## The End of a Long Week ##### [[Campaign 2]] > [!danger]+ DM Memory > ASDF The city of [[Keirhall]] hums along at its usual pace as four people finish out their week. [[Revius]] is grinding through a demanding project under the thumb of his boss Lennford Kravitas. [[Teagan]] — TJ to those close to her — spends the day with her doting father in the market. [[Kopesh]] whiles away his door duty listening to stories from Father Krios. [[Eleric]] tells his mother he has taken up work as a courier, and she tells him, not for the first time, that he is wasting himself. They gather at the B&B Safe House over dirtied tea and trade rumors floating through the city — a [[Coronite]] sickness spreading, people going missing without a trace, a phony gift horse skeleton, hag stones turning up on the hillside. The week is done and answers feel far off, but the rumors nag at them enough to go looking. They investigate the hag stones first. The stones prove to be peepholes into a nighttime scene of open plains, and when Eleric hears and feels something on the other side, the party flees. At the foot of the Cursed Hills they cross paths with Teagan's brother Norric, hauling suspicious landscaping gear and gone just as quickly as he appeared. Following a treasure map, the party pushes into the hills through devil-horned gates and a rubble-blocked passage into a chamber carved from the rock itself. Inside they find a map imprint in the floor and an infectious mirror. When they place the map it transforms, pointing them to a place called the [[King Tree]] in the [[Weirwood]]. Then their own reflections peel off the mirror and overwhelm them — featureless shadow copies that drag them under. They wake later, shaken, and make for town. On the way out they find an animal dying against a tree, bashing its head in with twitching, rhythmic compulsion. When they examine it, the brain is full of Coronite spines. At its center: a single bead of amber glass. ## The Arcanum [[Revius]] identifies the glass marble — its interior is threaded with sigils for Arcane Eye. [[Eleric]] catches up with an old contact who mentions glass shards turning up in the soil. Teagan goes underground to her network and picks up a job connected to a woman named Astrid Freehold. [[Kopesh]] continues pressing his mentor for information about Keirhall's founding families. Together, they plan a break-in of the [[Keirhall#Academia Ens Primum]]. A library visit first confirms that a Sixth Family exists, with details carefully redacted. Then they run their recon — Teagan disarms the alarm system with quick somatic work, aided by something glazed and strange that assists her through the building. Eleric reluctantly gives the party a tour of his old school and finds a carpet in the wrong place, one that clinks like a trapdoor underneath. They return after hours. Eleric ghosts through the offices in gaseous form. Revius nearly walks into a security golem, saved only by his own glass shadow. They find the trapdoor and descend into something they were not prepared for: an ancient body obliterated on the floor, a marble-sized hole bored through its skull, a dream sigil carved beneath it, Coronite scattered everywhere, and pages of research suggesting someone had been running experiments here for a long time. Then the body lurches upright. The undead fight is harrowing. Eleric and Teagan figure out that the creature is healing from the nearby Coronite supply and cut it off, turning the tide. When it is finally destroyed and the Coronite with it, a disembodied voice addresses them from the dark. Calcif Terenvice, a wizard of considerable age and the Arcanum's second-in-command, reveals he has been watching the whole time. He wants a deal, and he has the leverage to demand one — but Teagan refuses him outright. Calcif puts them to sleep over the dream sigil anyway, and the party is pulled into a vision of [[Keirhall]] stripped of everything. No buildings, no people, just a sickly sky threaded with veins of opaque sludge coiling toward storm clouds. Each of them follows something different into that landscape. Teagan follows her brother toward the swamps and finds him crouched over a chest with a beating heart inside, a half-map in his hand, locking it away forever. Eleric follows a familiar path to where his tower should be and finds a glass reflection that doesn't show his face, a voice insisting it needs him and that it's time to come home. Kopesh descends into the dwarven mines after a voice and watches a fellow Keirhallian try to hold back a consuming darkness with nothing but a candle — and fail. Revius chases a small, glass, child-like figure through the northern forest and loses it entirely. Calcif pulls them back and tries to press his advantage. The party exits the Arcanum and spends the early morning hours outwitting and destroying his familiar, an imp named Cinder, buying themselves twenty-four hours of unwatched time. They use it to follow a trail into the forest, find where the undead creature had been resting, and by sheer luck encounter a Forlarren named Gravlutz who claims to know what is happening — the glass shadows, the Coronite, all of it. ## The Forest and the King Tree The party splits. Revius and Kopesh follow Gravlutz north to a small glass town — still and perfect, every person frozen in place except for a small girl who moves freely and seems to have built the entire settlement like a model in a taproom. She can step sideways into the glass plane and tends to wounded glass folk there. Revius watches her go and can't quite look away. Teagan