomino? ^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

Moryë arrives in Talltrees and starts settling in right away. They have a serious talk with Heal-All about sainthood, its trials and its joys, with both of them finally admitting that odds are high Moryë is on the path to sainthood and should prepare for that (Heal-All, who was traumatized by gaining sainthood and has struggled frequently since, is terrified by proxy of the prospect, but Moryë, who treats the god as a beloved friend, is taking it seriously but almost excited).

Around the same time, some more information about Etantillian’s murder comes to light: a body was found in the chamber of the governing body in the Tundra, a dragonborn man nobody recognized, with a letter. The letter admits to the Gatekeeper’s murder and explains that this man has died because the job was not an official one and he thus violated the laws of his organization. As soon as she finds out about this, Erzsi remembers her dance with the dragonborn man, no longer erased from her memory, and they hear that the government official who brought him along also now remembers those few months, though there are no clues in either to what might have been going on.

Moryë also has a surprising and concerning conversation with one of the residents of Talltrees, Stranger, who has been there since the last time the party visited Talltrees and is only just preparing to leave and rejoin the world. She’s heard about the Blank Assassins now, since this is very much in the news, and explains to Moryë that she’s at an arcane trauma recovery center because she lost a year and a half of memories to a Blank Assassin who her diary assures her she was very much in love with, and who at least in the diary seemed to love her as well. She gives Moryë what little information she has before she goes.

All of this, however, is very quickly eclipsed by one conversation between Mali and Erzsi, in which Mali, who’s been sitting and stewing for a few weeks on Moryë's parting words, can’t help blurting out “You get that Moryë basically proposed to us, right?” What follows is an utter and complete meltdown on everybody’s parts, with Moryë at a distance so it’s even harder to communicate.

It is, at least in part, a cultural misunderstanding. Cave elves don’t have communes like sky elves do, and don’t quite understand the family structure, which is quite distinct from a polycule (sky elves are likely to have romantic and sexual relationships of varying lengths within or without the commune), so when Mali heard “Live in my household and be part of my family,” he was thinking more of cave elf traditions, where that certainly would be a proposal, so he’s embarrassed and still confused, while also having set off the dominoes of Erzsi realizing her romantic feelings for all three of them, and Moryë’s years-ago quiet admission that they can have him in any way they want (which has now been expanded to include Mali) is being examined in new lights, and the whole thing is a mess.

(Also multiple calls are made to Lilly and Elsbeth for some outside-the-situation friendly sympathy, wherein Lilly admits to pining for Elsbeth and Elsbeth says she’s pretty sure she’d know if someone was in love with her. That whole situation is going so well.)

Erzsi continues to fear making life-changing decisions, always worrying she’ll jump the wrong way and worrying that changing her relationship to her most beloved people means she might lose them when she still has fears that she’s fundamentally unlikable. Moryë has a panic attack about having to manage everyone’s emotions long-distance and how a serious offer kindly meant has led to such a misunderstanding. Chad wants to commit in both romantic and familial ways but loves his mother too much to not have some mixed feelings about legally declaring primary kin ties to a different family. And Mali is grappling both with the possibility of letting go of the Underdark not just for a few more years but for the rest of his life and with the inevitable heartbreak of a romantic relationship where two members are elvish and two are human.

However, they all want to try a romantic relationship together, but don’t want to start anything while Moryë is gone and can’t take equal part (though Erzsi is wildly impatient about this), so they settle on improving their communication, starting to compile information on their respective cultural courtship traditions so there are less likely to be future misunderstandings, and talking with a few members of the Greencote so that they have more of an understanding of that and the ways joining the commune would be distinct from having a romantic relationship.

In between all of this, as they start hashing out terms, the party has a few solo adventures. Erzsi gets invited on a backstage pass at Telora Quickfoot’s concert in Telcontëar, where Telora’s opening act turns out to be a trio of sirens who believe that Telora is the reincarnation of their long-lost queen and whose attempts to “bring back her memories” nearly kill her. Erzsi enacts a daring rescue and then gets to spend the night with a popstar.

Meanwhile, Moryë gets a call from Gwirilind, on her summer break, who’s visiting the area where she lived as a child and looking into the ruins of her own town, which was leveled in a terrible tornado and which now, according to local legend, is haunted. Moryë goes with her and finds an emergency room full of shades (imprints of people’s actions more than their actual conscious selves) reliving the last two hours before the tornado hit and they all died: people hurt and looking for help, doctors trying their best to save patients, and so on. There’s also a guardian ghost there, who watches in surprise while Moryë and Gwirilind kindly and compassionately lay the shades to rest, and then considering them worthy, tells them that there’s an amulet hidden in a statue in the emergency room that casts Spare the Dying on anyone near enough who needs it (though it only works per person once a day). The three of them fight the statue to free the amulet, and Moryë and Gwirilind send it to Abis Eretu on her hospital ship, the Sunfish.

Chad, running around the park, finds a colony of ants that has gained sapience and is trying to take over the world (not very effectively. They are ants). This problem is neatly solved by removing the Headband of Intelligence that somehow ended up in the ant colony, but the megalomaniac ants will haunt Chad for months to come.

Two things also happen, in this span of time, involving Heal-All. The first is that Heal-All chooses his name for the god, the second of the four current chosen to do so (the god continues to waffle on a fifth person, and though they briefly considered Gwirilind they can’t seem to settle for sure). His choice is going to raise eyebrows in the temple to say the least: he’s chosen the name Tanji, which in Gnomish translates to “motherfucker,” ^11-1 a pointed choice to remind the god that they’re a person too, in need of care as much as the others their domain covers. Also around this time, Moryë decides to give Heal-All a gift thanking him for his mentorship and asks Síranyailë (the name they use most often at the moment, since it was their first) for any advice. Síranyailë shows Heal-All walking on a private path he favors, where he’s recently had trouble crossing a stream he used to be able to do handily, and Moryë (and then Síranyailë, and then Heal-All) is mortified at the violation of Heal-All’s privacy but takes the point and, with Heal-All’s permission, begins building a bridge.

