2026.04.18: Burn on Your Own Terms

When Last We Met

The Freaky Gray Company has made it to the heart of the Sultan's famed vaults. At the bottom of the Sultan's Charcoal Palace, beneath the dungeon, past the beholder's cavern, they have come to destroy the dimensional anchor — the forbiddance orb that keeps Gaushroth and his loyalists locked out of the City of Brass and, by extension, keeps the Sultan's grip on power inviolate.

The vault holds treasure beyond reckoning, five chained dragons wreathed in Avernian steel, and someone they weren't expecting: Zariel, Archduchess of Avernus, Lord of the First, who is apparently no stranger to the comings and goings of the Freaky Gray Company.

The Damned Angel

The room is impossibly vaulted, the treasure hoard stretching up into a darkness that swallows the light. Maps of unnamed continents hang framed on the walls, entire regions crossed out in red. Weapon racks are draped with things that may have belonged to gods. And in the center of it all, on a pedestal of green steel, sits an object radiating light so bright it hums — a crystal orb, egg-shaped and vast, shooting beams of strong light that make it impossible to look at directly for very long. It is like looking into the sun.

Five alcoves ring the vault's perimeter. The sound of chains drags through the dark as five colossal crimson dragons emerge and take their stations — each collared in mythical Baatorian steel from the mines of Avernus, chained to something no one can see the end of. Snow's bow begins to glow.

Zariel, the Archduchess of Avernus, stands before them. A fallen Solar, still carrying the architecture of what she used to be in the high cheekbones of her face, in the cold geometry of her grace, in the corrupted wings at her back. Her halo is living flame. She carries a burning greatsword, and her other hand is gone, replaced by an apparatus and a long chain flail. She spreads her wings. The shadow swallows half the room.

She speaks.

When the Sultan banished The Bloodied One from the City of Brass, it was I who captured and imprisoned his children to ensure he never returns. It was I who had the dragon’s collars forged from baatorian steel deep within Avernus. They stand as both guard and prisoner here.

While Zariel continues her monologue, the party does what this party does: they start clocking the room. Snow & Phelan are already cataloguing. What is the steel? (Avernian iron, forged in the deepest shafts of the plane of Avernus — lighter than normal steel, impossibly sharp, melting point requiring mythological heat.) Can the chains be broken? (Almost certainly not — dragon fire would have already tried.) What's the attachment point? (The chain goes back into the cave. No one can see where.) Is the crystal spell anchor fragile? (Hard to say, and something about the light is actively pushing everyone back before they can get close enough to find out.)

Well... shit. Now what?

Snow edges toward one of the dragons. The dragon notices. Its posture is unmistakable: get much closer and I will incinerate you. Snow stops, noting the reaction.

Phelan sends a muttered Message to Erash, asking if he might be able to, you know, get the dragons on his side. He whispers back that he's "working on it."

Zariel's Offer

Zariel, meanwhile, is building to something.

I must admit you have surprised many by your resilience. I’ve been watching for much of your journey. Songs may be sung about you six someday, though the final verse may already be written. The Sultan is a greedy, spiteful fool, and he causes much trouble in his dealings. However, he is still my greedy spiteful fool, and even though seeing him deposed and disposed would grant me a brief modicum of pleasure, I need him in his place of power, and for this balance to remain annoyingly… reliable. His reign has been a cruel one, even by my standards. His absolute power, however, is a facade. The uneasy foundation of it residing….here (to the orb). Gaushroth knew this and tried to wrest control, so long ago. But for better or worse, he was betrayed and the coup failed. Or…..delayed, apparently.

She turns her gaze to Erash for a moment, contemplating him.

It must feel odd – the threads of fate pulling you about like some mummer’s plaything? Regardless, you have proven more than expected of you by all sides who have been watching from afar.  So it is with some passing regret that I should see you removed from all existence.

Three armored knights astride their Nightmares appear from the dark behind her. Two Erinyes follow — horned, winged, and carrying wicked blades. And finally, a squat four-and-a-half-foot creature with green skin, a pig's snout, and opulent silk robes: an Amnizu, tucking its bat wings behind it like it owns the place, which at this point in the evening is... a reasonable assumption.

