2026.03.07: "Happy Travels..."

When Last We Met...

The Freaky Gray Company stands in the wreckage of a beholder encounter, surrounded by the museum-like pedestals of a dungeon room that has clearly been waiting for attention and admiration.

Khoraka's arm is no longer entirely his: the Lash of Shadows has burrowed in from elbow to fist, tendrils moving visibly beneath the skin, and inside his head it is worse. Three presences compete for control — Sizlefeth's hunger, Avandra's grace, and whatever is left of the man himself — each one pulling in a different direction in a skull that is not large enough for all of them. Every action Khoraka takes requires a 50/50 roll to determine who is steering.

In the rest of the room: a beholder's corpse. An ivory box that Snow is now carrying (because she bumped it off its pedestal and caught it before it hit the floor). A feather, a lantern, a horn, a cobalt rod. Everything here has the weight of important artifacts.

Still to find: a dimensional anchor. The Sultan's vault. And whatever else waits behind doors they haven't stumbled across yet.

A demon, a goddess, and a pirate walk into... your head

When the party moves to help, Khoraka fends them off, vanishing.

He's not invisible — Ferric confirms this, his True Sight sweeping the room and finding nothing. Not ethereal, either. Simply gone, somewhere nearby in the dungeon, having made the only decision that felt like kindness: putting distance between himself and the people he might hurt.

Phelan casts out a Message cantrip through solid stone, knowing his friend's mind well enough to find him even without a line of sight.

The reply comes back carefully controlled.

"It's better if you don't know where I am. This is bad. I'm in a bad way, and for your safety, I can't be near you."
— Khoraka

They go back and forth, Phelan trying to coax him into returning so they can figure this out together. And then, mid-exchange, a second voice slams into Phelan's head like something shoving through a door that was meant to stay closed.

He's mine.

Two words, and then gone, and Phelan flinches like he's been struck. The rest of the party sees him wince and grab his head, and doesn't know why. He tells them in a too-even tone why Khoraka's running, and as the group starts to deliberate, he shifts into his wolf and goes to find him. The others run after him back into the obsidian hallways, with little semblance of a plan.

The Wolf in the Dark

To Phelan's wolf, the corridor smells like stone and ozone and old lightning, and also, inexplicably, fresh-cut grass – summer and earth and something impossible. As well as faint traces of Khoraka's familiar scent.

He tracks it: past the dried remains of the gelatinous cube, down the sweep of familiar hallway, past the lightning trap, all the way back to the circular door of the statue room — the room with the six mysterious statues and a version of this party that existed days ago. The door has rolled shut. Phelan paws at it, whimpers, then starts pacing agitatedly. Valgara tries to kick it in, only to find that two feet of stone is not particularly impressed by her prowess. Snow carefully searches the walls and finds a mechanism, working a dagger into the gap like a coat hanger in a car door, and the door starts to roll.

Phelan bounds through it before it finishes moving, four paws landing on miraculous grass, and there's Khoraka in the corner — arm cradled against his chest, eyes too dark, a man made of three competing wills trying to occupy one body.

"Khoraka. I didn't mean it. I'm not gonna take your arm off. I just want you to be better and not try to kill me."
— Snow

Khoraka rolls the percentage dice. It comes up 90. The Marilith surfaces.

The Most Brutal Kind of Care

What follows is quick and horrible and, in its way, deeply specific in its love.

The Necrotic Shroud — black ichor tracking down Khoraka's face, skeletal wings emerging from his shoulders, a wrongness that radiates outward and sends most of the party stumbling backward, fear winning where sense couldn't. Synaptic Static crackles through the room in a forty-foot radius, leaving everyone but Phelan muddled and burning. The wolf charges anyway.

Phelan hits him at full gallop, throws his body weight into Khoraka's chest, and knocks him down prone into the grass. Then there's a big lick to the face before the wolf shifts to his cursed hybrid form — bones snap and pop painfully, resulting in a shape that is neither wolf nor man — and the werewolf holds position with both hands on Khoraka's shoulders, pinning him into the ground.

The Marilith fires back. Khoraka snakes a hand around the edge of the Solaris Bulwark — the Dwarven shield that was given, earned, and kept — and both the light in his eyes and the voice that comes out of him is not his own.

"Bastard dog."
— The Marilith, through Khoraka

The shield blazes. Phelan takes fifteen points of radiant damage and fire directly to the face from a foot away and does not let go. Then the Blight arrives: fifty-six points of necrotic damage blooming through the hybrid wolf's body, sores opening, parts of his body going to rot in real time. Still does not let go. The wolf, down to roughly a third of his hit points, maintains the pin and does. Not. Move.

