Session 26 - Xancelled

General Summary

Ionessa and Xanthos come back holding hands and grinning like idiots. Kestor gives them a wise nod and a thumbs up, then he attunes to the claw amulet and it sinks into his flesh and gives him claws and feathers down his arms! He identifies the gloves and banner, the gloves are good for throwing weapons and casting light, the banner is useful in battle but can also be planted in one spot to give big benefits to anyone in a wide area. Ionessa has a dream, she’s floating in inky blackness, pierced by large angry turquoise eyes. “I warned you.” She then sees another figure, one with the storm itself, Astrapyndircles.
“Bold and foolish to take mine own gifts and use them as my enemy.” Ionessa says she doesn’t want to be enemies and that she attacked him and keeping slaves is bad, but Astra says he’s too far above her station to have to listen to her. She says that him being a big deal doesn’t make bad things good. He says that he has work for her, “You took my granddaughter from me and you will return her, lest I find you and eat you and everyone that you know and turn your cities into glass.” She has to do what he says or he’ll basically kill everyone in the world, but he’ll reward her if she does what he says. He gives her 7 days.
Kestor finds himself in a opulently decorated room, gold, plush pillows, grapes and wine, and at the end of his bed is a door through which a man enters. Charcoal black skin, spindly white hair, and looks at him with great urgency. “My lady they’re not coming back. We need to leave. Your father is gone, everyone is gone, the city is empty and gone, we need to leave NOW.” The opulence melts away, Kestor is running on cobblestone through a dark city street, noises of animals and people talking makes him jump. Another man is there, a halfling cloaked and clutching something close - it’s the ember. Kestor tries to divert the story and avoid the alleyway that gets him killed by the Kenku. He exerts his will on the vision and goes in a different direction! A voice comes from the darkness behind, as the halfling hears it he shudders and clutches the package closer, “The city is burned, we have to get out of here, you have to trust me.” It’s the spindly man again, but it’s the Kenku mimicking his voice. Things become less detailed, like I’m running out of the side of a painting, things begin turning into this gray haze. “He can sense the thing, when it’s used.” Pairairi the Kenku is after the ember, he DID take it from the halfling, and knows where it is. RUN.
Kestor goes to check on Ionessa and make sure she and the ember are okay; they are. Ionessa’s eyes have turned blue and slitted like a dragon’s, they both comment on each other’s appearances but agree to discuss it in detail with everyone in the morning. Ionessa is worried that Astra can see through her eyes, so Kestor gives them the finger. Kestor asks how things went with Xanthos and she says they went very well! She invites him to stay and he sleeps in the corner, hoping Kovu will be tempted by his soft arms, but he doesn’t come over.
King Bion awakes us in the morning urgently, we have to leave immediately. The guards who were posted to defend the tomb were killed, King Bion thinks they were killed by someone after the ember. Pairairi. We teleport the fuck outta there and go back to Cherianto where Hedylus greets us! He has news for Xanthos, Phaedra is here in the city staying with Kriton the Games Warden. Kestor quickly tells Bion some information about Pairairi, Xanthos is worried that Phaedra is gonna kill Kriton so we rush over to his home! The door has been kicked in and his servants have been beaten to a pulp. Phaedra has Kriton tied up and is torturing him for information as to where the demon came from, Ionessa demands that she stop, and Xanthos has a moment where he’s having to bridge the divide between the moralities of his new girlfriend and also his mother.
Xanthos gets Kriton to give up the people he knows who were involved with the demon summoning, he wants Phaedra to give immunity, or for us to promise to protect him from her. We promise. He was approached by a Satyr woman who lives in the marsh to the North; he gave her money in exchange for the demon. Phaedra bids us leave at once for the summoners, she chides Xanthos for showing mercy and Ionessa does not trust her! Xanthos brings Kriton to the king’s justice before Phaedra can kill her, Neo heals some ungrateful servants. There is a thin plume of smoke rising over the city, Phaedra has set fire to Kriton’s home. Ionessa is aghast that she would do this, and questions how complicit Xanthos has been in this behavior in the past. He’s not a fan of fire but it seems he did stand by while she did similar acts. Ionessa looks lost for words, she thinks he wants to go commit evil acts with Phaedra, Xanthos denies that, he just doesn’t want to fight her.
Kestor tries to get to know Phaedra, she raised Xanthos and taught him to control his darker impulses. He was a biter. Kestor brings up the vampire they killed and the spear Xanthos has, and Kestor has a vision. He sees himself dragging a coffin alongside Phaedra over rough terrain, she’s younger, “I think this is as good a place as any.” We pull out shovels and start digging into the dirt. When he comes back around, he starts questioning her about the vision. She interprets it as him reading his mind and attacks him,
Demons are the spawn of Iasponas, a lesser deity but a demon nonetheless spawned from the runoff of the forge of Ptourge. Typically demon summoning involves a sacrifice of a living being that takes the place of the demon in the pits where demons are formed. Kestor says that there might be someone involved in that cult that could be redeemed. Phaedra tells a story whereby Kaiotim burned the first Polis because when the gods ascended, mortals there had grown greedy and complacent and the moral rot had set in too much to be redeemed. Sometimes you just gotta ice some people because they’re too evil, and Kaitotim knows who’s bad and who’s good. Kestor says that she ain’t Kaiotim.