Nonetheless, you have proven considerable skill. Resourcefulness. Initiative. Ruthlessness when the situation calls for nothing less. There are battles raging in the multiverse on a scale which you cannot comprehend, but someday might. I have need of you. The tides of chaos rise once again, and all the forces of order must stand firm together to turn them aside. So I offer you this. It will not be offered again.

Zariel raises her arms. Somewhere high above, something shifts in the dark, and a single coin falls from an impossible height and lands at her feet without a sound.

She does not look at it. She is looking at right at the Freaky Gray Company.

Take the coin. One for each of you. Then take as much as you can carry from here. Live out your days as the heroes of legend you are surely meant to be. If you choose, the coin will grant you immense power in the slaying of demons. Demonslayers they will call you across the realms, and eventually in all corners of the multiverse. Also, neither you nor your kin shall be troubled by residents of the Nine Hells for as long as you live.  When death comes for you, I will intervene for your sake, granting you eternal life as a general in my army. You will then continue your heroic deeds with me on Avernus, and the planes beyond.

Refuse, and your souls will cross the river tonight. Becoming nothing, forever. The Sultan will crush the growing rebellion above, along with all those who foolishly dare stand against him, and the final ember of House Al-Khaleed will be snuffed out.

Choose.

The party politely asks for a moment. Zariel raises an eyebrow, but obligingly takes a step back. (Thank you for not insta-deathing us, for that, BTW.)

To deal or not to deal

Inside the huddle: nobody wants to make a pact with a devil. Khoraka has had enough of that. Erash won't. Phelan... well, he points out that devils keep their bargains, which is both the case for and against the deal depending on how you look at it. Valgara notes that order is not her vibe. Nobody is eager for eternal torment. Someone floats the idea of killing Zariel, but Phelan notes that you can only permanently destroy a devil in the Nine Hells, and this is not the Nine Hells. (No matter how much it feels like it.)

The group scrambles for other angles, ways to negotiate with the devil, invalidate the need for the Sultan, or recruit the dragons to their side with Erash's mark of "allegiance" to their father.

"I mean, if you're like, 'Daddy sent me,' then maybe that's helpful?" — Snow

Coming up blank, they accept that a fight is coming, and politely decline Zariel's generous offer.

She looks unsurprised.

Pity that your fealty to what you consider as “righteousness” is that which seals your ultimate demise. Maybe I’ll find you in the planes beyond. You think those you worship now will protect you? I’ll easily barter for your soul and personally ferry you to Avernus for eternal torment. However, in the immediate future, I may be soon pressed to answer for what happens here, and I must truthfully declare that I had no hand in your destruction. That I will leave to my generals.

It was actually a pleasure to have met you face to face. Your ancestors would be proud. I hope you recognize your accomplishments as you take your final breaths here. Goodbye for now, Freaky Grey Company.

She gestures to her generals with a final command.

"Destroy them."

She strolls casually from the vault. Khoraka screams Coward! after her retreating form. (This is probably not tactically sound. It is, however, very in-character.)

The Amnizu cracks its whip, and out of the deep dark comes a wave.

The Horde of Damned Souls

"Lemur? Like little cute lemurs?" — Gallery Valgara

The lemures are not cute lemurs. They are a formless mass of groaning faces and misshapen bodies, half-melted flesh in motion, a pudding made entirely of damned souls. They are waist-deep, and they bite knees, and they are gross as hell. The party is quick to note this.

Roll for initiative! The results are... not inspiring.

Ferric moves first and calls on his Spirit Guardians, cheerful angels made entirely of violence, and releases them into the horde. The radiant aura becomes a persistent weapon, destroying the lemure swarm in chunks as it advances. Khoraka swings his flail with a Divine Smite and staggers the closest knight. Valgara rages, grows to enormous size, literally picks up a handful of damned souls and throws them at a devil, then summons five berserker spirits from the Horn of Valhalla — Norse warriors from Ysgard who are extremely willing to fight but cannot do much about creatures in the air and have deeply unremarkable charisma saves when Zariel's aura finds them.

