Session 132

Revenge

Chapter 1: Head of the Snake

When the massive door was forced open, it swung inward with a groaning echo that rolled through the shell like distant thunder. What had seemed compact from outside was revealed as a vast and ornate throne room, its vaulted ceiling swallowed by shadow. Decayed murals crawled across the walls, depicting forgotten wars and psionic nightmares, while the air hung heavy with rot and the low hum of necrotic power.

Jagged pylons rose throughout the chamber, each crowned with a glowing purple orb. Their eerie light pulsed like a living heartbeat, casting long, warped shadows that danced across stone and bone alike. At the far end, upon a raised dais, stood the Kaisharga. Green psionic fire burned in its eyes as it regarded the party with cold intelligence and simmering wrath, psychic energy crackling around its skeletal hands.

At its side loomed the Bone Colossi—towering constructs of fused remains, massive and jagged. Their necrotic glow mingled with the pylons’ purple light as they shifted and cracked, as if eager to be unleashed.

The Kaisharga spoke then, its voice calm and venomous, promising inevitability, the fall of Tyr, and vengeance yet to come. Every word pressed down on the room like a weight. This was the head of the snake, the architect of the undead army—and it was ready.

Shiv answered with fury. Rage tore through him as he took on the aspect of his klar, the Athasian psionic bear, and charged a Bone Colossus. He invoked the Fury of the Arena and swung at the towering construct, missing in his haste. His second blow landed with crushing force—but the impact rippled strangely, and a nearby pylon orb throbbed in response, siphoning away part of the damage. Snarling, Shiv smashed the orb instead, then struck the colossus again. Once more another orb reverberated, dulling the blow. Realization struck. Shiv shattered that orb as well and bellowed to the others, “Destroy the orbs!”

Karnos merged with Shank, weaving their wills together. Shank split into a psionic clone while Karnos erected an intellect fortress around them. The Bone Colossi answered, stomping forward and swinging massive bone limbs at Shiv and the joined Shank–Karnos form.

The Kaisharga drew deeply on the room itself, ripping necrotic energy from the pylons and floor alike. A crushing gravitic grasp seized Fazanna, Zahraan, Safi, and the Shank clone, dragging them together and pinning them in place. Aldric responded with brutal efficiency, shattering three of the glowing orbs before invoking his crimson offering and flooding his weapon with corrosive acid.

Zahraan hardened his defenses with ki, vanishing into a cloak of shadows as his body twisted into a bestial form. Fazanna escaped the grasp with a flash of misty step, lined up the pylons, and hurled a lightning bolt through them. The magic vanished into the crystals—and then surged back, knitting shattered bone and restoring the Colossi instead of harming them.

Safi slipped free with a nomadic step, cast bless over his allies, and ignited his radiant halo. The Kaisharga twisted Fazanna’s lightning through the pylons, redirecting it into a ray of enfeeblement that weakened both her and Aldric. With a single word of power, it stunned Fazanna where she stood, then unleashed twin beams of necrotic and psionic force into the joined Shank–Karnos form.

Again the room tightened. Another gravitic grasp seized Fazanna, Zahraan, and the Shank clone. Aldric shattered two more orbs and struck a Bone Colossus, while Zahraan shadowstepped to an orb and smashed it, then shattered another with his bone widow knife. A hurled javelin struck a third orb and simply ceased to exist. The Shank clone raged helplessly within the crushing force.

Shiv, hasted by a potion, became a blur of motion. He darted beneath the Colossi, crushing four orbs in rapid succession, then turned his mace on one of the towering constructs. Shank–Karnos smashed another orb and carved into a Colossus, while Karnos unleashed a dazing psionic strike that staggered it.

The Kaisharga retaliated with a gesture of utter contempt, banishing the joined Shank–Karnos into a maze beyond reality. Fazanna shook off her stun as Safi rushed to Shiv and poured healing magic into him. The Bone Colossi battered the party with sweeping blows as Fazanna reignited her bladesong, seized Shiv, and tore space open with a dimension door, placing them both beside the Kaisharga.

The lich answered with a soul burn, necrotic and psionic power ripping into them both. Safi closed in and conjured a spiritual weapon, smashing it into an orb—only for the magic to be absorbed and devoured. The Kaisharga defiled reality itself, tearing at Fazanna’s and Shiv’s very existence.

