Chapter 3 / Episode 88 – At the Stronghold

Chapter 3 / Episode 88 – At the Stronghold

Date: Planting 11–13, 576 CY — Afternoon into Night
Region: Drachensgrab Hills, south of Highport — broken ruins along the slave road
Weather: Cold drizzle. Low clouds. Mud and mist clung to stone and bone alike.

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Players

• Dog the Ranger

• Irving the Reluctant (with Harvey the Hare)

• TerryOr the Cleric

• Silversun Ubermage the Magic-User

• Slash the Bard

• Tiger Wong

• Lady Morwen Ellisar (NPC)

• Kern Blackshield of Safeton

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Planting 11 — The Sword That Chose

The throne room still reeked of old magic and older death when Slash knelt beside the fallen blade.

The crown lay nearby, dull gold and red-stoned, whispering without sound. But it was the sword that drew him.

Ancient etchings ran its fuller—pre-Temple, pre-Stockade, older than the ruin itself. Slash lifted it carefully.

Steel touched steel.

His own weapon shattered instantly. Not chipped. Not cracked. Shattered.

Silence followed.

“Well,” Slash muttered, staring at the broken hilt in his hand, “that answers that.”

Irving said nothing. Harvey shifted on his shoulder, ears flat.

The debate that followed was not about loot. It was about direction. Return to the surface? Press deeper below?

Terry’s answer was simple.
“We don’t leave rot half-cut.”

They went further.

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The Ruby Faces

A chamber—twenty feet square—centered by a dry well. Five pillars ringed the space, each carved with a grimacing stone face. In every eye socket: a ruby.

Silversun stepped forward first.

He removed one gem cleanly.

No trap triggered. No curse screamed. Just the faint scrape of stone and the quiet weight of a prize pocketed.

Irving drank healing draughts slowly, age heavy on his shoulders but resolve unbroken. Terry searched for hidden seams and found none.

They withdrew.

Above ground, the world had not improved.

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Lady Morwen and the Cart of Dead

They found her at the edge of the ruin—Lady Morwen Ellisar, rain darkening her cloak, standing beside a cart filled with corpses. Hobgoblins. Slaves. Hard to tell in the drizzle.

“This place breeds death,” she said flatly.

They agreed to rest. No one had the spells—or the patience—for another descent.

Dog ranged outward to find shelter off the slave road. Slash lingered behind.

“You trust her?” Slash asked quietly.

Dog didn’t look back.
“I trust what she’s done.”

That was answer enough.

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Planting 12 — Vultures and the Limping Man

The land shifted as they moved south—rockier ground, scrub brush clinging to stubborn soil. Vultures circled ahead.

“Fresh,” Dog whispered.

Then he saw him.

Six foot four. Plate armor. Longbow. Limping slightly. Alone.

They waited.

Irving offered to close the distance under divine sight, checking for chaos before steel. The stranger approached cautiously, but not like a slaver.

His name was Kern Blackshield of Safeton.

His wife had been taken by hobgoblins.

“I tracked them this far,” he said, voice tight. “Then I lost them near the old road.”

Silversun’s reply was cold but practical.
“If she lives, she’ll be at the stockade.”

Kern did not flinch.

“Then I’m going there.”

So be it.

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Camp and the Crown

Dog brought down an antelope before dusk. Clean kill. Clean cut. Meat roasting over low coals as rain eased to mist.

Watches were set.

First: Kern and Terry.
Second: Tiger and Slash.
Third: Irving and Silversun.
Last: Dog and Silversun.

It was the third watch that broke the night.

Irving held the chaotic crown in both hands, staring at it like a problem that needed ending.

Silversun stood opposite him.

“Destroy it,” Silversun said.

“No,” Irving answered.

The word hung heavy.

Steel wasn’t drawn—but voices rose. Others stirred. Slash rolled to his side, blinking through sleep. Tiger rose silently.

Irving’s position was clear: the crown would not be destroyed blindly. It would be examined. Judged. Returned, perhaps, to the Church of St. Cuthbert in Hommlet—who had funded their war against this rot in the first place.

Terry supported caution.

Silversun wanted certainty.

In the end, no one acted rashly.

The crown remained intact.

But something else cracked that night.

Trust, perhaps.

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Planting 13 — The Stronghold Revealed

By midmorning, the hills gave way to sightlines.

And there it was.

The slavers’ stockade.

High walls. Reinforced gates. Patrols in steady rotation. Towers with archers. Smoke from within. Organized. Alert.

“Front gate’s suicide,” Dog said flatly.

They pulled back.

Horses and cart were hidden under entangling brush and canvas. Tracks masked. Animals released quietly to range.

From a higher ridge, they watched.

Patrol timing. Guard shifts. Blind angles.

There were rumors of a haunted section the guards avoided. If true, that was an opening.

Invisibility was discussed. Illusion. Bluff. Fire. Faith.

No decision yet.

Only reconnaissance.

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Outcome Notes

• XP Awarded: 1,000 XP each

• Items of Note:

  • Ancient sword (superior enchantment; shattered Slash’s former blade on contact)

  • One ruby gem recovered from skull pillar

  • Chaotic crown retained (undestroyed)

• New Ally:

  • Kern Blackshield of Safeton — man-at-arms searching for abducted wife

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Current Status

• Party low on spells but rested

• Crown under guard (Irving, Dog, Silversun aware of risk)

• Stronghold identified and observed

• Infiltration plan pending

• Emotional tension rising between divine caution and arcane pragmatism

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The stockade waits.