and Eleric are guided toward a Key Tree, warned that they'll need to trick its guardian to gain passage to the King Tree. They face the great bear-faced totem, deceive the Forlarren companions, and slip away guided by lights from the forest spirit Grym, Son of [[Gor]]. At the King Tree, Teagan places the map on the slab before even taking it in fully. Ancient power erupts from the roots, igniting a ring of portals to the Feywild. A blast of energy fires from a Mage Tower further west at the same moment. One Forlarren slips into the white portal — [[The Winter Court]] — before Grym can stop him. He urges the party toward the tower and tells them he will guard the tree. The Mage Tower opens to Eleric's blood. Inside, the first room has been thoroughly picked over — by Eleric himself, in a previous visit — but a new door has appeared. The Mind's Eye marble opens it. Down the hallway past crystalline urns the size of barrels, one broken and crusted with something saline, they find a clinical chamber with a blood-stained dais, strange wall panels, and a final door with three indentations. The last one is shaped like a human heart. They are missing the key. The dais responds only to Eleric. When Teagan bleeds on it, the name "Bowright" appears in Eleric's vision alone. When Eleric bleeds on it, plans flash rapid and vast through his mind — necromantic and illusion runes beyond his comprehension, sketches of sowing glass into the earth, a Sequester spell, a sealed chamber, and a timer. One hundred years and one month, counting down. With one month remaining. Calcif, in the days that follow, makes his displeasure known through every channel available to him. Revius is demoted. Teagan's family finds their Coronite purchasing power taxed. Kopesh's nemesis in the temple is promoted. Eleric is banned from the Arcanum grounds entirely. The party understands — clearly and without ambiguity — that they are running out of time on multiple fronts. ## The Sterile Waters Teagan receives word from Norric. Calcif has hired him for work in the Sterile Waters. Beneath the smithy floor, the party finds evidence of brown glass in the soil. They arm up and go south to find him. Norric is infected — a glass basilisk from the Gravel Ponds got to him — and he has been bartering with the local Bullywug settlement, a ramshackle empire calling itself the Melgath Empire, for his freedom. The next piece of the map is the currency. He also mentions that the person the party had previously smuggled into the city has been taken captive by the Bullywugs. The party pushes deeper into the swamp, crosses three deadly rivers with the help of a Bullywug dropout named Bugle Boah who has opted entirely out of empire life, and arrives at the Melgath Empire just in time to watch King Cram Cram eat a prisoner whole. The Melgath Empire is mired in a theological dispute between two gods: the Red God and Garganto, a monstrous toad of enormous appetite. The party steps in as god-selectors, interviewing a devoted acolyte wallowing in a pool of filth and then traveling into the mountains to speak with the Red God directly — a Red Slaad, openly and shamelessly playing a deity, who holds the Heart Stone from a recently slain basilisk as his prize for divine legitimacy. With time running short and eight hundred coronite-infected Bullywug eggs in Lambent Lake ready to hatch into mutant froglets, the party moves decisively. King Cram Cram is lured away from his court, fed poisonous mushrooms, and confronted by Teagan who delivers a blunt and ill-timed dose of honesty. The resulting brawl is sharp and over quickly. Meanwhile Eleric and Revius fashion a Coronite bomb for the spawn pond and obliterate the eggs. The Slaad, now unopposed as the empire's one true god, hands over the marble without complaint. Then Garganto arrives — ridden by his keeper Gurblebitz, who has heard rumors of the new order. Garganto eats Gurblebitz almost immediately. The party uses explosions and arcane power to disorient the colossal toad and drive it back into the mountains. They commandeer a fleet of giant toad transports and flee back to Keirhall just as the Centennial celebration fills the streets with noise and light. In the crowd, a citizen drops to his knees. Glass spreads across his face like frost on a window. ## The Glass Plague The party scatters across the city. Kopesh finds Father Krios and his friend Iadai preparing to head south toward the mines on their own. Revius runs to his workshop, collects a package from his boss, and finds his friend Maddy in the guard district — turned to glass and walking toward the old Mayor's home, which has been empty for some time because the Mayor, too, is glass. He locks them both inside and runs. Teagan goes to Norric's shop and finds the glass blight crawling up his arm. She ties him to an anvil, takes the glass and Coronite dagger he has left her, and goes. Eleric faces his mother. She doesn't have long. She gives him her spellbook and tells him he is more than his origin. The party returns to the forest and the Mage Tower, now knowing that the blast of energy from it has something to do with the townspeople walking glassy-eyed toward the mountains. Gravlutz intercepts them and asks them to investigate what happened to his associates who set a trap for [[the wizard prime]] — and who opened the final portal, releasing a Winter Court assassin to hunt him. In the tower's meditation chamber they unlock the final door, fight their way through living magic down a long corridor, and step through a portal into a pocket of shadow and