"I guess I could have written something on the wall — 'none shall harm the Freaky Gray Company' — but I didn't think that far ahead." — Phelan

Phelan grabs Khoraka by the arm and scribbles quickly on his skin with the Quill of Absolute Truth. None shall harm me. The quill writes mandates enforced by charisma saves. It's vague enough that it might work on anything. It does, in fact, work: something stops a blade in midair that should have connected, and Khoraka looks at the arrested strike and says, calmly:

"Oh, you are all in big, big trouble." — Khoraka

Snow fires twice into the nearest Erinyes and Misty Steps clear of the horde. The Erinyes are not immune to her arrows, but they're immune to fire and poison, and everyone adjusts accordingly. Meanwhile the Amnizu is running psychological warfare — Feeblemind attempts, a Dominate Monster that doesn't quite land, a Command to grovel that Erash passes by the skin of his teeth and the memory that he is a dragon prince, thank you, and groveling is not on the table.

Phelan Solves a Puzzle (Which doesn't help)

Nobody can move further towards the orb – something about it is almost like light given physical form that pushes back against you. The closer you get, the more stuck you become.

Here is what Phelan figures out:

The orb is radiating light so intense it creates a field effect, and that field pushes things back. Specifically, it feels like your shadow is pulling you backwards. So... if you have a shadow dragging you backward, then if you eliminate your shadow.... He rigs his bullseye lantern to point at his back by having Phase bob along behind him, pulls his welding goggles down against the glare, and sprints toward the orb. He succeeds on his approach! Unfortunately, he used one too many variables and has trouble telling the rest of the party how to replicate the results of his experiment. Regardless of shadow or light, or eyes open or closed, or walking backward... nobody else is successful. They'd need a light source and a way to rig it behind them.

"Just do one test at a time." — Khoraka

"Are you critiquing my experiment design, mate?" — Phelan

"I am trying to facilitate a successful experiment of some kind." — Khoraka

On the upside, nobody can get to him, so he's relatively protected from the present pandemonium.

He tries an investigation check on the pedestal. He tries using Phase to shine direct light on the orb. He gets a piton and an axe-back and hammers on the crystal, which has a damage threshold of 20 before anything registers. He shoves the entire orb off its pedestal with a 26 Athletics check and knocks it rolling across the vault floor. The light scatters. The dragons screech.

Nothing breaks.

He yells at Valgara from across the room: try closing your eyes. She tries closing his eyes. She still can't push forward. He tries the other trick: it's the shadow, you have to hide your shadow! She can't find a way to do that, and cannot approach any faster than she is. Phelan continues attempting to solve the problem in real time while his party fights an archduchess's entire retinue around him.

The Amnizu, who sees the barbarian getting a bit too close to the crystal for comfort, casts Dominate Monster on Phelan, telling him to attack Valgara. After a frozen moment of furious attempts to navigate around the command with some kind of loophole (too much time with the fae), a very annoyed looking but ultimately compliant Phelan turns and starts shooting at Valgara.

Burning on Their Own Terms

Erash lights himself up like a chandelier. Control Flame at will, maximum brightness, 30-foot radius — the light he's generating should eliminate all the shadows around him.

Erash raises the orb he recovered from his ancestor's study high over his head.

He is not a puzzle-solver. He is the last of his line. He is a dragon prince who has traveled from a realm beyond death to stand in the treasure vault of the plane of fire, holding his family's orb, looking at five colossal crimson dragons wearing his ancestral enemy's collar, and the one thing he has that Zariel does not is the blood right to say something.

He holds the orb above his head. The air is heavy with the weight of impending battle. He speaks into the hush.

"Children of Gaushroth — look at me."

"I am the last of my line. Every soul that shared my blood is ash now — and still I burn. This mark on my arm, fire and gold, is not decoration. It is a reminder that what is precious and what is destructive are not opposites. They are the same thing. Your father Gaushroth knew that. He built his legacy on it. And yet here you are, his own blood, leashed by something that will never understand what you are."

"Turn with me. Not for me — I am the last of nothing, a dying flame by any measure. Turn because Gaushroth's fire does not belong in a cage. Turn because a thousand years from now, they will not remember the five dragons who obeyed. They will remember the five who chose to burn on their own terms. I have nothing left to lose. The question is whether you do."

He smashes his orb on the ground.

It breaks. Clean, anticlimactic. And for a moment, the party wonders if the orb was ever the point, or if it was just the thing that got Erash here.

A Pact Fulfilled

Combat rages on. The party is no closer to destroying the crystal anchor, and Phelan's compelled suppressive fire is successfully keeping Valgara away from it.