Zahraan closed in, unleashing a relentless flurry of knife strikes and blows, but the Kaisharga slipped away from most of them and answered with another devastating soul burn that tore through Zahraan, Shiv, and Fazanna alike. Psionic lashes cracked out, and a word of power stunned Aldric.

Shiv disengaged, smashed the final orb, then baited and switched with Fazanna before swinging at the Kaisharga—only for it to vanish and reappear farther away. At that moment, the joined Shank–Karnos burst back from the maze, unleashing a brutal action surge as steel and psionics tore into the battlefield.

The Bone Colossi continued their relentless assault. Aldric shook off the stun. The Kaisharga commanded its undead servants to strike Safi, and a crushing blow from a Colossus dropped him to the floor. Shiv surged to him, calling on the Blessing of the Tree to drag Safi back from death’s edge.

The battle tightened into its final moments. Zahraan closed once more and landed telling blows with his bone widow knife. The Shank clone carved into a Bone Colossus. And at last, amid a storm of steel, psionics, and fury, the Kaisharga fell—torn apart by the reunited Shank and Karnos in a whirlwind of decisive strikes.

As its green fire guttered and died, the oppressive energy in the throne room began to fade. The pylons fell dark, the Colossi slowed, and the whispers receded. The head of the snake had been severed, and the undead army had lost its master.

Chapter 2: Deadly Choice

With a final, coordinated convergence of steel and sorcery, the party struck true. Their weapons and magic pierced the Kaisharga’s defenses, and it staggered, a jagged gasp of psychic energy tearing free as green light fractured across its frame. For a brief, fragile moment, it collapsed onto the dais, and the Bone Colossi fell motionless, frozen like statues of fused bone. Relief began to settle in the chamber.

It did not last.

The Kaisharga twisted and rose again, necrotic and psionic energy erupting from its body in a violent surge. Its form swelled and warped, growing larger, more terrible—no longer bound by anything that could be called mortal. A chilling, triumphant laugh rolled through the throne room as it cried out:

“You are too late! Even now, Tyr burns to rubble!”

Instinctively, their gazes snapped toward the open doors. In the far distance, thick smoke coiled into the sky, an unmistakable sign of a city consumed by fire and chaos.

The Kaisharga’s voice washed over the chamber again, calm, mocking, and absolute:

“My task was simple: to keep you occupied. And it… was successful.”

The weight of the moment pressed down on them. They could see devastation already unfolding in Tyr, its streets lost to flame and fear. Every instinct urged them to abandon the throne room and race toward the city, to undo what damage they could and save whoever might yet live.

Yet memory cut just as sharply as urgency.

Tyr itself had scarred them—from banishment to rumors and their time there as slaves. Also the Verransi Family that had been the root of so many problems was there.

The purple-lit pylons pulsed with necrotic energy. The Bone Colossi shifted, looming and silent, as if aware that the choice before the party would shape everything that followed. Between the burning city and the ascended horror before them, the chamber hummed with unbearable tension.

The decision came quickly, hardened by memory and resolve.

They chose to finish the Kaisharga—not out of vengeance for Tyr, but because it stood before them now, a living nexus of necrotic and psionic power. Leaving it alive would only invite greater ruin later. Whatever awaited them in the burning city would have to wait. Here, in this throne room of bone and shadow, they committed themselves fully to ending the Kaisharga once and for all.

Chapter 3: Questions

With a final surge of effort, your strikes find their mark. The mythic Kaisharga shudders violently, necrotic and psionic energies flaring wildly before it collapses onto the stone floor of the dais. Around it, the Bone Colossi convulse as one, fractures racing through their massive frames. With thunderous cracks, they crumble apart, collapsing into heaps of shattered bone and dust, the echoes of their fall rolling through the throne chamber.

For a heartbeat, silence reigns.

Then the Kaisharga moves.

With a grinding rasp of bone and will, it twists and rises once more. Green psionic fire and necrotic power surge outward as its form expands, becoming larger, more terrible—its shape distorting beyond mortal symmetry, as if reality itself struggles to contain it.

A chilling, triumphant laugh fills the chamber.

“You are too late! Even now, Tyr burns to rubble!”

Instinctively, you turn toward the open doors.

This time, there is no mistaking it.

On the horizon, thick black smoke coils into the sky, illuminated from below by an angry orange glow. Even from this distance, you can see fires spreading through districts, hear—perhaps only in your imagination, perhaps not—the distant roar of a city coming apart. Towers vanish behind curtains of smoke. The skyline of Tyr fractures and disappears as flames consume stone and steel alike.