When things start to settle a little bit, come autumn, when everyone is digging in and Erzsi has had a visit with Nairëlinda, a guardian with the Greencote who has determined to adopt her and give her some less complicated maternal affection than the kind Erzsi gets from Sarolt, the party gets a call from Jalkivri, the powerful dragon they did the heist for. A friend of hers, she says, has urgent need of some help, and since she’s realized since the first job she hired them for that they’re better suited to being a battering ram than doing subtle work, she asks them for help, and when they agree and Moryë travels in to Telcontëar, she introduces them to her friend.

Samsabi (she/her, white dragon), a scattered and anxious person, is in severe distress. The primary curator of her hoard, a major concert hall and music museum across the sea, is on the Elemental Plane of Air visiting with a merchant house there to negotiate for a musical artifact. However, that house is in conflict with another merchant house and the conflict has now reached a boiling point. Her curator is under siege at House Shoforanou with the family, and House Roudanori is not inclined to let her go by peacefully. She entreats the party to break her out and promises to pay them anything they ask.

The party takes on the job and immediately gets ready to travel, leaving Mali anxious behind them as they go to the Elemental Plane of Air and the city of Rinazy, where the newspapers are reporting on the feud and its sudden escalation. They rent an airship and fly out towards House Shoforanou, though along the way they are attacked by some bird-like elementals who nearly knock Erzsi out of the sky before they’re subdued.

When they reach House Shoforanou’s landholdings, they find them largely deserted. The house, when they reach it, is boarded up, and the siege must be real, but air elementals can easily look like part of the air if they want to, so they can’t see what kind of force they might be facing. A phone conversation with Samsabi’s curator and the head of House Shoforanou don’t really help. They scout around, trying to be stealthy, but eventually are confronted by Cherzivehi (he/him, air elemental), a member of House Roudanori and head of the besieging force.

After some posturing and an attempt to recruit them, he answers their questions about the origin of the feud. Ten years ago, a son of House Roudanori and a servant of House Shoforanou were rivals for a trading cargo at an auction (both houses deal primarily in textiles). The son (Cherzivehi’s nephew) grew hot-headed and eventually challenged the servant, Imiyadeh (he/him, air genasi), to a duel. Imiyadeh, against the odds since he hadn’t been trained in the sword since childhood, won the duel, killing his opponent, whose spirit refuses Resurrection as long as his killer lives. House Roudanori has long claimed dishonorable conduct and deliberate murder, and has grown incensed with House Shoforanou for protecting Imiyadeh.

The party is beyond impatient with this Shakespearean nonsense, and retreat briefly to consider options, before trying something they know going in might not work. If Imiyadeh swears under Zone of Truth that he didn’t kill deliberately, in sight of witnesses of both houses, will Cherzivehi believe him?

Cherzivehi says yes, but that’s a difficulty, because nobody present can actually cast it. Moryë, though, has a plan, or at least a hope, encouraged by Erzsi and Chad, and reaches out to Síranyailë, asking if there’s a way they can be allowed to cast Zone of Truth. And somehow rolls a natural 20 on this request, and thus gains an answer: Síranyailë can do this, but Moryë is going to be exposed to a large amount of divine power in the process, the kind that can’t be taken back. Essentially, if Moryë truly wants to do this, Moryë is going to become a saint.

Moryë, who expected sainthood but not quite this soon, agrees nonetheless to prevent the useless bloodshed, and takes the extra magic on before calling Imiyadeh out. Imiyadeh comes expecting to be questioned and perhaps sacrificed for the safety of his house, and instead finds a righteously angry and brightly glowing paladin with divine resonance in his voice asking questions about the duel, about Imiyadeh’s intent, about everything they can think of to get all the information across and help House Roudanori understand what happened. In the end, Imiyadeh is publicly exonerated and Cherzivehi leads his army away, willing to end the feud in the face of incontrovertible evidence but having trouble reassessing his image of events.

Almost as soon as everything ends, Moryë passes out from the rush of divine power, and Erzsi, Chad, and Imiyadeh spring into action, bringing them inside to rest where their party members can watch over them carefully. They also call Mali, who’s terrified and helpless but agrees to call the Greencote and update them on what happened, and Heal-All, who immediately leaves to help and also gets in touch with the on-plane temple of the god at the same time to send someone to check on Moryë and affirm the sainthood.

Moryë wakes exhausted but ultimately okay, and discovers that the lingering sign of sainthood from the amount of magic he channeled is a lightning-white glow from his eyes. They were already making a name for themself, but this has put paid to any hopes he had about even temporary anonymity in the temple structure, which is going to be awkward and possibly troublesome when they finish their year at Talltrees and return to Telcontëar for two years of temple service there. Moryë’s friends fret over him, and call Mali again, who allows himself to be reassured and then says “I love you” for the first time before getting embarrassed and hanging up.

(Moryë’s text message reply is “Love you too, asshole.”)

Another night’s sleep follows, and a cleric from Síranyailë’s temple on the Plane of Air shows up to confirm the sainthood not long before Heal-All arrives and loudly fusses over his favorite mentee, checking Moryë over for lasting damage and not finding any. The party, with Heal-All along, talks with House Shoforanou, checks in on Imiyadeh (who swears to tend the shrine that’s inevitably going to be built at the site of Moryë’s sainthood, something Moryë is less than wild about but doesn’t raise any objections to out loud), and retrieves Samsabi’s curator, slightly shell-shocked, before Erzsi decides it’s smarter to take a Teleportation Circle back to Rinazy than flying back and maybe almost getting knocked out of the sky again.

The party, Heal-All, and the curator all travel together, but they barely make it ten steps into the transport center before Moryë staggers and tells Heal-All he has a thunderclap headache before collapsing with a stroke.

Emergency services take them to the hospital, where it transpires that the combination of Moryë regrowing their own brain matter less than a year ago followed by an overdose of divine magic with the sainthood lead to a stroke. The exposure to higher-level magic with the Teleportation Circle tipped them over the edge. Heal-All, Erzsi, and Síranyailë are all wretched with guilt, and Moryë gets fussed over to the point of needing to pretend he’s more okay than they really are in front of them, but after a lot of scans and some healing from some non-divine-magic users, it’s decided that there’s unlikely to be a recurrence of the emergency, though Moryë is likely to have to contend with periodic migraines.

Much sobered, they all return to the Prime Material Plane, where Moryë stays with the rest of the team and Mali in Telcontëar for a few days being fussed over before returning (with Erzsi for at least a few days) to Talltrees with a lot to think about.

