2026-04-25: The Reckoning

"All right! We didn't die, y'all. We didn't die. We got really close. Thus ends our story." — DM Steve

When Last We Met

After what felt like months of creeping through the Sultan's dungeon, navigating the magma-lit corridors beneath the Charcoal Palace, the Freaky Gray Company destroyed the spell anchor that protected the Sultan's empire — and then they ran. The dungeon collapsed behind them as they burst out into the scorched streets of the City of Brass, and for one beautiful moment, it looked like they might just get away with it...

The Dragon in the Market

The dungeon doesn't just collapse — it creates a sinkhole, and the sinkhole grows, and the City of Brass erupts. Dragons and efreeti tear through the smoke-choked sky. Chaos reigns as two apex species vie for dominance. And then, landing on top of the Charcoal Palace with an impact that should not be survivable, comes Gaushroth the Bloodied.

He is the size of a mountain. He is the size of a reckoning. The party is, by Steve's precise and extremely unhelpful measurement, roughly the size of one claw. Not the whole hand — just the claw.

He leaps from the palace and lands in the open market, and the shockwave sends half the party sprawling across the scorched ground. Everyone not physically immune to the physics of this situation is knocked prone. Then comes the wisdom save — DC 24, "you are all frightened," and if you rolled low enough, you have also, mechanically speaking, soiled yourself.

Gaushroth turns his gaze to Erash and declares the blood pact fulfilled. The Sultan's line is broken. The only bloodline remaining with claim to the throne of the City of Brass is the House of Al-Khalid — a destiny Erash was born to, but not prepared for. He is being granted freedom. The kind of freedom—

He stops mid-monologue.

Snow's bow is glowing. Not a little. Bright enough that it doesn't matter whether it's in her hand or her quiver. It blazes against the ochre sky of the Elemental Plane of Fire, and Gaushroth's eyes go wide.

"VYRAXITHAR."

The name leaves his throat with a raw, wounded sound.

"What have they done to you?!?"

The Bloodied One's great head arcs back. His chest deepens to a glowing, incendiary red. He begins to inhale.

The party has one action before they are incinerated.

A Study in Party Cohesion

What follows is, as one player cheerfully observes, "one hundred percent on brand."

Phelan has the unenviable task of deciding who to save – Khoraka, Erash, or Snow. He urgently begs Snow to give up the bow, to save herself, but she just can't do it. He ultimately gestures at Erash, compressing spacetime around him and teleporting Erash 90 feet towards the back of Gaushroth's haunches, out of the immediate area of what is sure to be a swath of fiery doom in a few moments.

Khoraka, meanwhile, has Dimension Doored straight out of the city and into the Temple of Surtr, where the shaman Velthara is very nearly ready to annihilate him before she recognizes who he is. He fills her in on the marketplace, though she already knows much of what is happening there. She knows they need to get out, and get out fast. She tells him there is a portal close to the Iskalat Docks, halfway across the city. It may still be functional. Khoraka notes this and immediately Dimension Doors back into the market.

Valgara — still large, still raging, still frightened — does something remarkable. She wrestles Snow's bow out of her hands, ignoring her anguished cry of "SYLANIS!" She turns from Snow, speaking in Draconic, and brings the bow towards Gaushroth, where she lays it at the dragon's feet.

We did not kill your friend. We are sorry your joy of finding your children is tainted by the grief of this loss.

She steps back.

Ferric — who rolls a natural 20 on his wisdom save and is therefore the only member of the party who is not frightened — takes one look at the situation and goes full heroic. He steps between the party and eternity, draws breath, and casts a spell that pulls Snow, Valgara, and Phelan sideways out of the material plane entirely. They go ethereal: still present, still able to watch in muted colors as the world begins to burn, but untouchable. That's his action. He has nothing left.

Ferric is still standing in the market. Alone. With a dragon.

Erash — behind the dragon, 90 feet upwind of the apocalypse, thanks to Phelan's Vortex Warp — casts Sending at Gaushroth. His message, delivered in 25 words or fewer to a prehistoric dragon the size of a castle:

Will you hear what I have to say, or end us, breaking your word in a rage unbecoming?

