📜 Session Overview

It was the third day of the trek, and the party woke to the same ugly miracle they'd gone to sleep with: two dozen pteranodons and a guard still unconscious, sprawled like felled statues. Xavril never truly rested—he paced with a loaded crossbow the entire night, eyes scanning the treeline and the sky as though the forest itself might suddenly decide to blink.

During that long rest, Warwick—already tangled up in that golden-eyed Dream Deity—was dragged into a vision that wasn't his. He watched through Xercomath's eyes, seeing flashes of Gloomspire: Xercomath, his son, and Vendui the flumph—sweet, small, and painfully out of place in the nightmare-halls of the Underdark.

Morning brought planning, grim hands, and worse ideas.

TyelKoron pushed for answers—someone had to. Sorina approached the downed pteranodons to "inspect" them, and something inside her sight shifted. She described it like an X-ray: bone and structure laid bare, and in that vision her own skeleton lit up—her bones glowing an eerie red. Warwick, wary of "fixing" whatever spell-sleep had claimed the beasts, still helped devise a brutal experiment: a jolt, a shock, a forced restart.

Warwick drove mana into one of the creatures—shocking grasp, but "more" than the spell, like he was grabbing the world's wiring with bare hands. Sorina tried to manipulate its state, to shove life back into the body like slamming a door that wanted to stay open.

The pteranodon convulsed.

And then… the inside of its skull betrayed it.

The brain softened, melted wrong, and Sorina—panicking, brilliant, desperate—tried to mend what was collapsing. Instead the scene turned into a butcher's tragedy: the skull split, the brain was removed and replaced, and the creature died in a way that left nobody feeling like the winner. If the forest had a jury, it was silent—and not forgiving.

They stopped trying to wake the rest.

With no better option, they lashed the unconscious guard to Broj's back like a grim travel-pack. Xavril took point, moving with a methodical precision that felt almost supernatural—like his presence forced the world into orderly lines. Someone noted it again: Xavril has guarded for a decade, yet he carries himself like a man who doesn't age the way others do. Elf blood, surely… but there was something stranger in the cadence of him.

As the party broke camp, Warwick's eyes flickered yellow-gold—and he turned inward.

He used his Mind Palace, reaching for TyelKoron through a painting on the wall like it was a door half-remembered. For a moment Warwick went still—too still—frozen mid-thought until Broj slapped him back to the waking world. Whatever Warwick was building in his head, it was becoming a place you could get lost in.

They marched. Xavril led. Sorina watched Warwick. Sorina also watched the guard, unease growing like mold.

Behind them, TyelKoron lingered to test a theory: was the pteranodon sleep tied to distance? After about an hour apart, the answer came back with a cold finality—distance didn't matter. The spell wasn't a leash. It was a nail.

So TyelKoron changed shape, and with the wings of the manticore—a gift and a warning both—he took to the air to catch up. When he reached the group he hit the earth running and tackled Xercomath, hard enough to rattle teeth and ego alike. Nothing had changed back at the pteranodons. No stirring. No waking. Just the same dead stillness.

Half a day later, with the sun at its apex, the party stopped to rest.

That's when they checked the guard.

He was gone.

Not freshly—deceased for a while, body already drifting toward that quiet stiffness that makes grief late and useless. The best guess was brain damage from whatever had been done—or whatever had been done to him before any of them ever arrived. Broj shifted that weight on his back and, for once, even the loxodon's strength looked tired.

TyelKoron reached out to the living world, casting Speak with Plants to ask the forest what hunted nearby. The trees answered the way trees do: indirectly, truth wrapped in terror. They spoke of creatures that pulled limbs and left things hurt and broken.

And the moment the spell carried his question into the green… something in the green answered back.

The White Apes came.

They moved like nightmares wearing fur—silent until they weren't—sniffing the air like it had secrets in it. They weren't drawn by meat. They were drawn by magic, by the strange signatures clinging to this party like perfume.

The apes rushed them.

The fight was savage and close, the kind that leaves everyone breathing hard and suddenly aware of how soft throats are. Spells cracked. Steel rang. Blood hit leaves and didn't belong there. And when it finally ended, it ended in brutality: Sorina tore the arm off the last ape, not in rage, but in something colder—efficiency, necessity, survival.

The forest fell quiet again.