^11-1 Look, there are zero attempts at anything resembling Gnomish language resources that I can see and the suggested names, the only clues we have, are all like halfling names but Zany. One does what one can. ^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

In the wake of Moryë gaining a sainthood and having a brain bleed, Erzsi follows them back to Talltrees Arcane Recovery for a few days to continue clinging to him in her worry. The two of them have a quiet time, though Sunstone, Erzsi’s pseudodragon companion, and Siltha, Moryë’s summoned steed, take a wander through the woods and have a lot of fun doing good deeds for the various denizens of the forest. Eventually, though, she has to go home and return to work at NASA, and everyone returns to their lives, still shaken by the events on the Elemental Plane of Air (though they don’t mind that as thanks, House Shoforanou sends them several bolts of fabric from the Astral Sea). They do their best to stay connected, and start sending each other a few tentative courtship gifts in their various traditions.

Moryë has a conversation with Kalin Dimar about Síranyailë’s preferences in offerings, and their fondness for fragrant herbs leads Kalin to give them their third name: Lissthelas.

In Telcontëar, a much more difficult conversation needs to happen. Since finding out that Honor has had Modify Memory cast on her, probably multiple times, the Affirmative Friends have kept it from her, since research showed it could cause damage to try to remember without medical supervision. Still, it’s been long enough, and she needs to know, especially because Heal-All and Moryë, at Talltrees, are well-equipped to help her. After a family dinner, Erzsi tells Honor and Tilda what they know, and Tilda, beating herself up for not seeing it, runs a diagnostic and discovers that it’s true.

They are also forced to confront who the most likely suspect is for who could get close enough to an experienced rogue to cast Modify Memory multiple times: her uncle, the archdevil Drekano, Minority Leader of the Assembly of the Songless City. Honor offers up a few powerful devils on his staff who could theoretically have done it, but even she doesn’t seem very sure of it. All of them agree it’s important for her to act as normal as possible, so they plan to continue with normal life until they can find a reasonable time and excuse to spend some time in the region where Talltrees is.

An opportunity presents itself almost immediately, though it’s a dangerous one. Some weeks later, Erzsi receives an invitation to an academic conference in the early spring, one on Aniel’s people and the implications the existence of aliens has on the planar system as a whole, asking her to give a panel on learning to translate the alien language. She’s honored and delighted … except for the fact that the conference is in the Songless City in the Hells, at the heart of Drekano’s domain. He’ll almost certainly be there, safely distracted, and that gives Heal-All and Moryë an opportunity to remove the Modify Memories from Honor and find out what memories have been hidden from her.

That is several months away, though, and the party finds ways to keep themselves occupied in the meantime, while they make what preparations they can (largely dropping a decent chunk of their party funds to give Mali a massive credit with the local transport center so if something dramatic happens when they’re on another plane again he can get to them instead of fretting long-distance).

Two teenage Greencotes (the relationships within the youngest generation of a commune are somewhere between sibling and cousin), Ríatinwë and Telpesanë (she/her and he/him respectively, both sky elves), come on a camping trip to the forest around Talltrees, largely to check on Moryë after the whole sainting and near death thing, and end up going through a wild portal by accident and ending up in a forest in the Feywild that’s being set on fire by an archfey trying to take it over. Moryë fights a difficult battle and picks up some burns, but saves their family and the forest both.

Erzsi and Gashak are asked to do a job for a sentient ship named the SS Harptane (it/its, construct), going to a long-abandoned sorcerer’s fortress, a formerly-sentient building made by the same defunct company that made the Harptane, and stripping it for parts so the Harptane can keep itself going longer. They go to the rotting jungle fortress and pick up a great many trinkets ^12-1 while solving a series of puzzles to get them into the building’s control room for the materials they need. Also, it turns out that one of Erzsi’s high school classmates is currently interning at the Harptane’s facility (Erzsi is pleased to see her. The classmate, who regarded Erzsi as a nemesis and her only competition for valedictorian, is less pleased, something Gashak picks up on and Erzsi doesn’t). Erzsi also finally discusses with Bountiful that she doesn’t want to spend her whole life in space, and Bountiful assures her that the plan to make a wormhole drill is going to make things much more flexible so nobody has to leave forever if they don’t want to.

Mali and Chad end up on a small adventure in a grocery store, where a fey is making mischief. Mali helps Chad capture them, but ends up punched in the face in the process and also ends up taking a second level of bard.

Eventually, the time for the conference rolls around. Erzsi takes Chad with her for backup (and is very glad that Khainan and Nexaph intend to attend the conference), and Moryë and Heal-All receive Honor and Tilda and start figuring out what the next few days will look like.

While Erzsi attends the conference, Moryë enters Honor’s mind with her so they can experience the true memories together. Even the first one is damning: Honor apparently told Drekano about the aliens, wondering what she should do about them, and he erased her memory of doing so. As they go deeper, looking at future memories, he would start asking her questions about the aliens and Aniel in the middle of an unrelated conversation where they were alone (or only with a trusted member of his staff). Questions about where they came from, about how they used magic, lots of questions she didn’t know how to answer.

Meanwhile, in between meeting someone who wants to start a Hells space program to match NASA’s and getting to do some networking, Erzsi and Chad receive a note: Erevan Inquae, the false warlock who almost killed Chad during the very first arc, is a prisoner in the city, since the Hells will often take prisoners who misuse magic to keep a close eye on them. He is, in fact, a prisoner in Lith House, the official residence of the Minority Leader of the Assembly of the Songless City—Drekano again. The note asks that they visit Lith House if they wish, so he can make amends to them.

Erzsi leaves it up to Chad, since it’s his trauma, and he decides that not knowing what Erevan wants is way worse than seeing him again. The two of them leave the conference, after making sure Drekano was engaged and warning Khainan of what they’re planning, and cross the city to meet Erevan. He’s certainly a prisoner under house arrest, but seems to have the freedom of the house, and also seems to have a plan in mind. He’s uninterested in Chad or in apologizing or explaining his actions. Instead, he focuses on Erzsi, talking around things he can’t say, and tells her, essentially, that there’s something of hers in the house, in the library, if she cares to fetch it, before he goes for a meeting with a prisoner advocate elsewhere in the house, leaving them to their own devices.