The Kaisharga’s voice rolls over the chamber again, mocking and calm.

“My task was simple: to keep you occupied. And it… was successful.”

The purple-lit pylons pulse harder now, necrotic energy throbbing like a diseased heart. The air grows thick, oppressive. The Bone Colossi remnants twitch faintly, as though even in ruin they still heed the will of their master.

Every instinct screams at you to run—to abandon this place and race toward the burning city, to pull survivors from the flames and fight whatever horror has been unleashed there. Yet the Kaisharga stands before you still, radiating power, daring you to challenge it one final time.

The chamber hums with tension, balanced on the edge of catastrophe.

And then—at last—you finish it.

With a final, merciless assault, the Kaisharga shudders. Its towering form convulses as the necrotic and psionic energies spiral inward, collapsing violently. It crashes to the floor once more, the mythic power guttering out in a storm of green sparks.

For a moment, it does not rise.

When it moves again, it is smaller. Normal-sized. Diminished.

The lich drags itself upright, eyes burning with grim, tireless intelligence. Its voice is hoarse now, strained, yet resolute.

“I cannot truly die. I serve Dregoth. He has my phylactery. I will be back.”

It leans forward, the glow around it flickering like a dying flame, and adds with cold urgency,

“I have only a few moments… ask me your questions.”

When asked why it attacked Tyr, the Kaisharga throws its head back and cackles, a dry, broken sound.

“I did not. I was just the destraction.”

Its form flickers as it speaks, edges blurring, necrotic energy bleeding away in thin strands.

When Shiv asks about his hammer, the Kaisharga answers without hesitation, malice sharpening every word: Dregoth would never permit such a weapon to exist—and had it destroyed.

With that answer, the creature visibly shrinks. Its shoulders hunch. The green light in its eyes dims. The psionic aura fractures into drifting motes that hang briefly in the air before fading.

Finally, Karnos asks how Dregoth might be killed.

The Kaisharga only stares at him.

Seconds stretch.

Then, slowly, it answers:

“You cannot kill that which is already dead. Better to ask how you might still the sun at its zenith, unwrite the first betrayal, and make the Dragon remember mercy.”

As the final words leave it, the Kaisharga collapses inward. Its body withers rapidly, shrinking into a rotting husk. Necrotic energy sparks once. The psionic aura flares in a final, violent pulse—

—and then the creature vanishes.

All that remains is a scatter of dust across the stone, fading motes of green light, and thin tendrils of psionic energy that unravel and dissolve into nothing.

The throne room is silent.

Far beyond its walls, Tyr burns.

Chapter 4: What's Left of Tyr

As you leave the fortress behind and stride out onto the cracked, lifeless plains, the weight of what has transpired follows you like a shadow. The land is silent, the kind of silence that comes only after catastrophe. Even the wind seems reluctant to stir the dust at your feet, as if the world itself is holding its breath.

On the horizon, a vast column of smoke coils upward, thick and black, swallowing the dying light of the setting sun. It stains the sky like a wound that will not close. There is no mistaking it—Tyr burns. Not in scattered fires or distant skirmishes, but in total ruin. Entire districts have collapsed into themselves, stone and adobe reduced to glowing embers and ash. The streets where voices once cried out in trade and defiance are gone, buried beneath charred debris and drifting smoke.

And yet, standing in cruel defiance of the destruction around it, Kalak’s Ziggurat remains untouched. Its angular silhouette cuts through the haze, dark and immaculate, a solitary monument rising from the devastation like a mockery of hope. While the city around it has been scoured away, the Ziggurat endures—unchanged, unscarred, watching over the ruins as it always has. Whether this is by design or by dark irony is impossible to say.

You see no movement among the wreckage. No fleeing citizens. No survivors calling for aid. The haze is thick with ash and the bitter stench of burned stone and flesh, and it clings to your lungs with every breath. Whatever happened here happened swiftly and completely. The battle you fought within the fortress bought time—but not enough. The Kaisharga’s delay served its purpose, and the cost of that truth settles heavily in your chest.