Quiet enough to hear the next problem breathing.

Xavril stepped in, signing sharply to Sinora—concern cut into gestures like knife-work. Then he did something unsettlingly intimate: he sniffed and inspected the party like a hound trained on curses instead of criminals. He wasn't checking for blood. He was checking for sickness.

He found it.

Sorina. Xercomath. Both carried the infection from the apes' bites: Arcane Wasting.

Xavril warned them with the kind of urgency that doesn't waste syllables: soon the infected would become contagious. And worse—once it took root, casting a targeted spell could pass the infection from caster to victim like a parasite hitching rides on magic itself. Healing would become risk. Buffs would become weapons. Every helpful act would come with a hidden blade.

The party tried to process that. The universe did not wait for them to finish.

Something went wrong with TyelKoron.

In cat form, he saw it first: the Golden-Eyed Naga Dream Deity—standing in the middle of them, slack-jawed, motionless, like a puppet paused between strings. TyelKoron reached for it instinctively, trying to pull it in, trying to contain it, maybe even trying to offer it to his own patron—because he'd made deals too, and now two gods were sniffing around the same campfire.

And in that same breath, Warwick's world folded inward.

They were suddenly inside Warwick's Mind Palace—but it wasn't the calm fortress of thought it used to be. Flames licked the halls. The air felt heavy, like an old grief reheated. Warwick could see an entity inside, a presence hunting through his thoughts.

TyelKoron couldn't.

Warwick watched that entity chasing the golden-eyed dream thing through his mind like a predator in a burning library, and the chase was not symbolic. It hurt. It pressed into Warwick's skull like a physical weight, grinding his sanity into paste.

TyelKoron, standing beside him in that inner world, tried to intervene—warning the unseen hunter to leave his friends unharmed. He forced his way deeper into Warwick's fortress, searching corners, turning over rooms, but to him there was only fire and Warwick's panic. He warned a threat he couldn't perceive, which is its own kind of horror.

Meanwhile, in the physical world, TyelKoron's body moved.

He approached the Sisters with flames in his eyes, speaking words that didn't belong in daylight—Abyssal, slick and cruel. And Sorina—infected, exhausted, and already cracked open by the day—felt something twist inside her: elation, sudden and wrong, like laughing at a funeral. The spell didn't just touch her mind. It tilted it.

Reality snapped, buckled, and snapped again as the party tried to understand what they'd just witnessed: TyelKoron acting unlike himself, Warwick battling something invisible, eyes around the camp flickering gold and returning to normal like a signal trying to find a receiver.

Warwick, desperate, attempted to communicate with the entity inside him—hold it, reason with it, bargain with it.

The entity answered with pressure.

The chase intensified. Warwick's distress turned to collapse. Somewhere in the burning halls of his mind, a voice cut through—Vyr, cold and condemning, calling him a fool.

Warwick's eyes flashed gold.

He lurched toward Broj like he needed something solid, something real—and then he dropped, unconscious.

Later, he woke with a skull-splitting headache and something far worse: holes. Missing time. Missing context. Missing pieces of the last day like pages torn from a book. His last clear memory was waking at the bowl-platform, and everything after was fog and dread. Whatever fought inside him hadn't just bruised him. It had stolen.

They traveled on. Because what else do you do when your options are "move" or "die where you stand"?

Night fell again. They made camp. Xavril stayed awake, crossbow ready, the only one behaving like sleep was optional.

Rest came fitfully.

TyelKoron tried to force Xavril to rest with hibernation—and it did nothing. Either Xavril resisted, or something about him refused the very idea of surrender.

And then Broj dreamed.

In his vision the world was red and black, smoky and scorched. He stood on a massive platform surrounded by a wasteland, and in the distance the entity approached—colossal, a walking disaster. Broj—never one to cower—made a hand gesture at it, a signal of challenge or greeting.

The thing returned the gesture.

Then it kept walking.

And as it drew near, details sharpened in the nightmare-light: skin reddish-brown, claws, a strange anatomy—breasts, five-fingered hands like a humanoid mockery stretched to titan scale. It looked down at him like he was a curiosity on the edge of its hunger.

Broj woke with the taste of ash in his mouth.

Morning came like a sentence.

