Session 6: Kingfall
General Summary
THE CHRONICLE
What follows is the account of the final watch of the night of 5 Ches, 1487 DR — as the strike team cleared the upper floors of the Royal Palace and the Cormyrian Civil War reached its conclusion.
I. The Token
The Moonspire token vibrated.
It had been sitting in Jasper Flint's pocket for the better part of the evening, warm and inert, a thing that meant nothing until it meant everything. When it finally pulsed to life, nobody needed an explanation. The courtyard below was becoming someone else's problem. The final phase had begun.
It was at this precise moment that a boy appeared.
Small. Shabby. Official-looking scroll in hand. He registered the armed strangers in the hallway and bolted. Gustav reached for his concertina and the motion took too long. Jasper was faster — a spectral hand materialized from nothing, stripped the scroll clean from the child's grip, and floated it out of reach while its former carrier made his exit at speed. The boy was not apprehended. The scroll was retained. The party called it a win.
Creed, Micah, Flint, and Princess Elyndra elected to remain in the stalwart suites rather than descend into a siege they might not survive long enough to explain themselves through. The party agreed this was sensible and moved on.
II. The Moon Tower — Floors Three and Four
The lower floors offered modest resistance and immodest traps.
A broad stone chamber — torture devices, several coffins of uncertain occupancy, a spiraling central staircase — yielded nothing of mechanical concern to those who thought to check. Hans thought to check, rolled a natural 20, and confirmed it was clean. The rest of the party stood near the stairs and tried not to think about the coffins.
The fourth floor was more interesting. Two round tables, a handful of chairs, and the discovery — upon taking several steps into the room — that none of it was where it had been a moment ago. An anchoring illusion ward, two-node, maintaining a field of spatial disorientation across the entire floor. Carver found the ceiling bead. Jasper found the floor node. The party had one Runebreaker Vial and one available spell slot. Carver threw the vial. Jasper expended the slot. Both nodes shattered simultaneously. The room reasserted its geometry. A stone slab door appeared in the wall where Varsen had, seconds earlier, introduced his axe to solid stone and received nothing useful in return.
The door was locked and electrically trapped — confirmed when Onataro inserted his thieves' tools and took six points of lightning damage for the trouble. Jasper's Mage Hand picked it on the first attempt. Spectral fingers do not conduct electricity. The door opened. The room beyond was a bathroom. Nobody said anything about this.
III. The Moon Tower — Fifth Floor
The top of the Moonspire smelled of candle wax and something metallic-sweet that settled at the back of the throat and declined to leave. Bookshelves undisturbed. A writing desk near the window. The harbor fires of the rebel advance painting the water orange below.
Hans did not like the room. He said so, in terms that communicated something is wrong here without being specific enough to act on. Carver, running on a natural 20 perception check, was specific: a slight ripple in the wall behind Jasper, and then a figure stepping from shadow with a long spectral blade already raised.
He cast Sanctuary.
The creature rolled a natural 19 on its Wisdom save, overcame it, and attacked anyway — natural 20 on the strike. Jasper went down on the first hit of the engagement. It was the first knock of the campaign. The room noted this and continued.
What followed was a close-quarters engagement against two Resonant Blades — possessed corpses bearing House Morvain's crest, fighting as a coordinated pair — in a room progressively filling with smoke from a thrown grenade. Both enemies demonstrated Uncanny Dodge and pack tactics. Carver went down in round two after taking twenty-one points across two coordinated strikes. At this point, roughly half the party was on the floor.
Gustav's Healing Word brought Jasper back. His exact words were: "There is greater pleasure to be had in life, my friend. Get up and dance, as Bast would have us all do." He threw his hip to the side and said "Ah." This was not tactically relevant but is worth recording.
Carver stabilized on a natural 20 death save. The table received this as cosmic correction. Onataro ended the first Blade with a point-blank shot through the temple and watched a shadow-silhouette hold its death pose for a moment before fading into the ceiling. Varsen finished the second by lodging his axe in its torso and then crushing its skull with his bare hand until the bone gave. The second silhouette reached toward him briefly before dissipating.