Erzsi and Chad consult again, but there’s not going to be a better opportunity than this, and Erevan implied it has something to do with the aliens, so the two of them go into the library and do their best to investigate while being as unsuspicious as possible.

At Talltrees, Moryë and Honor, going slowly and taking breaks (during one such break, Honor makes sure to tell him not to try to fight Drekano and not to let Erzsi do so either, and uses the phrase “squash her like a bug,” something that will haunt the party whenever they think about it), have reached the final modified memory: the night of Etantillian’s party, the one where the party stole the painting back. Honor and Drekano broke into the vault that night too, and while Honor remembers stealing some patents and blueprints, the true memory shows something else: pages ripped from the primer on Aniel’s language that Erzsi’s aunt Meseru wrote, with a plaque saying they were acquired from Drekano. Honor took them back and confronted her uncle, but he took the papers and made sure they were out of sight before he modified her memory. As soon as the memory ends, though, it’s obvious Drekano set a trap to keep his secrets, even if it wasn’t his first resort: Moryë and Honor fall deep into Honor’s mind, trapped there.

It’s a labyrinth of sorts, and Moryë soon realizes that the space shapes itself into what they expect to find, and encourages Honor to picture somewhere more familiar. They end up in the halls of Lith House, following paths to the basement, where they fight the embodiment of this curse: a giant beetle, one endemic to the Songless City (they make train cars out of the exoskeletons), though it does transform into Drekano at the last moment. The fight is difficult, but Honor eventually slays the curse in her mind and sends herself and Moryë back to consciousness and the treatment room at Talltrees where Heal-All and Tilda have been fighting to get them back since they went unresponsive.

Meanwhile, Erzsi and Chad lay hands on a box of materials that have to do with aliens, move things around in the cabinet where the box was stored, and put it away in the Briefcase of Holding before getting out of there as fast as they can and getting back to the conference. They arrive to the news that Moryë was briefly unconscious and non-responsive and decide to leave the conference, since the invitation to tea with Erevan came after Erzsi’s panel. They have a few panicked discussions with Khainan and Mali (already on his way to Talltrees) and Erzsi Banishes herself and Chad back to the Prime Material Plane.

It’s clear to everyone that something must be done, and after some discussions (and some relieved and tearful reunions and some screaming about how dangerous in retrospect that heist was), they decide to call on a victim advocate from the Hells to take on Honor’s Modify Memory case, so everything can be documented. Nexaph recommends an advocate and she agrees to come to the Prime Material Plane for interviews, so they meet Erascu, Compassionate Listener (she/her, devil), who interviews them all and offers them options.

After some thought, they decide to let Erascu find them some allies in the Hells quietly, since it’s no easy thing to visit consequences on an archdevil, and keep things to themselves for now, little as they like it.

The party and Mali also go through the box of materials from Drekano’s house. Sure enough, it contains Meseru’s primer (with the pages that had been ripped out Mended back in), as well as the notes that were stolen from Aniel’s ship on Sauria. There are other sundries as well: a copy of The Seas of Tierne when the party hadn’t realized anyone else had made the connection between the two, diagrams of the flow of magic across the planes, and a multicolored stone, something they already know can be a pass through a portal to reach hard-to-access or locked planes.

Funnily enough, it looks just like the one Moryë has had for years now, and an Identify from Mali confirms it: they now have two stones that will allow one person each access to the plane or demiplane sometimes called Tierne.

They don’t yet know why Drekano is seeking it, or what he knows, but they all return to the last few months of their year apart from Moryë looking over their shoulders and waiting for disaster to strike.

^12-1 For anyone who has been wondering about the pet name “mouse” among the more traditional ones in the porn we’ve all been writing, this adventure is the origin! One of the trinkets Erzsi finds is a beautifully carved stone mouse, which she gives to Mali while making it very clear that it is a romantic gift. They’ve all been very careful at saying what’s romantic and what’s platonic, largely at Erzsi’s request, so there are no further cultural misunderstandings. ^{return to text ↩}

Chapter Text

To everyone’s relief, not much happens before Moryë returns to Telcontëar. Maliconar finishes the first year of his two-year sci comm graduate program, Erzsi and Chad are settled in at their workplaces, and Moryë continues to enjoy Heal-All’s mentorship. They all do their best to court each other kindly and honestly while waiting for Moryë’s return to start a romantic relationship, something that makes all of them (but especially Erzsi) impatient. There’s no word on Drekano, but they know that Erascu, the victim advocate from the Hells, will tell them if she needs anything to continue her work.

Only one thing changes: only a week or two before Moryë is due to return for the summer solstice, the party finally registers with an adventuring union, which means that instead of defaulting to calling themselves the Affirmative Friends or the Affirmative Friends Groupchat, they have a more official name that’s perhaps less likely to make people dismiss them: The Third Option, since when they’re presented with two they tend to choose neither.

They don’t take any jobs right away, though, because the summer solstice arrives and so does Moryë, and the four of them proceed to have so much sex in every possible combination. Everyone goes to work (Mali at a summer internship for a local state park, and Moryë settling in at the biggest temple to Síranyailë in Telcontëar, where nobody knows quite how to handle having a saint around but where luckily Moryë gets to spend a lot of time seconded to local emergency rooms to handle incoming urgent cases), but other than that, no adventuring gets done over the summer as the four of them all find new ways to love each other and also fill out a kink spreadsheet.

This delightful idyll is interrupted after a nice long time of calm, something like two and a half months, and for once, it’s interrupted when Bountiful asks the Third Option to come in for a meeting. This isn’t an emergency mission, but rather a planned series of them. Bountiful and the rest of the arcane research team (Gashak included) have been figuring out what magic item ingredients are needed to make the wormhole drill that should allow them to get to Ninki’s star, and one of the ingredients seems suited to the Third Option’s skillset and social and professional network.

In short, Bountiful needs a gift given by each Gatekeeper of the Nine Hells, specifically as thanks for a quest undertaken at the request of those questing. Since the Third Option have been looking for a bit of an excuse to explore the Hells in more depth, they don’t mind, and start planning their first foray.

First, though, they have another connection to build in the Hells: they have been invited to the investiture of the new Keeper of the Tundra Gate, the replacement of Etantillian, murdered more than a year ago now. They receive invitations, since they were of material assistance in the investigation into Etantillian’s death, and they decide to go.