Erash turns to examine the spell anchor, the crystal brilliant white in the center of the chamber. He channels all of his energy into a Disintegrate spell.

The crystal shatters into a million glittering shards. The light flares and goes out, leaving spots before everyone's eyes. The party can all feel an indefinable weight lift from the air around them. The Forbiddance spell is down. The explosion knocks Phelan around, and his mind clears, restoring his autonomy.

The solar wind that was pushing outward from the orb begins pulling inward toward the shards. All five dragons rear back as something snaps and the Avernian steel of their collars falls away. Five sets of chains hit the floor of a vault that suddenly has five free and very pissed off adult red dragons in it.

The long-captive dragons rush the remaining devils. The Amnizu, which has been running three different forms of domination magic at the party simultaneously, is now occupied with the dragon that just eviscerated an Erinyes and is looking for its next target.

There is an ominous rumble as the entire room shakes. Suddenly, the ground falls away under the pedestal and the remains of the orb. They sink into the abyss, and gold begins falling inward as the sinkhole expands, swallowing treasure by the ton.

Time to go.

Exit Strategy

The party runs like hell.

Khoraka disengages, mounts Peaches the celestial pegasus, and Misty Steps them both another thirty feet toward the exit. He extends his arm to Phelan, who grabs it and vaults up into the saddle behind him.

"Look! I'm a flying cow!" - Ferric

Khoraka: "A cow fly. Are you gonna go over the moon?" - Khoraka

"I'm about to. Don't doubt it." - Ferric

"Yeah? Tell her I said 'fuck you.'" - Phelan

Erash casts a Fly spell on himself, along with everyone who isn't already airborne or scaling the wall. Valgara and Ferric launch into the air.

The vault collapses behind them with a sound like the sky falling. They fly up through the beholder shaft, through the artifact hallway, past the lightning trap, past the ooze room, and out into the City of Brass.

The sky is chaos. Dragons are fighting in the air. Devils and Efreeti are fighting in the streets. Buildings are rubble. The revolution the Sultan has been suppressing for years is erupting simultaneously from every direction.

And then the biggest creature any of them have ever seen descends through a portal above the Charcoal Palace.

Gaushroth — colossal, mythologically vast, scales the color of blood — lands on the palace, crushing the domes, collapsing the towers, releasing a gout of fire upward into the sky like a declaration. He surveys the carnage, and his eyes lock onto the Freaky Gray Company.

He leaps from the palace. The tower collapses. He crashes like a thunderclap in the middle of the Ember Market and crouches in the rubble of what was an entire city block, looking at six people who just destroyed a dimensional anchor on his behalf after traveling here through a volcano, through a dungeon, and through an audience with Zariel.

Well done, House al-Khalid. I have journeyed across oceans of time to see this moment realized."

The party will need to make a save. Next session.

That is it for the Freaky Gray Company's session on April 18, 2026!

Final Thoughts

• Erash's speech to the dragons is the moment of the session. It was prepared with twelve AI prompts, delivered in full, and immediately followed by smashing the orb on the ground. The dragon prince arc finding its capstone at the feet of Gaushroth's imprisoned children is exactly the kind of narrative payoff this campaign earns.
• Phelan solved the light/shadow puzzle and was not able to use the solution. His character's entire arc being about agency and control made the Dominate attempt from the Amnizu — which he succumbed to but visibly hated — one of the quieter gut punches of the session.
• The Quill of Absolute Truth writing None shall harm me on Khoraka's arm stopped at least two attacks cold. The mandate was vague enough to work. The quill is staying in inventory.
• Valgara summoning five berserkers from the Horn of Valhalla and then immediately throwing a fistful of lemures at a devil as a separate action is the session in miniature.
• The Amnizu (CR 18, pig-faced, running three forms of mental domination simultaneously) was a genuine threat buried in a chaotic fight. The party never fully addressed it. The dragons did.
• The orb had a damage threshold of 20 and 100 hit points. Erash overcame both with a single double-cast of Disintegrate. The axe & piton did nothing. The sword did nothing. The orb just needed the right person.
• The session ends with Gaushroth standing in the rubble of the Ember Market and six people about to make a save. The save is next session's problem.