2026.02.28: The Museum at the End of the Hall

When Last We Met

The Freaky Gray Company has fought their way through a tomb that has no intention of letting them leave without scars. Last session: a sarcophagus opened to reveal a mummified royal and a wraith; Ferric stepped into a rune-circle trap and was banished to the Abyss — encased in ice for what felt considerably longer than a few seconds — while a demon crawled out in his place; the wraith and the demon were both dispatched; Ferric was ejected back into the room, ice-cold and briefly wide-eyed, and was bundled into the Camper's Respite to thaw. Where the party stands now: still underground, still in the Sultan's dungeon, still shackled by proximity and dimensional shackles alike, standing in a rune-lit room that smells of sulfur and old ichor and has yielded nothing they can actually use.

What the Room Knows

The crimson glow has not faded. Skeletons cling to the walls in their old positions. The puddle of ichor from the slain devil glistens on the floor. Snow takes a walk around the perimeter — literally, feet on the stone walls — scanning the skeletons for anything worth noting, listening for the hollow sound of a hidden door. A 30 on her first pass – the room has nothing more to say. There are no hidden doors, no secret compartments, no answers the walls are willing to give.

What the room does offer is smell. The compound effect of exertion and blood and infernal ichor, standing in a charged space after a battle, does something unpleasant to Phelan — a slow fever up the spine, a suggestion that claws and fangs might be appropriate right now. He makes his save and presses the feeling back down. Valgara does not have the most dignified few seconds of the evening. The ichor puddle is noted and left. The party turns to other business.

The Terms of the Shackles

The dimensional shackles went on Phelan in a hurry a session ago, and the conditions of their use were never fully worked out. Erash takes them off, thinks about it, and puts them back on — this time designating all members of the Freaky Gray Company as authorized to remove them. All members, that is, except Phelan.

"All members of the Freaky Gray Company can take these off — except for Phelan." — Erash

Phelan receives this with the specific energy of a man who has considered arguing and decided he doesn't have the patience. There is a brief conversation about whether it would be better to chain him to a pillar and leave him behind, to which Erash points out that Phelan has been quite useful in a fight — and, anyway, Khoraka's paladin aura extends ten feet in every direction, which is a compelling argument for keeping the werewolf close. The group settles into the current arrangement with the mutual resignation that passes for agreement in a dungeon.

"I have an axe." — Valgara, when the party discusses alternate means of removing the shackles

A Taxonomy of the Infernal

Standing over the ichor, someone starts counting. Since their resurrection, the party has encountered a notable number of infernal beings — a devil on the road to the volcano, the ones in the marketplace, and the one they just dispatched. That's at least eight-ish devils by recent memory. Phelan, who has Opinions about the distinction, delivers a brisk taxonomy: demons are Abyssal — chaotic, destruction-driven, operating on pure entropy; devils are Infernal — structured, contractual, interested in the acquisition of souls. The Nine Hells. The Abyss. They are very different things, and if you confuse them, Phelan will notice. Here ends the lecture of the week.

What nobody has a good answer to is why they keep running into them. Phelan reminds them that Emmi and the Cobalt Soul had flagged unusual infernal activity in Wildemount some time ago, and he had wondered at the time if there was a connection between the Sultan looking for Erash and the devils getting a jump on them. Our heroes are now deep beneath the Sultan's palace on the Elemental Plane of Fire, and the encounters have continued – despite the Forbiddance spell. Nothing is supposed to be able to enter down here. The party files this information under things that aren't making us feel better.

The Mummy's Due

The party returns to the sarcophagus room for a final pass. Another investigation turns up nothing new — no hidden compartments, no false bottoms, no secrets the mummified woman is willing to surrender after death and wraith-hood both. What she does have is jewelry. Erash detects no magic on any of it, but the material quality tells its own story: a heavy platinum necklace, solid platinum disc earrings gauged to expand the lobe, nose piercings, a jeweled belt. The kind of adornment that would make a shopkeeper in any port city step back and say I don't think I can help you with that. Extraplanar royalty. This person was Someone.