The plane, and the party’s attendants, are very different places without Etantillian. The new Gatekeeper has wasted no time reducing the size of the guesthouses and has completely torn down Etantillian’s opulent mansion and begun returning his vast hoard of frequently-magpied treasure to their appropriate homes. Her name is Eulinaran, Hope of the Fallen Moon (she/her, storm giant), and she’s a druid and walker between planes who gained her title from saving a lunar (embodied spirit of a moon somewhere in the universe, the same way solars and planetars work here) who had been taken prisoner by Abyss demons. The lunar, Sielah, Fallen Moon (she/her, lunar and bard), is now her ward, and is essentially an irrepressible teen delighted to meet the Third Option.

The rest of the party is much more official and sober than those Etantillian ever threw—guests are there more due to political or ritual significance than due to being famous or interesting. The investiture itself is a massive circle casting led by three of the Gatekeepers, including Rurehi, Keeper of the Scree Gate, the sphinx who led the investigation into Etantillian’s murder.

After meeting Eulinaran and paying their respects to the other Gatekeepers, the Third Option returns home and starts planning their first trip, eventually settling on going to the Jungle That Thirsts, largely because going to that gate gives them the excuse to visit Lilly, and to bring Mali with them to spend a weekend on the beach before they send him home and go on their more dangerous quest. Xanthilisia is much more enjoyable than last time, with no star-crossed lovers to aid, although Lilly has acquired a girlfriend and none of them exactly think that’s a great idea given how recently she’s been pining out loud about how hot Elsbeth is.

The portal to the Jungle Gate is in the library at Xanthilisia University, as the party discovered before, so once they’ve spent some time with Lilly and sent Maliconar back home to Telcontëar, they step through the portal and into the humid forest of the Jungle Gate. They’ve been warned it’s almost impossible to navigate without help, but that the Keeper likes it when people make an honest try at it, so they strike off and end up frustrated by a river that goes in a circle and a maze of a forest with few animal tracks. Eventually, though, they notice an iridescent purple wren flying over them—and realize that three such wrens were one of the gifts given to the Keeper of the Jungle Gate ^13-1 to release Hiscaris from his contract. They follow the bird, and soon after are found by one of the Keeper’s handmaids, a young fey who conducts them to the Keeper.

The Keeper asks them questions about the reason for their quests (though she’s been warned, because they warned Rurehi that they would be making the rounds of Gatekeepers), and seems very interested in the wormhole drill’s construction. She also advises them some on etiquette, that information is currency anywhere but especially in the Hells, and that if they tailor the information they share to the person they share it with, so much the better—for instance, since the Jungle That Thirsts is the Hell focused on transmutation magic, information about this massive magic item they’re creating could come in handy.

They take her advice and ask her for a quest. After some thought, the Keeper tells them that in the town of Zechorial, also known as the Town of Secrets ^13-2 , there seem to be some infrastructure problems in one part of town. Basements are flooding, foundations are cracking, and no one has yet found the cause. The Keeper sends them to find the cause and deal with it if they can.

The Third Option follows the lady’s handmaid (one of three, as it turns out) to the portal to the Jungle proper and go through, finding themselves in a small clearing with maps and a few shrines, but with no people or guards to greet them. They don’t linger long, but travel through the forest, the day or so’s hike it takes to get to Zechorial, enjoying the brightly colored flora and fauna of the area and the sweetrise trees, a known local source of clean and sweet hydration that mean people tend to travel around with spiles to drink from them directly.

In Zechorial, they find their way to the mayor’s office, and he reiterates the problem the Keeper put before them: part of the town appears to be sinking for no known cause, and it’s even put some cracks in the town wall. They’ve done some scans, but those aren’t always reliable in places as magic-soaked as the Hells, and the best they can tell is that some kind of sinkhole might be opening up.

The Third Option, after getting used to the town (and doing a bit of shopping—for the record, you can assume that Moryë is getting jewelry in every Hell, Erzsi is getting fabric or clothing, and they’re all looking for quintessential products made by local artisans in general), goes to the neighborhood that’s sinking and talks to a few people—a shop owner, the head of the neighborhood watch, a local historian, and a woodworker. They can confirm timeline (not very long, most of them tie it back to the return of a silver torc that belonged to one of the Eight, which you may recall was stolen from Zechorial by Etantillian and stolen from him by his niece Mardia, who returned it in secret) and effects, but don’t have many theories about reasons, other than the local historian (Orzojas, Keeper of Ancient Records (he/him, devil)) mentioning that there are rumors of a treasure buried down there from when a thieves’ guild used to operate out of the area.

With nothing else for it, the Third Option goes to the city walls and finds a minimally invasive way into the hole outside the city gates—only to immediately discover this is no natural hole. Instead, it’s a systematically dug out series of chambers and tunnels, and not only that, there are frequently traps in them, not to mention the kinds of beasts that move into any unattended dungeon. The worst of each sort are an earthquake trap that takes Chad down more than half his hit points in just a few seconds and a many-legged lizard that, in dim light, is invisible to those with darkvision, which meant Moryë had a fairly terrible time there.

There’s one chamber, though, that’s blocked off with plywood from all sides, and eventually everywhere else is cleared. When they go in, there are two golem-like creatures in there, guardians made of mud and stone and bone and fossil, which immediately attack the party and give Erzsi especially a very difficult fight before they are eventually defeated. When they dig in that room, they find the box of treasure, though they can’t open it—it seems to open with a very particular key that looks much like the shape of the newly-returned silver torc. Someone’s been treasure hunting.

When they turn back and leave the dungeon, they discovered a hidden door they missed the first time near the entrance—and discover that it goes up into someone’s basement. Goes up, in fact, into Orzojas’s basement. It turns out he’s been interested in the treasure both for the money and for the historical significance for a long time, and didn’t mind almost causing a large-scale disaster in his hunt for it, now that the key to the box had been returned. The party, particularly Moryë (since the Greencote focuses so much on urban infrastructure and thus they know things about settlement rates) are absolutely disgusted with this, and help to oversee large-scale evacuation of the neighborhood until the hole has been safely filled in, receiving thanks and small gifts from several locals.

The Keeper, when they return to her (and are once more escorted to her presence by one of her handmaids), is interested and impressed by the story, and gives them a gift—one of the lanterns that her handmaids use to navigate her perpetually-dim domain. She wishes them the best in their quests and sends them off with escort. At the portal, the handmaid gives them another gift, one just for them: a small circle made up of the feathers of the purple wrens, which she says can’t be called on but will grant its bearer luck once and once only.