Gaushroth responds, in the formal manner of legendary red dragons, by incinerating the entire market. The vizier's palace begins to melt.

Ferric, standing at the center of a 120-foot cone of fire and force, takes it full in the chest. He staggers to his feet, barely upright, blistered and blinded.

"He's at 22 hit points..." — Steve

"He saved my life." — Snow

Snow makes it to Ferric through the new hellscape of melted stone and pooled magma and heals him with the last of her good fourth-level slots. Ferric looks toward her through the smoke, blinded, small fires still burning in patches across his robes, and says: get the bow.

Get to the Docks

The High Forger Andal finds Erash and broadcasts a message into all of their skulls simultaneously:

There is no safe haven in this city or on this entire plane for you. The Iskalat Docks. An old portal that may still work. Halfway across the city. Go.

And then Erash, running at 80 miles an hour, trailing light like the Silver Surfer, sweeps past Valgara and scoops up Winter's Wrath on the way.

What follows is a chase sequence through a city that is being destroyed from three directions simultaneously: civil war above, a dimensional anchor's structural consequences below, and one extremely motivated ancient red dragon plowing straight through the middle of it, too wide for the streets and too annoyed to go around.

Each round of the chase, the party rolls Athletics or Acrobatics. More than half must beat a DC 15, and Steve rolls a d6 for complications. The complications include: a panicked crowd of City of Brass locals flooding the streets; a collapsing four-story tower falling directly over a cluster of fleeing civilians; a thirty-foot sinkhole with no visible bottom; three efreeti fighting a red dragon in the middle of an intersection; and, in the final round, Gaushroth pausing mid-pursuit to cast Meteor Swarm.

The party handles all of this with varying degrees of grace.

Phelan leaps thirty feet for every ten feet of movement thanks to a well-timed Jump spell, calculates the geometry of a dragon's breath cone with the casual confidence of someone who has definitely thought about this before, and launches himself through the chaos. When a collapsing tower threatens to crush a crowd of panicked locals, he fires a Web across the street — his arcana roll coming in at a 31 — and braces the structure just long enough for people to get clear. The tower collapses on both ends. The middle holds. Briefly.

Khoraka spreads his sepulchral bone wings and screams menacingly at the crowd to move. When they don't move fast enough, Gaushroth, visible behind him, is a very convincing finishing touch. Valgara clears a 30-foot sinkhole in one raging bound. She shoves party members through danger zones when they aren't moving fast enough. She is precisely as useful as a large, raging barbarian should be in this situation.

Khoraka zooms by on Peaches — his celestial pegasus, resummoned mid-chase — and drops a fireball from the Necklace of Fireballs onto the efreeti/dragon intersection without breaking stride, because why not. The efreeti appear to appreciate it.

Ferric, brand new to flying thanks to Erash, has what can only be described as an early Wright Brothers experience. He eventually gets it together.

Then the meteors hit. Gaushroth casts Meteor Swarm to make sure he has the party's full attention. The DC is 24... and no one makes it. The fire damage is halved by resistance, the bludgeoning damage is not, and both Khoraka and Phelan go down. Snow transforms into Gaseous Form through sheer force of epic feat. Ferric mass cures wounds. Everyone gets back up with maybe enough hit points to get to the exit. Maybe.

One last obstacle: a lava canal, twenty feet across. Everyone either flies it or jumps it. They land in the dock district on the edge of an ocean of lava that goes on forever.

Andal is already there. He taps a section of alley wall and keeps running.

Find The Way Out

The wall looks like nothing. Relief carvings, old runes — less a language than a diagram, something engineered. A portal, once, now gone cold and dark. Khoraka casts a darkness spell adjacent to them, which does not hide them but may serve as a distraction for a dragon. It is unclear whether this helps.

Gaushroth rounds the corner.

Phelan, with Phase perched on his should, the owl's lamp-like eyes illuminating the carvings, starts rotating the runic disks in sequence. He understands and can see what it's supposed to do, but while he's worked with Tinker's Tools his entire career, they are imperfect for the job and it takes him longer than he'd like. The sharp eyes of his friends keep him from making a critical error.