Valgara takes the necklace. The belt is also claimed. As the pieces are lifted free, the sound of dry leaves and snapping sticks fills the quiet — desiccated bone and fabric shifting under new disturbance — and the smell of old mummy, previously contained, gets considerably worse. Several members of the party make the kind of face that requires no elaboration.

They leave. This is the second room in a row that has yielded only traps, a body, and no apparent purpose. Phelan notes it specifically, out loud, for the record: there is nothing here to protect. So what are these rooms protecting?

Nobody has an answer. They go back to the hallway.

The New Door

The hallway past the nearby statue now reveals a door that hadn't been opened — tucked on the left, easy to miss in the aftermath of everything else. Erash kicks it. The door holds. Snow scans for traps — a 33 on the first roll, effective 30; she's confident — and then picks up her tools. Twenty-two on the lock. It doesn't yield. Twenty-one on the second attempt. Still nothing. On the third try, with Snow's notes from the prior two attempts serving as intelligence and the help action lending advantage, Phelan finally gets the lock to click open on a 27. Khoraka opens the door from behind it, shield raised, with Snow peeking over his shoulder because she is, in her own words, a cat and a chicken, and she is not wrong.

The Museum

The room beyond is enormous. A hundred and twenty feet long, sixty feet wide, ceilinged high enough that even Valgara's enlarged form would be comfortably contained. It is otherwise unadorned — no murals, no reliefs of the Sultan, nothing — save for six stone pedestals arranged in pairs down its length, three on each side, each one roughly the height and proportion of a museum display case. At the far end of the room, where the floor meets the wall, a natural cave opening yawns into the dark: roughly twenty feet across, going somewhere the party cannot currently see.

On each pedestal, an object:

A simple black feather. A tarnished, salt-pitted brass lantern. A plain metal cylinder. A large horn — the kind meant to carry sound across distance. A coiled rope. An ivory box.

Khoraka walks in first.

As he approaches the pedestals, something speaks — and it does not speak to the room. It speaks inside him, from the place where his patron has always lived, warm and familiar and wrong. A hissing voice.

Love me.

He presses it back. He has heard it exactly once since his defection, when he reached out through his patron bond for information about whether to trust Gaushroth — and it had felt, he tells the party now, like a very bad tug on the soul. And now it is back...

"I think I just heard the Marilith's voice again." — Khoraka

"I thought you broke up with her." – Phelan

What the Rope Wants

The party spreads out to investigate. Khoraka cannot determine which object is calling to him — or whether the voice came from one of the six, or from somewhere else. He slowly walks into the room, passing the first pair of pedestals, reading whatever the room is willing to give.

Phelan feels another cold sweat come over him, but battles back the urge to shift a second time, only his eyes giving away his own internal struggles as Khoraka strides forward.

Khoraka hears another disembodied whisper.

"You’ve forgotten how it feels to be a god. I haven't forgotten how it feels to carry you."

Khoraka clutches at his head, and then he is running.

Phelan barks at Erash to take the shackles off. [I didn't write that on purpose but...]

Nobody moves fast enough. Khoraka is already running.

Initiative.

What follows is a contained catastrophe executed with obvious affection. Phelan gives chase and catches Khoraka before he reaches the pedestal — grappling him around the arms, dropping his movement to zero. Erash Enlarges Valgara who crosses the room in a few giant strides and hauls Khoraka by the shoulder up and out of Phelan's grip. Ferric dashes to cut off Khoraka's approach angle. Erash commands Halt — voice carrying the full weight of a sorcerer at full expression, eyes blazing, DC 19 — and Khoraka rolls a 23 and then a 31, and still suspended in Valgara's grip, Misty Steps away from her.