The party goes back to Xanthilisia, has one last lunch with Lilly, and returns to Telcontëar and Mali for the next month or so, until the next time Moryë and Chad can get enough time off work.

After some debate, the party decides to go to the Pit of Endless Tracks next, because they got the information on where the gate on the Prime Material Plane is—it’s in the Archipelago, the group of floating islands where they spent their first spring break and fought a giant crab. Happily, it’s also near Clan Sinamaya, a clan of dragons they have good relations with, and they stay there for a night before heading over and meet some clan elders (and also stop by a member of the Greencote living away on their way, to help Erzsi and Chad continue to grapple with the possibility-becoming-probability of joining the Greencote themselves someday) and have an excellent banquet.

When they get to the portal to the Pit Gate, it’s a black hole in the center of a small island, and all there really is to do is climb down or jump, and they pick climbing, and get down with little trouble, into a somewhat claustrophobic tunnel, and then into the cavern that seems to comprise almost the whole of this tiny demi-plane. They find a side chamber by the sound of voices, and catch a devil on his way out, though it’s dark enough that they don’t see much of him.

In the side chamber waits the Keeper of the Pit Gate (they/them, devil), a seer who gave up name and identity upon choosing to become a Gatekeeper, an ancient personage with skin so thin and near-transparent that you can see the viscera through it. They offer the party a cold collation and seem mildly confused and intrigued by the party’s complete lack of interest in their skills as a seer.

After some consideration, they offer a puzzle: a few years ago, there was repair work being done in the plaza that’s central to the Pit of Endless Tracks, and they dug up a box that nobody’s been able to open since, with no clues about what’s in it. The Keeper requests that they go to the Tower of Memory at the center of the Pit, where many rituals are done and where the box is kept, and open it.

Quest given, the party goes through the portal and into the Pit of Endless Tracks, a city carved into the walls of a massive pit, with a tower at the center that was also carved out of the pit, with the tower surrounded by a plaza. They enjoy traveling across the city and reach the tower in good time—only to discover that there’s a picket line in front of it. The workers of the sixth floor of the tower, which largely does blood rituals, are on strike against their boss, Aekax, Custodian of the Sixth Floor (he/him, archdevil).

A quick bit of research says that since they’re going to a different floor, the second, they could theoretically go inside without crossing the picket line, but they’re all far too class conscious to do that. Instead, they let their contact inside the tower know they’ll be in when the strike is over and ask the strike leaders what they can do. They’re introduced to Orderly, Worker of the Sixth Floor (she/her, devil) and Enqua, Striking Worker (he/him, devil) ^13-3, who are happy to put them to work.

Moryë goes to a temple of Síranyailë in the Pit, where a junior cleric is happy to pledge the temple’s aid and start passing word around to other local temples, and where Moryë updates their Hells title from “Beloved of Their God” to “Beloved Saint of Síranyailë.” After that, which certainly lights a fire under the Pit’s religious community, the party joins the strike for a day or two, while Aekax makes concessions that aren’t really concessions, and give the strike fund enough of a donation that they could keep going for quite some time. There are a few complications, notably an acid-spitting bird (a known kind of local dangerous fauna) that gives Erzsi a rough time, but eventually, Aekax comes out to negotiate.

They discover, as he speaks (and is forced to make concession after concession) that he seems to genuinely believe, as the dragon that attacked graduation did, that the Ethereal Plane might hold limited amounts of magic, and that it’s his duty to ration it against future generations. The party looks into this theory later, but can only find evidence of it as a philosophical question—the Ethereal Plane is vast and people can only survive at the very edges of it for long, so there’s no real way of knowing.

However, with the strike successfully resolved, the Third Option has a job to do, so they go to the second floor of the tower and get the box to start figuring out how to open it. There’s a long list of strategies that have been attempted to get inside, including all types of magical and non-magical damage, the Knock spell, Dispel Magic, power tools, asking it nicely in a variety of language, and putting it in a time-out corner.

The team, led by Erzsi and her love of solving puzzles, try several more strategies, and eventually a blast of enough raw arcane power is effective enough to get some lines to raise on the box, vine-like patterns, and something similar turns the lines into a maze, which Erzsi solves and which opens the box, revealing the contents: five pieces of hammered copper that seem to be scales from scale mail, inscribed carefully with characters in a language nobody recognizes, and when they call on staff on the floor, nobody there recognizes it either. It’s not even Aniel’s language, a known unknown, but like Aniel’s language, it seems to be warded against castings of Comprehend Languages and Tongues.

Puzzled and intrigued, the party leaves the workers of the tower with the mystery, take pictures, and after a bit more shopping, they leave the Pit and go back to the Keeper, who is delighted that the strike came out well even if that wasn’t the initial quest and offers the party a Seeing of their choice someday, if they ever want to know something. The contents of the box also interest them, particularly the copper scales themselves, and in return for that, they provide a tapestry that depicts the Tower to add to the collection of items for the wormhole drill.

Something about the copper scales is tugging at Erzsi’s memory, and after some looking around, she discovers what it is: in a great many depictions of the Eight ^13-4, one of the group is wearing copper scale mail.

In the time before their next Hells visit, one very important project begins: for a long time, Moryë has been feeling uncomfortable in their body, and he wants to seek out gender-affirming care, especially now that they are increasingly famous and that means people make assumptions about and have opinions on his body and the way they present themself. Essentially, they want to (without changing pronouns or anything else about social presentation in the world) have a body that lines up more with those who have estrogen-aligned endocrine systems, and they seek out a doctor who has expertise in that kind of care. This is a fantasy world, so treatments are fantasy treatments (though there are certainly medical procedures involved), and Moryë ends up deciding on a course of treatment that could give him what he wants in probably something like a year, and has a good chance of not requiring lifelong maintenance.