Neo talks to Ionessa, she’s unhappy that Xanthos seems to be capitulating to his mentor and isn’t standing up to her. Neo says he would try to stand up to his family, but he can’t know how he would behave if they showed up, and before he just ran away. Ionessa swears not to let her do evil acts, and Neo swears he will help her. As we continue on we encounter a symbol on a small stone temple, a skull in three hands, the mark of Iasponas, the first demon. As we approach, a little voice calls out to leave unless we have business with their esteemed lady. It’s an invisible demon on the roof. We can enter if we lay down our arms, Xanthos doesn’t want to but Ionessa does.
In the end Xanthos tries to throw a spear at the demon on the roof, Ionessa tries to stop him, but Phaedra goes and kicks in the door and gets her ass kicked, so we have to save her. The demon summoner, whose name is Dynas, hits really hard until Xanthos pokes her to death and she explodes into demonic flame, almost killing him and Neo, who is taking half of Xanthos’ damage. Afterwards, Xanthos gets mad that Neo took some hits for him and asks him not to do it again, but Neo says he’s just helping. We heal up and head down to a basement through a hidden trapdoor, there is a woman lying at the center of a magic circle within an underground crypt. The circle is not intended to keep anything out, but rather keep something in. It is blocking the passage of demons.
Kestor asks if she is a demon, and he has a vision of her in the same POV on the bed that he was in his earlier hallucination. She is whose eyes he was seeing through. “Arachnos, I don’t know where I am, I think there’s something wrong with me.” Neo detects that she is a fiend, and Ionessa notices she is melting a little bit, like a wax figure. Her name is Rhene. She thinks I am the spindly guy from the vision. She remembers being somewhere hot, there was something wrong, it was dark, and then she was here. She was in her father’s dungeon, it’s all jumbled, her father is Diaphonus. We heard this name from Hedylus, he is the First Elf.
Kestor knows that Diaphonus is poorly regarded in history and myth as being a huge asshole, when he was created some aspect of Fytanke was in the clay that formed him and gave him immortality. He had a lot of children and locked them all up in towers, underground vaults, other planes of existence, under the sea, all of them eventually escaped and led to the different types of Elves of the world. Rhene is the name of the first of the Drow. There exist demons that can take the shape of a different person, but none that match exactly what’s happening here. Maybe she has been afflicted by demonic energy? Maybe she was used as a sacrifice over and over because she’s immortal?
We decide to free her, we dispel the magic circle and convince her we mean no harm. She wants to talk to Arachnos, Kestor elects to be honest and explains what he has seen. She reveals that she escaped that night that Kestor saw, but everything is all jumbled, but she accepts that they are there to help (no sketchy disguise self to look like Arachnos needed!) Xanthos inspects the bodies in the coffins below ground, they all have the same ritual markings on them, presumably because they were sacrificed. We make plans to bury them.
Upstairs we try to convince Phaedra not to decapitate this poor woman. She needs to be rehabilitated, maybe King Bion can help. Phaedra says Rhene should not be allowed within the city limits, so she insists that Bion come see her outside of the city instead. Bion teleports to us and he trusts us to make the correct decision. Neo casts Augury, Fytanke says this will be good and bad. Bion examines her and determines her current form is not her true form, so Xanthos and Neo distract Phaedra while Kestor and Ionessa go to talk to to Rhene. Kestor tries to get her to tap into her ability to change her form, and she begins to melt and morph into a formless primordial ooze with a single, central eye.
She is able to shift back and forth. Her physical form isn’t making her uncomfortable, it’s her mind, it’s still jumbled. She remembers encountering the play, that’s when… She starts to scream. Ionessa and Kestor calm her down, and she says “That was the last time I saw him.” Then she resets, she forgets what we were talking about. We decide we will take her to Cherianto. Phaedra tells Xanthos that she is headed to Vas, she vowed to protect the leaders of Vas as part of her vows taken during Sklirotikos, the process by which someone comes to be a citizen of Vas. She made those vows to Isadora, and now those vows apply to her son, Aristian. She believes he is going to be assassinated.
Kestor and Xanthos have a last minute talk about his behavior, he feels he is bad for Ionessa because he did some heinous acts in his past. Kestor tells him he’s a good man and that he should approach his relationship as one that can survive obstacles, he needs to let her know that he’s willing to work on the relationship not just break up at the first sign of trouble. Xanthos seems to accept this, and then punches Kestor completely unprovoked! (jk)
Kestor finds himself in another time, a feeling which grows more and more familiar as time passes. He is outside under the sun, sitting in an ancient but familiar theater. People laugh around, faces blurred, he focuses on two individuals in the crowd. Rhene and Arachnos, laughing and smiling, a distant voice introduces a play. As he exits this vision, he can identify they are the beloved friends.
The end!

Notes

:)

Report Date

09 Apr 2023