Victory offers no comfort now. The enemy you slew lies scattered to dust, yet the city you might have saved is already lost. Tyr has fallen, not with a final scream, but with a slow, suffocating collapse into ruin. As you stand on the edge of the plains, staring into the smoke-choked distance, the realization is unavoidable: there is nothing left here to save—only ashes, unanswered questions, and the long road ahead.

Chapter 5: Altaruk: A New Athas

The journey back to Athas stretches interminably—not for the miles beneath their feet, but for the unbearable weight that presses on their hearts. Each step is heavy with exhaustion, each breath tainted by the memories of fire and ruin. Between them, they carry the body of Sadira, her still form a silent testament to the cost of their victory. Wounds both visible and invisible mark their bodies and spirits; blood has dried into dust on scorched skin, muscles ache from relentless exertion, and their heads hang low, bowed under grief and the burden of all they have witnessed.

They had won, yes—but what is victory when the world they sought to protect lies in ashes? Tyr’s ruin, the Kaisharga vanquished but fleetingly contained, and the losses they suffered are etched into the very core of their being. Every footfall on the barren plains seems to echo the questions that claw at them: What is justice? What remains to fight for? What comes next when triumph tastes so bitter?

At last, they reach their bastion. Its walls rise like a solemn promise amid the desolate horizon. They cross its threshold weary, battered, and bloodied—but not defeated. The fire within them still burns, small but unyielding, flickering against despair. Eyes meet across the camp, unspoken acknowledgment passing between them: the road forward is uncertain, the path perilous, yet they endure.

And so they stand on the precipice of choice, hearts heavy, hands bloodied, souls scarred—and the question hangs in the air, echoing through their minds: What will they do next?

Chapter 6: A Letter from Dregoth

When Safi woke, a letter was simply there—resting beside him on the bed, untouched by dust or wind. No footsteps, no wards disturbed, no sign of intrusion. The air around it carried a faint, sickly warmth, as though it remembered fire, and a low psionic pressure pressed behind his eyes the moment he noticed it. Whatever had placed the letter did not creep, did not rush, and did not fear discovery. It had been left with absolute confidence, as if the sender knew exactly where Safi would be… and exactly when he would wake.

The letter is written on thick, dark vellum cured from some unknown hide. The ink is a deep green-black that seems to drink in the light. The script is impossibly precise, every line carved with deliberate care rather than written. Faint psionic pressure lingers on the page, like a headache waiting to bloom.

To the meddlers who dared stand against me,

You will read this, and you will understand.

You believed you had won. You believed that by striking down my servant, by breaking my designs piece by piece, you had delayed me—thwarted me—hurt me. Such beliefs are common among the short‑lived. They are also irrelevant.

Know this truth: your interference did not halt my ascension. It merely forced me to adjust the shape of my vengeance.

While you bled upon the shell of my fortress, while you exhausted yourselves against a Kaisharga whose sole purpose was to hold your attention, I acted. Not in haste. Not in anger. But with precision.

Tyr is ash.

Its streets burn still. Its towers have fallen inward upon themselves. Its people—those who once dared to believe themselves free—have fed the fires that now stain the horizon. Kalak’s ziggurat yet stands, untouched, a monument preserved not out of mercy, but as a reminder: even ruins may kneel.

Sadira is dead.

Her light did not save her. Her defiance did not matter. She died knowing that she had failed—not only herself, but you. That knowledge was my final gift to her.

This was not necessity. It was balance.

You cost me time. I took from you a city.

You challenged my will. I answered with annihilation.

Understand this as well: I did not pursue you afterward. I did not hunt you down as you limped from the battlefield, carrying your dead and your doubts. I have no need to. What I required has been accomplished.

I am complete.

The final transformation is finished. The last limitations of my former state have been burned away. I am no longer becoming—I am. Dragon. God. I stand beyond Boris now, beyond all who came before me. What remains of Athas exists at my indulgence, not my restraint.

Consider this letter a closing of accounts.

You live because I allow it. You walk free because, at present, you no longer matter.

But do not mistake this for forgiveness.

If our paths should cross again—by fate, by arrogance, or by your own misplaced sense of duty—understand this clearly: I will not distract myself with servants. I will not bargain. I will not explain.

I will erase you.

Not as enemies.
Not as heroes.
But as errors.

Carry this knowledge with you. Let it weigh upon every choice you make, every road you take, every hope you dare to entertain.

You are remembered.
You are measured.
And you are finished.

—Dregoth,
God-Dragon of Giustenal,
He Who Has Already Won

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