A dream from Síranyailë, though, does them one better: using the procedure as a model, and Síranyailë’s cell-deep knowledge of Moryë’s body, they think they could do this in a matter of weeks, if Moryë is willing to undergo some pain and discomfort. Moryë is, but there are lots of tests to run in the meantime, so they schedule things for the spring, with help from Síranyailë and medical supervision.^13-5

With that moving along, the party chooses the Moraine Beyond the Sunset, the Hell devoted to evocation magic, as their next destination. Erzsi and Chad went through it briefly on their way to the Songless City, so they already know where the gate is, and when everyone has a few days that line up, they take off for the country of Londolas, and through the submerged portal onto the massive glacier that makes up the Moraine Gate.

The gate is, to their surprise, quite busy, and the Gatekeeper, Ardail, Keeper of the Moraine Gate (she/her, planetar), greets them with surprise and is happy to take them aside for a break, since apparently she’s grown impatient with the tourists coming through for a celebrity wedding.

After some thought, she tells them frankly that there are few tasks in the Moraine worthy of their skill but that she has one she can give them. The most famous thing about the Moraine is the Fence of Children: a three-foot-tall iron border fence along its border with the Crownless Scree made up of the outlines of largely devil and tiefling children, each one unique, created through magic when a group of children defied a leader who was trying to start a war and invade the Scree. Recently, a strange beast nobody can identify has been seen in the vicinity of the Fence, and Ardail wants to know if it’s friend or foe, and if it’s foe, for it to be dispatched.

The party agrees to take the job and goes into the Moraine, where the settlement around the portal is busy with wedding guests—a famous warlock and bard are getting married, scandalously soon after the warlock divorced her patron-husband, and everyone is expecting some drama. While the party waffles a bit, if only because bringing celebrity gossip back to Mali could be fun, they instead decide to go about their job efficiently, and catch a train out of town and in the direction of the Fence of Children.

They go to the small town that’s had the most recent sighting and speak to a ranger there who’s on the volunteer fence guard and who maps out sightings for them. The creature has had various descriptions: large, and brightly colored, usually pinks and purples but sometimes blues, maybe four legs and maybe six, maybe in fact a lot of things. The party calls on a resource nobody quite expects: local fiend spirits. Moryë’s steed, Siltha, is a summoned fiend spirit from the Moraine, and nobody really thinks of these lesser fiends as having much to say on events, especially since when they aren’t summoned by someone they can’t really communicate easily, but Siltha can communicate with them and has many friends. They fill out even more sightings on the map and promise to let them know if they spot the beast.

After that, it’s a waiting game. They spend a few nights camping close to the biggest spike of sightings, and don’t see anything (and have been warned that the beast can disappear—invisibility, teleportation, fast movement, nobody can be sure), not least because Chad keeps getting distracted on watch taking pictures of the Fence. Eventually, though, they sense the presence of the creature, and though they call out offering to talk or to help if it needs help, it takes off running, and they and the fiend spirits give chase.

It’s a long and brutal nighttime run down the fence and, eventually, into an unknown cave entrance—and there they have to stop, in an opal cave (much of the Moraine’s substrate is opal-based). The creature, which on closer inspection looks kind of like a bear and kind of like a cow, with six legs and shifting pink and purple coloring, looks at them from the shore of a sizable aetherflow and then disappears.

The party has dealt with an aetherpearl before, wild magic caught up in itself and causing chaos in local communities, but this is a step worse, a whole pond of magic leaking directly from the Ethereal Plane. It’s too big to Banish all at once.

They retreat long enough to warn the local Fiend Squad, and then the Mountain’s Fiend Squad when the Moraine’s turns out to be going after the ex-husband of one of the brides at the celebrity wedding, her patron who attacked the wedding and killed several guests. Knowing that the flow needs to be contained as soon as possible, the party decides to deal with it as they did with the aetherpearl near Talltrees, by fighting it to bleed off some of the energy. They rapidly discover that it will only attack them when they attack it, lashing out in defense, but that its attacks are brutal. It also tries to pull Erzsi and Moryë toward itself and push Chad further, something neither of them enjoy, especially when one of its attacks starts turning both Erzsi and Moryë to stone. Chad goes down twice, though Moryë is able to bring him up both times, and in the end, they deal with the aetherflow—only to discover that the leak is still open.

Not long after, though, the Mountain’s Fiend Squad appears, thanks to help from Khainan and Nexaph, and with help from Siltha’s fiend spirit friends (which baffles and then intrigues the head of the Fiend Squad), they all do a circle casting that manages to close the leak and bleed off the last of the flow.

The Third Option, relieved, takes a little time to rest and then return to the Moraine Gate to present their findings. They couldn’t communicate with the beast or identify it, but it seems to have had good intentions and seems to have disappeared with the aetherflow. Ardail calls that good enough and gifts them a lock of her hair, since a personal gift from one planetar to another will aid in the building of the wormhole drill.

Back in the Prime Material Plane, winter is on its way. Maliconar is wrapping up the penultimate semester of his graduate program, and they’re all planning a trip to visit a member of the Greencote who is the administrator at the Khundabar South Polar Research Facility, Lómatindë (she/her, cave elf) for right after the semester ends, so he has to buckle down to work.

To that end, one night after work, Mali gives his partners a list of errands to run on his behalf, since small light-hearted fetch quests are a courtship tradition in Chad’s area. They’re ordinary enough errands—library holds, dry cleaning, groceries from a specialty Underdark shop—but they seem to spawn several miniature adventures. A cursed piece of art at the contemporary art museum escapes containment, a journalist from the Hells follows them around for a little while, so on and so forth. There are two fairly significant things, though, one good and one less so. To the good, while picking up Mali’s dry cleaning, Moryë spots an antique store with a gorgeous pearl veil in the window, and though it’s terrifyingly expensive, they can’t resist buying it. (This is largely only important because pornography ensues.)

At the library, though, the three of them spot a child who appears to have been living at the library unnoticed for at least a few days. Moryë takes the lead talking to her at first, and she introduces herself as Dinë (she/her, wood elf, short for Cidinnel Kithnot—a pointed choice of last name, the equivalent of “Doe” as in “John”). Eventually, she admits that she’s run away from a family that’s been isolating her and possibly subjecting her to some kind of religious abuse via the local temple school, and after some communication with Erzsi and Chad, the three of them call in Gashak’s girlfriend Mariel, a social worker who takes charge of Dinë and promises to take her somewhere safer than the library for the night and start work on her case.

The three of them come home feeling somewhat emotionally bruised, but Mariel keeps in touch and makes sure they know Dinë is safe and not being sent back to her family, which is all they can ask for for now.