Combat over. Two party members knocked. Both enemies accounted for.
A Morvain sigil coin was found sewn into the first corpse's tunic. Carver and Jasper's subsequent examination of the Resonant Blades confirmed both weapons were attuned to their wielders' biological resonance and would not function for anyone else. They pocketed them regardless. Research potential.
IV. The Prisoner
Varsen opened the first iron door with his axe. Two swings. The door finished falling. The woman inside had already closed her book, stood up, and reached for a small prison shiv.
Mid-twenties. Ash-blonde hair streaked with silver. The deep blue of House Valecrest, faded and worn thin from months of captivity but worn regardless, with the posture of someone who had decided a long time ago that composure was the one thing they would not surrender. When Varsen said the prince's name, the shiv clattered to the floor. She covered her face and wept. She recovered quickly — the manner of someone who has had extensive practice recovering quickly — and then asked about the people next door.
The people next door were dead.
V. The Other Room
The floor was worn smooth where two people had walked the same paths for months. Iron rings in the wall. Old rope burns. A cold meal tray in the corner, the food long past any useful classification.
Caleth and Mariel Ashvain lay as they had died: arranged, composed, the bearing of people who had decided some time before the end not to give anyone the satisfaction of watching them break. Caleth's hands were folded. Mariel's were open in her lap — a musician's hands, a lifetime of calluses at the fingertips that never fully leave. Pressed flat beside her right hand was a small folded note.
Hans found it. It was in their mother's handwriting. Both had been moved before the cold came. One had cried when they were taken. One had not made a sound. They had been taken to the mountains. Tell my boys. Tell them their mother was not afraid. Tell them we spoke of them every day.
Hans tucked the note into his breast pocket and called his brother in. The party waited outside. Gustav's expression, by the account of those present, did not require translation.
Lysandra, when she had composed herself enough to speak, told them what she knew. The Ashvain line had not been collateral. Tests. Experiments. Readings the researchers had apparently never seen before. Caleth and Mariel Ashvain had been the mechanism. Gustav and Hans had always been the point.
I'm sorry, she said. I wish I had more. She left them to sit with it.
VI. The Throne Room
The doors were partially open. The smell reached them before the sight did.
Prince Theodric sat on the steps before the Dragon Throne with his face in his hands. His father's body lay at the base of the steps, hands folded, crown still on his brow. Someone had placed it there. Prince Darius knelt in the shadow of the dais, silent. Rebel soldiers moved among the fallen in low voices. Nobody was celebrating. The violet marble had seen enough for one evening.
Elyndra crossed the room at something between a walk and a run and did not stop until she reached Theodric, who lifted his head and confirmed she was real before the embrace ended. Lysandra stopped at the threshold of the dais. Theodric came to meet her — no ceremony, no performance — and took her face in both hands. Hans, standing near enough to hear, caught what passed between them. She said: I told them you would come. He said: I'm sorry it took this long. She shook her head once.
Theodric addressed Strike Team Four directly. He said they had gone into the palace while he could not, and come back with the two people he could not afford to lose. He said Cormyr would remember it. His jaw tightened briefly. He said he would remember it.
He told the room the war had not been fought in anger or conquest. That his father had loved the realm and forgotten that love alone does not make a king. That the lesson was not triumph but responsibility. Rest tonight. Tomorrow we rebuild.
The soldiers did not cheer. A few bowed their heads. One or two raised a fist, briefly, and went back to work.
Strike Team Four were ordered to two tenday of rest and recalled to the capital in twenty. They were dismissed. The prince returned to his family.
Hans located the wine cellar and did not return.
The first long rest of the campaign followed. It had taken seventeen hours of table time to arrive at.
The Morvain coin remained in inventory, unexamined. The Resonant Blades sat tagged and waiting. The mountains, presumably, continued to exist.
In twenty days, Strike Team Four would receive their final orders. The war was over. What came next had not yet been named.
— The Chronicle of Operation: High Tower, 5 Ches, 1487 DR
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