Session Preface
Parathrax's Dream
As soon as you drift to sleep, your dreams take you. Engulfed in darkness, you descend narrow stone stairs spiraling into nothing. Your armor clanks awkwardly and reverberates in a sort of asymmetrical cadence, the stench of mold and decay and stale blood invade your nostrils. A sense of dread lingers in your gut, though you know you can neither linger nor retreat.
Further and further and faster and faster, as if falling but your boots still slide against the wet stone stairs spinning further into some darkness so deep your hands fumble towards your face to make sure your eyes are still intact.
Eventually, the spiraling ceases and there is nothing but your heartbeat against your chest, a ticking clock in this hallway of darkness pulsing against the silver armor and the shield at your back. You stand ankle deep in water, the surface rippling away from you. The dripping echoes off of cavern walls. A stillness in the stale air puts your skin on edge.
As you gaze into the void of water, a single thread of light wisps into view. Like starlight it dances and twirls before you. The warmth and simplicity of it a sigh of relief in this choking despair. As it feathers through the air, a faint ethereal ringing drifts through the air, beautiful, haunting, and obscure.
Then, like a blade from shadow, darkness severs the starlight. The thread is tethered, torn, shredded and what was once a gentle ringing is a shrieking, screaming, crying for aid and there is no blessing to give.
But yet, a brighter light above, silver and shining, defiant of the darkness drives into the darkness, piercing it if but for a moment. The darkness itself dives deeper into the pool of water, disappearing from view and the radiance follows. Your eyes follow this bright radiant light, racing through the water as if with wings unfurled, majestic and mighty, biting and tearing into the terror of the deep with divine determination. All the while, the water around your ankles gurgles, bubbles, and froths like a storm.
In the midst of this chaos, you see but for a moment the radiant light crest above the water, waves crashing against cavern walls and lapping against your chest. From the radiant light of silver shine, two sapphire beams glow and meet your eyes, piercing into your very being and one word echoes through your mind until it is all you know and could ever be. Protect. Protect. Protect.
And all at once the light dives once more, descending into the abyss, giving chase to an unknown and ancient darkness deep within the depths. In the now empty cavern, the waves begin to settle, your heartbeat still pounding, and your mind consumed with the singularity of your sworn duty. Protect.
In what seems like only moments after you settled into your bed, you wake, exhausted and forlorn.
Session Summary
Vorothruun's visions carry he and his brother to Halfreach, delving into the caves where he first discovered the Rod of the Pactkeeper with Greycastle in the years before. Passing through the small farming hamlet, the dragonborn learn of Feywin's capture by robed individuals clad in feathers. Tracking them to the caves, Feywin is found already in the process of being used as a sacrifice, her eye removed and flesh of her arm torn away.
Following their disruption of the ritual and the retreat or defeat of each of the cultists, Vorothruun uses the eye of a cultist and his own flesh to open a purple arcane portal beneath the water's surface, diving in and activating the portal at once.
Before Parathrax can follow, his duty to righteousness leads him in a desperate race on horseback to Halfreach to return Feywin and save her life before descending into his brother's madness.
Comments