When the party rose, the infection had advanced. Sorina and Xercomath were visibly ill, Arcane Wasting taking its first real bite—weakness, sickness, the beginning of a countdown. The group stood at the edge of two converging disasters: a contagious magical blight inside their ranks, and a golden-eyed, fire-chased presence that could walk into their minds whenever it pleased.

Xavril pointed them toward Vysteerie again.

And so they continued—wounded, haunted, and carrying more than their gear.

Because in these woods, even your dreams can catch you.

⚔️ Key Events

• Vision Through Xercomath's Eyes: Warwick experienced visions of Gloomspire during his rest, seeing Xercomath's past with his son and Vendui the flumph in the depths of the Underdark.
• The Failed Resurrection: Sorina and Warwick attempted to wake an unconscious pteranodon using their mana abilities. The experiment went catastrophically wrong—the creature's brain melted, the skull split, and the pteranodon died in a grotesque display of magical mishap.
• The Guard's Death: The unconscious guard carried by Broj was discovered to be deceased, likely from brain damage sustained before the party even found him.
• TyelKoron's Distance Test: TyelKoron stayed behind to determine if the pteranodons' sleep was distance-based. After an hour of separation, he confirmed it wasn't—the spell holding them was permanent and unyielding.
• White Ape Ambush: TyelKoron's Speak with Plants spell inadvertently alerted nearby White Apes, who attacked the party, drawn by the magical signatures emanating from the group.
• Arcane Wasting Infection: Xavril identified that Sorina and Xercomath had been infected with Arcane Wasting from the apes' bites—a contagious disease that can spread through targeted spell casting.
• The Mind Palace Assault: An unknown entity began hunting the Golden-Eyed Dream Deity through Warwick's Mind Palace, causing him immense psychic distress while TyelKoron tried to intervene from within.
• TyelKoron's Possession: In the physical world, TyelKoron approached the Sisters with flames in his eyes, speaking Abyssal and causing Sorina to feel unnatural elation.
• Warwick's Collapse: After hearing Vyr's voice calling him a fool, Warwick's eyes flashed gold and he fell unconscious, later waking with severe memory loss.
• Broj's Apocalyptic Vision: During rest, Broj dreamed of a colossal entity approaching him across a scorched wasteland—a being with reddish-brown skin, claws, and an unsettling humanoid form at titan scale.
• Infection Advances: By morning, both Sorina and Xercomath showed visible signs of illness as the Arcane Wasting began to take hold.

⚔️ Combat Encounters

👥 NPCs Encountered

🔍 Important Discoveries

💰 Loot & Rewards

• White Ape Bodies: Looted by Egg for components (specific items not detailed)
• Experience: Combat experience from White Apes encounter
• Knowledge: Understanding of Arcane Wasting transmission and symptoms

✨ Character Moments

🖼️ Session Images

📝 DM Notes

Session Tone: This session maintained a consistent thread of dread and supernatural horror. The failed pteranodon resurrection set the tone early—actions have consequences, and magic is dangerous when misunderstood.

Arcane Wasting Introduction: This disease mechanic adds a fascinating layer of tactical complexity. Players now have to think carefully about every supportive spell cast. The infected become both vulnerable and dangerous, creating interesting roleplay opportunities around isolation, fear, and trust.

The Dream Deity Arc: The entity hunting through Warwick's Mind Palace while TyelKoron can't see it creates excellent dramatic irony. Warwick's memory loss adds real stakes—he's losing pieces of himself. The golden-eyed flashes across multiple party members suggest the deity is trying to find a new host or is fragmenting across the group.

Xavril's Mysteries: Players are clearly noticing Xavril's oddities—his agelessness, his tirelessness, his resistance to magic. The slow reveal is working well. His curse-detection abilities make him invaluable but also raise questions about what he truly is.

Broj's Vision: This apocalyptic dream sequence plants seeds for future threats. The entity's gesture-mirroring and approach suggests intelligence and perhaps recognition. The ash taste upon waking ties it to something more than mere dream.

Pacing Notes: The session balanced investigation, failed experimentation, travel, combat, and supernatural horror well. The reveals came at good intervals, never overwhelming but keeping pressure constant.

Player Engagement: Strong roleplay from the table, especially during the pteranodon experiment and the Mind Palace sequences. Players are leaning into the horror elements and embracing character vulnerability.

🎭 Looking Ahead