The third lock clicks into place.

The arch tears open, a rip in reality. Cold blue-white light floods the alley. The smell of water — rain, soil, loam, something alive and green — hits them all at once. Phelan hurriedly gestures everyone in before grabbing Phase out of the air like snatching a hat on his own way through the portal.

The last thing any of them sees through the narrowing fissure is Gaushroth. His eye — the size of a catapult — fills the arch, close enough that they can see their own reflections in it. Then the portal seam closes with a sound like the air being sucked out of a room.

Somewhere That's Green

It is raining. The rain is evaporating in hissing steam off their armor, which tells them everything they need to know about where they've been. There is grass. There is distance. There is distant lightning and no thunder.

Ferric sits down on a hillside and laughs.

Erash rolls onto his hands and knees and throws up.

They are somewhere completely unfamiliar, that smells of grasses Snow doesn't recognize. Probably the material plane. Probably (?) Exandria, at least. Not somewhere any of them have been. Phelan checks for predators, and it seems they have a moment of respite. The party takes a short rest, patches each other up with what's left, and Erash — with Ferric's tea in hand, made with extra ginger for his stomach — prepares to teleport the group.

One beat of quiet passes before Erash mentions they left someone behind. Planksnapper, lost on the Plane of Fire, didn't come through the portal.

I'm sorry, friend.

Then Erash opens a teleportation circle, and they finally, finally go home.

The Shape of After

Ferric is in the Temple of Bahamut in Zadash, white robes catching the last light of the vesper candles. He's found a purpose there, attending the Grand Abbot — old and frail, reaching for books too heavy for him — with the same quiet steadiness he brought to the dungeon. He still visits Feolinn. The teleportation circle makes it easy. But mostly, now, he is here. Serving. And helping where he can.

Late one night, he's putting out the candles when there's a knock at the door. He ignores it. The knock comes again, louder. He walks to the door in his glowing white robes, opens it, and says, "Blessings of the Lord of the West Wind be upon you."

We do not see who is standing there.

Erash doesn't send a message. He shows up in person, the way a brother deserves after everything. He finds Deraxol at the council hall, still at his desk in the evening, buried in correspondence. Whatever Deraxol is about to say dies on his lips. He reads the answer on Erash's face before a word is spoken. There is a long silence, the kind brothers share when the thing they've been dreading for years is finally done.

"The anchor is gone. The city is free."

Deraxol sits back slowly, exhales once. "I'll get the wine. You're going to tell me all of it."

Later, Erash goes to the garden. He kneels at the place he needed to go. He sets something down. He stays there long enough that the shadows lengthen around him.

Some things deserve to be mourned without a hurry.

He becomes aware, slowly, of someone at the garden's edge. He turns. Snow is standing at the corner of the path. Her eyes have found something small: a dragon, wings catching the last of the light, quiet and watchful. Snow, who has walked through death and fire and the space between worlds without blinking, takes a step back. Her hand goes to her mouth. Her eyes go bright and wide. She makes a sound that's not quite a word.

Khoraka sits, uncharacteristically, at a writing desk.  He seems to struggle with the letter, writing and crossing out and re-writing the words over and over.  By the time he finishes his missive, there are several pages of tear-stained parchment stacked in an untidy heap.  He slowly seals them into an envelope, writes two names on the exterior, then walks into Feolinn to find a traveling messenger.  

The envelope is exchanged along with some coins, and the messenger boards a ship.  The ship passes through the vast expanse of ocean until a distant shoreline is spotted.  The messenger disembarks and passes the envelope to a merchant caravan headed to the continent's interior.

The caravan journeys deeper and deeper into the heart of the land, through verdant valleys and majestic mountains until it reaches a scorching desert landscape.  After enduring days of brutal, scorching heat, the merchant train eventually passes by a small village.  A guard breaks away from the wagons to approach the tiny settlement.  