stillness. The Wizard Prime speaks to them from the dark. He offers to spare their loved ones from the glass affliction in exchange for a complete map and his freedom. Then he turns to Eleric and begins connecting the threads of a very old puzzle. A clone had been made and taken to the Feywild long ago. Eleric hears his mother's voice — _more than your origin_ — and understands. A figure is suspended in the spell. They free him. His name is Pallas Fallfern. ## The Truth of It Pallas Fallfern explains: one hundred years ago, he made a deal with the Fey to trap [[the Wizard Prime]] — Taldrid Stalladel, an anagram hiding in plain sight — inside the tower. He succeeded, but was caught in the spell himself. He has been suspended there ever since while his family name continued under the false legacy of his trickery. He also warns Eleric plainly: the Wizard Prime can body-jump into him. He is not safe in his own skin. The real Fallfern family had been taken into the forest and used in experiments — turned to Coronite, used to sow the swamp lake. The glass girl, the Spirit of Water, shepherds the souls of all those the Prime converted. She brings the party to the ruins of Taldrid's childhood home and explains his history — a boy who sacrificed his own sibling in a dark deal with the Forlarren, binding those souls to a realm so that Coronite could be harvested from human flesh. As she speaks, dark creatures attack from both sides of reality, hunting her. The party defends her across two planes simultaneously. She survives, barely. Before the dust settles, Taldrid's simulacrum drops a control stone at their feet and tears Eleric sideways through the planes to the Feywild. Alone. The Winter Court's assassin, the eladrin Vil Starbinder, meets the remaining party with Gravlutz at the tower. She offers a blade that cuts through planes — and Eleric's blood — as the price of letting him try to face the Prime himself. Teagan kills Vil and takes her place as huntress. They gain access to the tower. The gateway to the Winter Domain opens before them — a mountain range that makes the [[Barrier Mountains]] look modest, craggy peaks jutting at impossible angles, a great fortress strung between them on arcing bridges of white stone, one tower a perfect mirror in ice of the one in the [[Weirwood]]. [[Queen Mab]] steps from the blizzard herself, marble-skinned and unhurried, blue eyes blazing with equal parts hope and despair. She does not need to explain who she is. She wants — she always wants — but her interest in the Wizard Prime's defeat aligns with the party's, for now. Bargains are struck, and the party enters. ## The Demiplane Inside the tower, Eleric is already there — on the floor of a circular chamber ringed with the same runes as the Weirwood portal, looking up at an older version of himself on a throne. Graying hair, neat goatee, green eyes. Taldrid grins. His plan has unfolded exactly as intended. The rest of the party fights through the tower level by level. A gentle giant named Gellint Flamegrabber serves as prison warden, a headband of intellect sewn into his skull having turned a once-happy oaf into a miserable and overthinking man. [[Pallas Zion]] — the very halfling who had pressed a blade to Stepjan's neck in Taembria, here revealed to be the same Pallas Fallfern traded to the wizard by the Winter Court in exchange for open gate spells — sits glumly in a cell. In another, an Oblex named Cralpuh waits with patient and dangerous good cheer. Past the prison, a puzzle chamber offers each member of the party a portal showing their deepest desire. Revius sees a young girl sleeping by a fire, clutching his old red scarf. Kopesh sees the Holy Hall of the Mid Day Sun, golden and still. Teagan sees a complete map, floating in darkness. Eleric sees the Freehold family — motherless, cramped in a refugee camp, but together, a father smiling tiredly at his children. A voice offers to recreate them all. Like new. Soulless, but new. They lift the rug in the center of the room and find the answer to that offer: endless husks of dead Elérics, dead Carolines, dead parents, suspended in a demiplane beneath the floor. They leave the offer behind. ## The End of the Prime The throne room is a full reckoning — Taldrid on his dais, arcane gates flanking him, tanks of green ichor along the walls with bodies floating inside, a golden rod in his hands and two boxes at his feet. The party does battle with everything the fortress can throw at them, the floor giving way beneath their feet as the demiplane itself tries to finish what Taldrid started. They bring him down. In his last moment, Taldrid's death spell detonates — aimed at Eleric's memories, a final attempt to take his soul and his body. Eleric resists. The party presses their most cherished memories into him, lending him their weight to hold onto himself. It is enough to keep him free. It is not enough to restore what was taken. When it is over, Eleric does not remember them. But he is his own man. And he is alive. --- The wizard's curse ends with him. The Coronite plague lifts. The glass folk still walking the roads slowly find their way back to themselves. Pallas Zion is freed from his cell. Father Krios does not survive the mines, and Kopesh steps into the empty place left behind, taking his role as holy man at the Mid Day Sun temple. Keirhall begins, slowly and imperfectly, to recover. The map is complete, the Prime is gone, and somewhere out there Eleric is living a life he doesn't remember choosing — though those who chose it alongside him know exactly who he is.