Valgara rages. She has been watching, and she knows the shape of the problem and the only viable solution.

She goes for the Vorpal Sword.

The first swing doesn't bite clean; it slides off Khoraka's armor, the angle wrong. But she can see it now, the joint between pieces where the cut needs to land. The second swing comes in at 31 to hit, eighteen damage, with the deliberate intention of a woman who does not need a third attempt.

The Vorpal Sword cuts through Khoraka's arm, severing it at the elbow.

There is a hissing sound of fury that the whole room can hear. The Marilith's presence blows out of Khoraka's head like a pressure valve releasing — sudden, total, silent. The voice is gone. The pain in his head is gone. What arrives in its place is the overwhelm of the physical wound, the sizzle of a cauterized edge, the impossible, blunt shock of a limb that is no longer there.

His forearm, still married to the Lash of Shadows, lands on the grass.

"Full-on Darth Vader-Luke moment. Just takes it right off."
— Gallery DM

Khoraka lets out a scream in shock. Phelan forces him to focus on his face as he pushes healing magic through Khoraka's injuries.

The Living Lash

The severed forearm does not stay where it lands.

In a terrifying metamorphosis, five snake heads emerge from the severed edge of the forearm. The Lash of Shadows, separated from its host and enraged about it, begins to move across the grass — not away from the party, but toward. Specifically, it creeps toward Snow, dragging the flailing remains of Khoraka's arm with the graceless determination of something that has never needed its own body but would very much like yours.

The lash speaks.

I know where you were the night Hawk left. The voice arrives in Snow's skull in a hissing tongue, warm and insinuating, coming from a direction just off to one side. Free me, and I'll take you where he is.

Snow makes the save with a 21. She holds fast.

What follows is the party killing an arm, which takes way more effort than it should. Snow pins it to the ground with two arrows, while the snake's head grasps for purchase. Valgara splits the animated arm lengthwise like a fleshy log with the Vorpal Sword, then jumps down onto two of the snake heads with both feet. Ferric channels a Mass Healing Word that restores everyone's health by 50 points at once, which helps considerably. A Fireball turns the arm into a small campfire. The last heads are still moving.

Khoraka realizes he has to end it.

He releases Phelan from the Hex he has been holding, and murmurs, "Let me up." His eyes look over Phelan's shoulder at the full-party chaos beyond. After carefully searching his face, Phelan rolls off of him, groaning a little in pain as he lies on the wild grass. Khoraka rises on unsteady legs, grips Avandra's coin talisman in his remaining hand, and walks over to the writhing thing on the grass. He places himself above it. He takes a breath.

His right foot begins to glow.

"Happy travels, you bitch."
— Khoraka

The foot comes down. Divine Smite, radiant and absolute, cracks through the Lash like a door being sealed shut forever. And then — not in Khoraka's head, but out loud, filling the room, coming up through the stone itself — a sound: No! Low, resonant, the voice of something that expected to survive this. And maybe it did. Then it tumbles down the hallway, into the darkness, and all is silent.

Khoraka drops to his knees on the grass. His divine flail, the pact weapon he dropped when he first picked up the Lash, reappears in his remaining hand, as though it was simply waiting. He looks at it. He laughs, a little, through his tears.

Improvised Weaponry

Phelan gets to him first.

He takes Khoraka's face in both clawed hands — still in hybrid form, his wounds beginning to close and heal in the warm light of Snow's restorative magic — and forces eye contact.

"We've really got to talk about your taste in women, mate."
— Phelan

Khoraka laughs. Well, it's half sob, half laughter. But both sentiments are real.

The party recuperates. The grass beneath them still smells out of place, wild and fresh, like something that should not be here. Ferric, who has held himself together through all of this with the quiet steadiness of someone who knows his job, channels further healing outward, healing the worst of the damage to the group.

"I'm sorry about arm, but we had to kill you a little."
– Valgara

Khoraka has a chain flail and a stump, and he wants to be functional again in combat before they walk through another door. With a few tinker's tools and some impressive artifice, Phelan secures the flail to a harness for Khoraka's arm: not pretty, not ideal, but functional. Khoraka swings it a few practice times. It moves like a weapon fused to a gauntlet, awkward and strange, and his arm still radiates phantom pain from the missing limb. He looks it over.

"Not ideal, but better than nothing." - Khoraka
"So now you're insulting my work?" - Phelan
"I just complimented it!" - Khoraka
"Oh no. 'Less than ideal' doesn't sound like a compliment to me... but we'll work on it." - Phelan

Light banter aside, Phelan tells Khoraka the real thing is coming—a magical prosthetic with the aesthetics of someone who thinks about how things fit together. He calls Sprocket on a Sending Stone, pointing her to some specific blueprints and telling her this one is for one of their own. By the time they return to Feolinn, it will be waiting for his final refinements to the design.