After asking around a bit, the guard makes his way to an aged hut near the edge of town, situated next to a burned-out plot of ground.  Maybe another home stood there once upon a time, impossible to say.  The hut (little more than a shack, really) looks little better than the patch of blackened earth.  Unkempt, disheveled, the dwelling seems to stand apart from the rest of town.  Almost like it's huddling away from the village to hide its shame.

The guard knocks on the door of the sad dwelling, and two elderly residents appear at the door.  The woman and man look shocked and fearful to have a visitor, any visitor, especially for two such unknown and unimportant people like themselves. They accept the delivery with silent astonishment, and the guard turns away to rejoin his caravan.

Their names are written in a shaky, untutored hand, yet this message clearly came from someone of means.  The parchment, though travel-worn and sweat-stained, still retains the crisp brightness of high-quality stock.  The ink is dark and vibrant.  With no small amount of trepidation and awe, they carefully open the letter and begin to read the pages.

Loren and Mirelya,

It is my great shame that it took me so long to write and offer my apologies for what happened to your daughter, Elewyn, all those years ago...

Valgara walks over the crest of a hill. The wind blows the tall grass across her grey skin. The dale below is home to her village. Maybe not where she was born, but where she was raised. Children are playing Langbold and cheering for their teams. One of them sees her and shouts, "Gara is home!" The younger children run to meet her, and she pats the smallest of them on their heads. Others come out of their huts to greet her.

 "Did you find your father?" one of her neighbors calls.

"No, but I made progress." She calls back.

She returns greetings as she walks past the gathering spaces and wheat fields to her hut on the edge of the village. Her gear gets heavier the closer she is to her home. She unstraps her pack and pushes through the front door. It smells musty from being closed up for months. But it is clean. The furnishings are sparse and feature a large engraved chest. She opens the lid to place her vorpal greatsword back inside. "Vorpalgara" – her friends have teased her about her "signature" sword since she returned home a few years ago. 

In the trunk, she sees her other treasures: Horn of Valhalla, Rod of Lordly Might, Embertooth Javelin, to name a few. Not just treasures in terms of value, but also treasures for the memories they carry. Of a time she remembers fondly because of her friends. And also with regret. They left the fate of the City of Brass to the fire of a giant red dragon enraged by grief. She will never forget the eyes of Gaushroth.

A mix of feelings swells inside her, heavy and hot. They always do when she is reminded of her time with FGC. Was there something they could have done differently to soothe the beast? To save the city and thousands of lives? Did they make the right decisions? Did she use the right words? Surely their exit caused a storm that left the City of Brass in a wake of destruction. There was no choice but to survive. Valgara knows this. But accepting it... that is harder. She feels guilty for leaving. Inadequate. Ashamed.

She closes the lid and hangs her head. She only knows one way to calm her soul when she feels this way. Valgara walks outside beyond her small garden of wildflowers. On the ground, there is a large dragon made out of river stones. She sits back on her heels at the dragon's feet and recites the words she wished had changed fate.

"We did not kill your friend. We are sorry the joy of finding your children is marred by grief." And she bows to the stone dragon."We did not kill your friend. We are sorry the joy of finding your children is marred by grief." And she bows to the stone dragon.

"We did not kill your friend. We are sorry the joy of finding your children is marred by grief." And she bows to the stone dragon.

And again.

And again.

Again.

Until her chest feels lighter. Until she can feel the cool breeze caressing the dale.

She closes her eyes and sighs. Then stands and dusts off her legs as she walks back to the village. Her neighbors will want to buy her a pint and hear what she's learned of her father. And how many new villages and towns have met "Vorpalgara" during her latest travels.

Phelan is in a classroom full of budding Alchemists in Port Damali — dismissing a class with a note that next week's topic will be properties of wolfsbane and its potential viability as a vaccine component for lycanthropic creatures. After the students clear out, a young man enters. In his teens, with floppy dark hair and two prosthetic legs, he carries a roll of schematics under his arm. Bran and Phelan look over the plans as they discuss the young man's latest prosthetic design, and his reservations about the knee joint's lateral movement under stress, like in a combat situation. Bran's faithful shadow, Tawar, now a small orcish girl of seven or eight, is peeking over the desk while they talk, surveying the pictures and looking very serious. As the conversation wraps up, she is then assigned the boring job of carrying the schematics back to Phelan's workshop. She pouts about it before ultimately giving in when Phelan promises her he'll let her blow things up someday.