Behind those walls are slaves. Slavers. And possibly Kern’s wife.

And somewhere inside, the chain that binds this whole rotten network together.

Next move decides everything.

THE END OF APPRENTICESHIP

This is the beginning of the rest of your life

With the Slaver’s Stronghold finally reached, a place I’ve actually tried to avoid, the haunted memories of why I am actually here talk to me constantly.  This is my honorable death, considering the size of the stronghold and its inhabitants.

 

 Balan Xos never saw his own death coming. He never hurt any humanoid in his unstable thirst for knowledge.  He lived peacefully in a peaceful city he looked over and they hated him for it.

 

Yet I yearn for that one last lesson.

I have long pondered this question, as one does when standing at the edge of this power not yet claimed.

When does a Magic-User know the hour has come to walk alone, to sever the tether of tutelage and step beyond the long shadow of a master’s tower?

When does the schooling truly end?
Is it when the last lesson is spoken?
When the final spell is memorized?
When the hands no longer tremble while perfectly writing the scroll?

And if one is fortunate—truly fortunate—to be chosen by a Master who deems them worthy, how does the student know the judgment is true?

Yes. Yes. I hear the old answer whispered by every academy hall and dust-choked library:

“Your Master will tell you when the time is right.”

But what if—

What if the student is forced to become the master not by readiness…
but by survival?

Then there is no ceremony.
No farewell.
No blessing of staff and sigil.

Not even the essential spellbook!
Ash.
Memory. And a silence where a voice once stood.

 

Here is but a smidgen of my story.

 

The night the world broke, it did not do so with thunder. It broke with chains, as it came in chains.

Alhaster burned in quiet colors—ember-red windows, guttering wards, spell-light dying one sigil at a time. The slavers did not come as raiders. They came as customers of fiends. Silent. Precise. Cloaked in bought magic and stolen prayers, bearing sigils older than Hommlet’s first stones and darker than anything whispered in Greyhawk’s libraries.

I felt them before I saw them. The mana I learned to sense screamed.

Balan Xos of Alhaster—Archmage, spell-jammer, dark sun seeker, planescape forger, my master—stood at the heart of his tower when the first ward fell. Not afraid. Not surprised. Furious. The kind of fury that bends reality.

“Run, Silversun,” he said calmly, his eyes black as pitch, his hands weaving.  “They come to kill me and will do you no such honor young apprentice.”

I didn’t listen, my 1^st time ever.  What did he mean they wouldn’t do me “such honor”? I didn’t run. That was my first sin.

Chains of binding burst from the floor like iron serpents, ruined in languages I had only seen in forbidden margins. Prismatic-fields collapsed the air. My feeble weak spells died in my hands like drowned birds. I tried to cast them, all of them. The words turned to ash in my mouth.

Xos did not waste time on defense. He became a storm.

Fire and void tore through the chamber. Two fiends ceased to exist—no bodies, no ichor, no memory in the wraith of inevitable death. Just absence. A third screamed as its soul was ripped from his flesh and fed into a containment sigil like fuel into a furnace.

But there were mage killers that had come prepared.

A black spear of anti-magic punched through Xos’s shielding and buried itself in his chest.  Then another spray or rainbow colors.

He staggered. Not fell. Staggered.

He turned to me then, blood already burning through his robes like liquid rubies.

“Remember who you are,” he said.
“Remember what they are,” as he pulled the black spear from his chest, screaming in defiant pain.

Then they executed him. Not quickly. Not cleanly. I was left alive & forced to watch.

They carved the sigils out of his body while he still lived, harvesting spell-anchors from his bones, ripping living runes from his skin, draining his mind into crystal phylacteries like wine into goblets. The Archmage of Alhaster died screaming spells, his last finger of death took out two of the warlocks standing over him, this last act shattered the stone of his tower—but not his will.

When his heart finally failed, the city’s destruction went silent.

 

 

That silence was worse than the screaming. I was grabbed by the hair as some beast dragged me outside, the skin on my legs shredded along with my robes and dignity.  Stripped completely bare black iron shackels closed around my throat and wrists. My vision went white. My magic went dark. The world collapsed into pain, iron, and shadow.

Dragged.
Bound.
Catalogued.

A slave.

As they hauled me through the burning streets, I watched my master’s tower crumble behind me, its upper spire collapsing in slow, terrible grace—like a king bowing.

That was the night the slavers stripped me of my name.

That was the night I learned theirs.

And that was the moment the war truly began. The fools did not kill me, their 1^st mistake in my presence.

Because they did not take a student. They forged an enemy.

And the blood of Balan Xos of Alhaster did not soak into the stones of Hommlet in silence. It wrote a debt into the world. One I will collect.

 

As soon as I’m out of these chains…

The Watch and the Hunt

 At night, while all is still, Dog watches from his arboral perch and whispers.....

 Lady of the quiet green

Watcher of root and branch

I walk the paths you keep hidden

Let my feet fall where the earth is strong

Let the leaves cover my passing

Grant me the patience of stone

Sharp eye of the hawk

The mercy to spare what need not die

If I must hunt let it be clean

If I must fight let it be just

If I must kill let it serve your balance

Guard the wild places while I am gone

Should I fall far from tree and stream

Let my bones rest where grass will grow

For no crown I ask nor song to be sung

Only to remain unseen 

and worthy of the paths you entrust to me

Elhonna, sit with me as I sit alone