Khoraka steps back into view at the pedestal holding the coiled rope. He drops his flail is on the floor. What he reaches for looked, to everyone watching, like a coiled rope — but as his hand closes around it, they all realize it has a head. Several heads. Snake heads. Those coils are no rope.

The heat comes through his palm before he can register what he's holding. Snake coils spring from his hand and weave up through his arm, threading between muscle and bone, and stop somewhere around the elbow. Khoraka screams — half pain, half something else entirely — and from across the room the party watches something serpentine move under his skin and go still.

This is the Lash of Shadows. One of the Arms of the Betrayers. The one he was always supposed to reach.

Behold

"By Marduk's breath..." — Ferric

Ferric hears it half a second before the rest of them see it — a vast shape rising from the cave opening at the far end of the room, dark and enormous, the surface of it resolving as it fully clears the floor into something unmistakable. One central eye opens first. Then the eye stalks begin to unfurl.

A Beholder. In this room. Now.

The party, which has not had a long rest, does what it always does.

Combat under a Beholder is a specific kind of suffering. The central eye sweeps an antimagic cone across most of the room — spells wink out, Ferric's spiritual weapon manifests for a moment and then dissolves, elemental bonus damage refuses to fire. Khoraka, partially merged with the Lash and uncertain of his own allegiances (a moment of the Marilith pulling, and Avandra pushing back), cracks the whip — a sharp report that sends drops of poison arcing outward — and finds himself, in this moment, on the side of the party. He runs for Ferric and Valgara, shouting for help, making it clear he cannot hold this very long.

Kill it, or I’ll find a way to make your own sword turn in your hand. You belong to me, not the grave." – The Lash of Shadows

The Lash does what the Lash does. Khoraka takes his shots.

Valgara, enlarged, rages, and closes the distance to the Beholder with her vorpal greatsword. Eye stalks collapse under the assault — something green and thick runs from the wounds. Phelan shoots from behind one of the pillars, working through the penalties the antimagic field imposes with the steady focus of someone who has accepted that this is simply his life now. Ferric fights with what he has when spells fail him. A disintegration ray catches Khoraka in the chest; the paladin aura absorbs what it can. Snow takes fire from the eye stalks. Valgara takes hit after hit at the scale that rage allows.

"This is awfully heroic music for our current state of affairs." — Phelan, during the Beholder fight

Round after round the party chips away at the Beholder — eye stalks crushed, the central mass bleeding, the creature reduced by degrees. And finally, it goes down.

The room is quiet. The pedestals are still there. Five objects remain unclaimed. And Khoaka, looks at them all with a blank, blackened stare, his arm physically bonded to the Lash of Shadows

That is it for the Freaky Gray Company's session on February 28, 2026!

Final Thoughts

• The Lash of Shadows is an Arm of the Betrayers — an infernal artifact bound to the essence of Khoraka's patron, the marilith Sizlifeth. His original pact weapon would manifest itself in the image of his patron, but was a weak facsimile. This is the real thing. The weapon Zehir created for a Champion to battle the Prime Deities.
• The Marilith's voice preceded Khoraka touching the Lash — she was already watching, or the artifact was already calling. Either way, she knew him before he reached it.
• The Beholder rose at the exact moment the Lash bonded. Whether it was guarding the room, was drawn by the artifact waking, or is simply terrible timing is an open question.
• The antimagic cone created significant tactical constraints — no bonus elemental damage, no concentration spells, the spiritual weapon evaporated immediately. The Lash appears to have functioned regardless; flagging this for Steve to adjudicate.
• Five pedestal objects remain: the black feather, the brass lantern, the metal cylinder, the horn, and the ivory box. The Lash was the coiled rope. What the others are is still unknown. But it's a good guess that they are artifacts, too.
• Khoraka rolled a percentile for patron allegiance mid-combat — a 91 put him on the party's side. He's stated he cannot hold the Lash long. Something to watch.
• The dimensional shackles are currently... not attached to anyone? I think? And I think Erash has them.