They just have to live long enough to get there.

Long Rest

"Either Snow is extraordinarily lucky, or you, Khoraka, are extraordinarily unlucky."
– Erash, as Snow gathers up the artifacts

"Both things can be true."
– Khoraka, backing away

The party rests on the grass — grass that should not exist in the Sultan's dungeon on the Elemental Plane of Fire, grass conjured by wild magic gone sideways and apparently permanent, grass that smells like something none of them have smelled in months. Snow retrieves the remaining artifacts from the museum room and nothing unusual happens as she collects them. Once everyone is resting in the Respite, Phelan identifies the artifacts one by one.

"If you find one fueled by nightmares, let me know. I can keep it powered for a long time."
— Khoraka, on the Lantern of Lost Hope

The Lantern of Lost Hope: A battered brass lantern containing what turns out to be a captured remnant of a dead star. While lit, creatures within thirty feet cannot be charmed or frightened, and a flash of its light can blind undead. The cost is specific: to relight it when it goes out, the wielder must spend a short rest recounting their happiest memory. That memory becomes fuel. It doesn't disappear — it just becomes background noise. You know it was good, but you can't recall the feeling anymore.

The Quill of Absolute Truth: A feather that is improbably heavy for its size, its tip already wet with liquid gold without an ink pot in sight. It cannot write falsehoods; attempting to do so destroys it in a radiant burst before it reforms at dawn. In capable hands, it can write a mandate — a rule enforced by Charisma save — on any surface, including skin. (Khoraka immediately proposes that someone write that Khoraka cannot attack friends on Khoraka.)

The Horn of Valhalla, Iron: Cold as a glacier, engraved with warriors locked in eternal silent combat. Blowing it summons five berserker spirits from Ysgard, immune to charm and fear, and they fight for an hour before returning to wherever warriors go when no one needs them. Valgara takes this one. It was always going to be Valgara.

A Fragment of the Rod of Seven Parts: The tip — four inches of a seven-piece artifact that, when whole, apparently does something that the party couldn't get through reading without cracking up. [Again, not Kat this time.] This fragment alone casts Cure Light Wounds five times a day, which is immediately and unambiguously useful.

"It's very you that you want to draw one, and it's very me that I'm going to advise you against it, and then it's very you that you're going to do it anyway."
— Phelan, to Snow, about the Deck of Many Things

The Deck of Many Things: Ivory tiles inlaid with obsidian and gold, each one the thickness of a tarot card and the weight of a bad decision. The magic inside is too much to classify — not a school, not a type, just everything at once and overwhelming to look at directly. Each card, drawn, enacts an immediate destiny-altering effect. Good fortune or catastrophe, suspended animation or a wish. Snow wants to draw one. Most of the party talks her out of it, with varying degrees of success.

"Meta, it's always a great idea to draw a card from a deck you find in D&D."
— Gallery Khoraka

The deck ends up with whoever wants it least (Ferric, in this case). Which, one theory holds, is exactly right.

The Beholder's Lair

The beholder came from somewhere. That somewhere is a shaft descending eighty feet — smooth-walled and vertiginous, the stone polished to something wrong by whatever disintegration carved it. Khoraka spider-climbs down. Erash casts Fly on himself. The others use rope and patience.

At the bottom: a collapsed passage to the left. To the right, thirty feet down the new corridor, a pair of doors forty feet tall. They are cast from an alloy that does not appear on any plane any of them know. Black at the center, bleeding outward to deep brass at the edges, inscribed with a script that alternates between Infernal and Ignan — two languages of opposing elemental and diabolic heritage sharing a door that suggests they had reason to cooperate.

Snow and Erash both try to read it. Together, they parse its meaning: an ancient, formal compact. Two parties, two languages, and something that was agreed to in an era before either of them could fully decipher the words. It reads like a contract.

Phelan connects the threads out loud: the infernal surge on Exandria, the Cobalt Soul's concerns, the devil who attacked them on the road, more devils in the marketplace, seemingly in league with the Vizier's son, and the creatures down here that seem exempt from the forbiddance spell.

"The forbiddance spell doesn't seem to affect the devils we've found down here. Perhaps this is their season pass, if you will."
— Phelan

And then, to Erash: It felt like they were all looking for you. And this looks like the paperwork.

Valgara knocks politely on the forty-foot doors. No answer. She tries to pull them. Nothing. She pushes. They open.

The Far Side "Midvale School for the Gifted" door joke gets made. It lands (when doesn't it?).

The Vault and the Compact

There is no ceiling.