The trip to the south pole, though, distracts them soon enough. Mali wants to talk to Lómatindë, as another cave elf who joined the Greencote (though she did it as a child), and while Moryë wants to catch up with a much-missed family member, the party has also heard tales of a mountain made entirely out of rose quartz in a range near the pole, and they can’t resist the chance to climb it. So all four of them make the trip south and head out to the Khundabar South Polar Research Facility. Lómatindë greets them happily and pins them all down for various conversations, and then keeps Mali for longer ones while the other three take some snowmobiles and go on the day and a half’s journey to the rose quartz mountain.

They run into a fairy tale on the way, as they travel through the ice desert. A frost butterfly has become trapped in an ice spider’s web, and when Chad frees it as thanks for its bright blue wings preventing him from driving his snowmobile right into the very sharp web, he’s left with a discarded chrysalis that will emanate blinding light when broken. Driving on, they find an elemental jackalope pinned on the wicked spines of an ice cactus, and Moryë frees and heals the creature and receives a shed antler that will make the bearer faster for a minute when broken. Close to the mountain, they hear cries from in a crevasse and find a trapped and lost ice mephit. Erzsi takes the lead on freeing the baby and they return them to their clan and receive an icicle that, when broken, will call a swarm of ice mephits to their aid.

When they climb the mountain, they take in some beautiful vistas (and find someone’s ice vegetable garden), but also have some encounters. A group of storm eagles of the same kind they met on the Plane of Air attacks them, though they’re defeated quite quickly. They run into a small rose quartz earth elemental who is happy to catch up on gossip from the outside world and tells them there might be something inside the mountain to interest them. Last, they meet a frost elemental that can mirror their forms and cause terror, and defeat that soundly as well.

After taking in the views at the summit (and collecting rocks for friends and family), they start their way back down—and not too far down, find a tunnel entrance that they could swear wasn’t there on the way up. The dungeon that follows was clearly designed by a puzzle enthusiast, and requires use of the chrysalis and the jackalope antler, though the mephit icicle is spared. Throughout the dungeon are instructions and words given in Primordial and Common, and one particular inscription intrigues the party: “If the time isn’t right, the stones must be.” Since this sentence appeared in early editions of the Tierne books, which are known to be connected to the aliens, the party is very excited to find a potential connection.

In the end, they find themselves in a small library, confronting a mist-and-frost elemental named Nehonchalya (she/her), who declares herself the guardian of a wild portal, of which there are apparently two kinds. The best-known kind, the kind the party has encountered before, is a temporary portal to somewhere specific that appears at random or periodically before disappearing again. This is a permanent portal, and some days it goes to specific places, but other days it goes nowhere, to the space in between planes, where the Third Option went when searching for the child saints in the Tidegrove adventure. One of the places it goes, though, is the place the Third Option knows as Tierne. It usually opens to go there twice a year, and nobody has gone in or out on those occasions in a long, long time.

She also introduces them to the concept of people she calls Watchers, of whom Lanasophria appears to be one: they show no one their faces or forms, and keep watch on the planes and the spaces between them. She’s also confused that they think the wall inscription is a literary reference when it’s a common proverb among plane-walkers, essentially a reminder not to forget your keys.

The final test of the dungeon is a combat against Nehonchalya, which the party wins before she can get a hit in, something that embarrasses her, but she waves it off, serves them some cactus juice, and gives them the usual range of dates that the portal opens to Tierne before they have to be on their way with plenty to think over.

On the way back to the science facility, they don’t run into much that’s interesting, just beautiful scenery, so they return to Mali and Lómatindë and catch up on how they’ve been. Lómatindë gives her approval to Moryë for all of their partners and warns him that Mali is grappling with the differences between the life he expected to have and the one he’s now building, and when they get home, Moryë and Mali have the first of what are sure to be many chats about that. In the meantime, everybody exchanges solstice presents and settles back in at home in Telcontëar.

The portal to Tierne will be opening in just six months if they want to catch the next opening, but they still have six Hells to visit, Moryë has a several-week enforced break upcoming for gender affirming care, and who knows what other issues might arise?

^13-1 She’s been introduced before, but it’s worth saying as a worldbuilding note that while devils and other residents of the Hells tend to go by their names plus their titles, powerful archfey generally go by title alone. (Less powerful fey just use their names—or they use names, anyway. Who knows if they’re real ones?) ^{return to text ↩}

^13-2 A brief primer on some Jungle politics, irrelevant to the plot but perhaps worth mentioning for interest’s sake: Vylaya, one of the young lovers from the Xanthilisia adventure, was a courier for the House of the Traitor. It’s called such because the chief ancestor of the house, an archdevil named Malatha, was the first in the Jungle That Thirsts to create a private, walled stronghold that prevented people from accessing resources that used to be commonheld. In response, Zechorial, the Town of Secrets was built. All are welcome to enter—except for those sworn to the House of the Traitor. The two factions have engaged in bitter conflicts across the years, including a war where Heal-All, in his earlier days of sainthood, served as a medic, and gained the title he now uses as his chosen name. ^{return to text ↩}

^13-3 These characters aren’t that important, but I had to mention them because respectively this is Devil Combeferre and Devil Enjolras, for any of the Les Mis people who are reading this summary. ^{return to text ↩}

^13-4 A brief history lesson, since I don’t believe this has yet been explicitly mentioned! The Eight are legendary figures in the Hells. In deep history, magic was much more unformed, and so were the Hells, and there were frequent disasters thanks to aetherflows and aetherpearls, and difficulties thanks to lack of standardization in spells and the amount of power it took to cast them. Powerful leaders in the Hells came up with the current system—schools of magic, leveled spells—and sent the Eight to the Ethereal to impose those rules by unknown means. The gambit worked (and created the Mountain With No Bottom, the Hell devoted to wild magic), but the Eight never returned. ^{return to text ↩}

^13-5 Moryë is a nonbinary genderqueer character played by a nonbinary player, and the table is taking great care to plan things in such a way that is affirming for both, especially the player, and taking advantage of fantasy worldbuilding. Moryë’s experiences and timeline are obviously impossible in the real world, and we are very much doing that on purpose. For any concerned, there will not be medical or plot consequences based on this plot thread, only a much-desired and fulfilling change for the character. ^{return to text ↩}