As the door closes quietly behind Bran, Phelan stacks a few papers and looks out at the ocean. It still fascinates him, even though his adventures with the Freaky Gray Company have taught him he has no business on a ship.

His reverie is interrupted by another knock at the door. A woman in Cobalt Soul regalia enters—petite, bespectacled, with turquoise streaks in her long dark hair. She carries a large and very full satchel over her shoulder. It's his old friend Archivist Gräbner, and Phelan is very surprised to see her. After a few pleasantries, she opens the bag and places something from within on his desk: a dodecahedron, gold-veined, with handles. It hums with an intense energy that makes him grit his teeth.

Phelan eyes it skeptically. "A Luxon Beacon, yes?"

"It is. Very astute, Professor." She waits expectantly.

He sighs heavily, rubbing a hand over his hair. "You know how I feel about organized religion, Emmi."

Emmi arches a single brow at him. "Indeed, I do. So it is a good thing I am looking for an arcane scientist, not a theologian. Though that amulet you continue to wear juxtaposes your assertion."

He brushes a thumb over the chain that peeks out of his collar. "This? Just superstition at this point, really. I haven't figured out why it's the only silver that doesn't affect me."

"What is organized religion, Phelan Ahearn, if not the superstitions of the collective?"

At his look, she smiles a little to herself and gets to the reason for her visit. Emmi explains that something with this beacon is... different... from the other ones the Cobalt Soul has encountered. Whether evolution, corruption, or something else, they cannot determine. The pair decides that the relic is better examined in greater detail in a more private and protected setting.

Phelan knocks his fist against the desk a few times and comes to a decision. He says he'll wrap up the semester in a few weeks, then travel to Zadash to meet up with her. There... they'll see what some summer research may bring.

That is it for the Freaky Gray Company's session on April 25, 2026! And maybe that's it for the Freaky Gray Company. Or... is it???

Final Thoughts

• This is the finale of the City of Brass arc — and Steve essentially homebrewed a dragon beyond the Ancient Red template because the Monster Manual wasn't big enough. "Instead of 20d6 fire, it's 30d6 fire" was a sentence Steve said out loud at his table, then nodded at.
• The party did not fight Gaushroth. They ran. Valgara was the only one who addressed him directly, and she did it in Draconic with genuine grief.
• Phelan fixing the portal while Gaushroth is rounding the corner, with Phase lighting up the carvings, might be the most Phelan moment of the entire campaign.
• Ferric sending three party members to the ethereal plane and then standing alone in the market with a dragon is exactly who he's always been.
• The epilogue sequence gave everyone a dénouement — Steve narrated Ferric's, Erash's, and Snow's were collaborative, Khoraka's, Phelan's, and Valgara's were player-delivered. The Luxon beacon in Phelan's epilogue is a clear campaign seed for whatever comes next.
• "Some things deserve to be mourned without hurry" is Erash at his best.
• The cliffhanger is whoever knocked on the temple door. We don't know. But Steve does.

The Gallery

"You shit your pants." — Steve (the actual mechanical consequence of rolling under a 14 on the wisdom save vs. Gaushroth)

"This party all dying in an every man for themselves approach is 100% on brand." — Gallery Phelan

"I'm gonna cast a Command spell. Choke!" — Gallery Erash

"You've done the geometry." — Steve, to Phelan, on understanding a dragon breath cone is a cone

"She has been very, very, very good about not using it. But it's apparently made of one of his good buddies." — Gallery Snow, on Winter's Wrath [attribution uncertain]

"If you have some kind of controlling spell, you can just win the entire campaign immediately." — Steve

"Spider dog does everything a spider does. Which is... what, exactly?" — Steve, after Phelan webs a collapsing building

"Can I use this hand to — am I going to rip my dick off?" — Khoraka, on the prosthetic arm Phelan built for him