The treasure stretches upward into a dark that swallows torchlight: mountains of gold stacked with the casual indifference of a civilization that gave up counting somewhere in the first few centuries. Gems the size of fists, throwing light back in colors that don't have names. Weapon racks and armor stands are draped in implements that belonged to entities that might have been gods. Framed maps of continents — possibly of planes — annotated in red, whole regions circled and crossed out. The Grand Sultan and the City of Brass exist to accumulate wealth. The party is standing amid the proof of his astounding success.

In the center, on a pedestal of green steel, is a crystalline egg radiating light so bright it has a low hum. Beams of light move within the beams of light, like solar wind. This is the dimensional anchor. The object that maintains the forbiddance spell, the goal that has been driving this party for months. It is here.

Then they see her.

She strides toward them from the far end of the vault. Half as tall as a dragon. Not a giant — something rarer, and worse. The architecture of her face carries the memory of mercy: high cheekbones, severe grace, features sculpted for compassion that she has long since found other uses for. Her wings are scorched and enormous, veined with hellfire that pulses slow and rhythmic like a second heartbeat; when she spreads them, their shadow swallows half the room. Above her brow, a halo of living flame. In one hand, a greatsword burning with unfamiliar green-steel fire. Where the other hand should be: a chain flail apparatus, which she wears with complete indifference.

Her eyes find all of them at once. She does not speak first. She doesn't need to. The silence she carries is a complete statement.

Ferric draws himself up. He looks, to anyone who knows him, briefly shaken. But his voice is steady.

"I name you Zariel. Lord of the First. Demon Breaker. Lady of Wrath. Archduchess of Avarice."
— Ferric

Zariel — Archduchess of Avernus, overseer of the Nine Hells' first layer, an angel who fell and found the fall improved her — regards him with the patience of someone who has not needed to raise her voice in millennia.

You must be a charmer back home. Her voice fills the vault the way smoke fills a room: gradually, then completely. Nonetheless, I see you've studied well. Marduk would be proud, if he could see you now.

She casts a smoldering eye at the Radiant Orb.

But you are beyond his sight here.

I must thank you first, she continues, unhurried, for ridding us of that dreadful son of the vizier. He was petulant, and only competent enough on enough occasions as to forestall his ultimate end. I grew weary of dealing with him. No one mourns his loss. Not even his father.

She looks utterly and profoundly unbothered.

The session ends here: in the Sultan's treasury, under the light of the dimensional anchor they came to destroy, before an archdevil who is grateful for their work and has not yet explained what that means.

That is it for the Freaky Gray Company's session on March 7, 2026!

Final Thoughts

• The Lash of Shadows is vanquished... though not unmade. The Marilith is gone. Khoraka is free, at the cost of his right forearm and a substantial amount of the evening. The Vorpal Sword has, again, earned its slot in the party.
• Khoraka's 50/50 roll coming up 90 (Marilith in control) when Phelan charged him meant the intervention had to be executed against an actively hostile Khoraka, from start to finish. This is on theme.
• Phelan absorbed 56 necrotic from Blight, 15 from the Solaris Bulwark shield-burst, and an unknown amount from Synapse Static, all at close range, and maintained the pin through all of it. That is one stubborn wolf.
• The Lash's parting whisper to Snow — I know where you were the night Hawk left — introduces a new thread with no further information. What happened that night? Why does an ancient demon-bound weapon know about it?
• Five artifacts are now in party inventory. The Deck of Many Things is in Ferric's bag. This will be fine.
• Zariel appears to be operating independently of the Sultan ("The Sultan believes this meeting is not happening"). The nature of her presence in his vault — and her relationship to the infernal/ignan accord on the doors — remains to be established.
• Ferric naming Zariel from memory suggests either significant prior research into the Nine Hells or personal history. The Marduk reference appears to confirm existing connections.
• The dimensional anchor is visible. It is in the room. It is also in a room that now contains Zariel.

The Gallery

"Let the record show that Steve started the descent."
— Steve [THIS WAS NOT KAT DAMMIT]

"Well, what if Khoraka, you know, dies, but not forever, just a little bit? Enough to make the wormy thing and the crazy thing think he's no longer accessible and then they go away?"
— Valgara, tactical analysis from a character with INT 8

"Like a petit mort?"
— Gallery DM

"I don't know what it means. I mean, he would be hard if he were stone."
— Gallery Valgara

"I could kick him really hard in the head."
— Valgara, on alternative approaches to sedation

"It's like watching a river flow uphill."
— Gallery Erash, on Marley attempting the stairs

"Looking pretty fly for a fire guy."
— Valgara, to Erash

"She seems nice."
— Valgara, on Zariel