The session began with Siax turning his attention to the moonblade, and what he found unsettled him. A blackened rune had melted into the steel, the blade without its sheath, and when he reached out to it the connection overwhelmed him before he could resist. He fell into a trance and saw through the blade's own perception: a hand reaching down, silk on the arm, a Merdelainian noble attempting to claim ownership. The blade caught fire at the touch. The screaming told the rest.
When Siax came back to himself the knowledge settled over him coldly. The white stripe, the tower in negative on the clothing. Only one person in Merdelain wore that heraldry. The Hand of the Queen had tried to take his blade, and the blade had burned her for it.
There was little time to sit with it. A fight was already unfolding, and the party moved through it with the kind of grim efficiency that had become familiar in the tower's depths. The Merdelainian leader had words for Tiaumil before the end, calling him traitor, and received an eldritch blast in answer. The last warrior tried something desperate with a potion and grew a tentacle where his hand had been, but it availed him nothing.
Among the captives in the room was an eladrin who introduced himself as Pancheska, calm and gracious despite the collar at his throat. Arya removed it, and when it fell open he expressed genuine surprise that such a thing was possible. She picked it up, looked at the unconscious scout nearby, and put it on him instead. Ruthless, Pancheska observed. Warranted, Arya replied.
He proved worth having. He had been held for the better part of a year, had seen much of the tower, and when Arya pressed him in Silven his composure slipped just enough to reveal the truth beneath it. He was no random captive. He was an agent of Oren, Lord of the Green Fae, and his message was simple: do not stop the ritual. If Merdelain reached the material plane, they would walk into a trap prepared by the courts. The destruction of this place might even bring the Bramble Queen back from her long exile.
Arya said nothing further, but she remembered everything.
The hidden doors Pancheska revealed led them deeper into the floor. Behind one, a fire elemental had been chained in a room of runes, its voice bleeding through the pipes in desperate Primordial. Arya dismantled the bindings and helped break what remained of the chains, and the elemental fell to one knee before her. She was also fire, it said. It would follow her.
The summoning chamber beyond the third door was chaos from the moment they entered. Creatures packed into warded circles, a Gloomweaver calling them cattle from the shadows, a sorrowsworn freed and wailing, and beneath it all a toad-like demon making Arya increasingly creative offers. They held the room, barely, until a single devastating burst dropped ten creatures at once and the Gloomweaver staggered through a portal of her own making rather than face what was left of them.
The portal stayed open long enough for Kael to throw his sword through on principle. It came back changed, carrying the weight and smell of deep water, barnacled and salt-worn and magical. A voice from somewhere in the flooded chamber beyond called after him, unhurried and faintly amused, promising a conversation the next time their paths crossed.
Then the portal closed. For tearing through the summoning chamber, they had bought themselves at least another day.