Agatha Pulls the Strings

General Summary

After the previous harrowing events, the party split up to look for Eregast and find help from their allies. MJ and Procella went to Eregast's offices in the Ebbenvogel Halls. They found it eerily deserted, and pressing on towards Kingra's workshops, found a shrouded hag sat at a teaching desk, rocking back and forth, and taunting them. Fearful at confronting the hag by themselves, they fled deeper into the chambers, dodging the spell flung at them. In another room, they saw the hag again, and again they took a different route, towards the forge workshops. This area too was abandoned, but sounds of picks on stone rang from the trainee's mine. In the mine they found Eregast, stumbling trance-like in the dark, muttering despairingly to himself about deaths of students, and how he was to blame. At first oblivious in his traumatised stupor, MJ and Procella managed to get through to him and convince him that whatever had happened was not his fault, and that the hag coven had orchestrated all of this. Eregast managed to regain some lucidity. He explained that in the mine, they must find replacement gemstones to re-establish the magical wards that protected Ebbenvogel Halls. But he revealed that even if they were successful, the stolen stones in the coven's possession would act as a key to bypass the wards. The group agreed that they should still do it, to prevent other beings from gaining entry if nothing else. They found several trainee dwarven miners working the mine's seams. They too were in a trance, but different to Eregast - they raised their picks to attack. Procella saw they each had a wooden wedge driven into the base of their skull, and believing them already dead, magically animated puppets, the three defended themselves with lethal force. The voice of the hag called out more taunts, gleefully accusing Eregast of crimes and misdeeds, driving him into a catatonic despair, while lurking invisibly in the dark and casting spells at them. She conjured a huge constrictor snake, and blew MJ and Procella stumbling away with gusts of wind. Eventually, the duo located her position and were able to strike back. But she unleashed a jar of wasps that grew to giant size, and fled. The wasps paralyzed MJ with their venom, and rendered Procella unconscious, as Eregast finished the last of them. Finding no breath or pulse, Eregast believed Procella to have been killed, and he left the mine to seek aid. Procella regained consciousness and chased after him, to his great surprise. Together they pulled MJ from the mine, and sent for Kingra to assist in healing and undoing the venom. In the aftermath of the attack, the party discovered that the "hags" they had seen on the way in were in fact bound students under illusion spells. The hag had, once again, tried to bait them into harming innocents. They freed the students. They also found a magical x-shaped wood implement, like the control bar for a marionette. In fact, the dwarves in the mine had been still alive during their attack, controlled by this item. In defending themselves, they had fallen for one of the hag's ploys after all. To clear up Eregast's confusion about her seemingly dead form, and to enlist his help in fixing it, Procella told him the nature of her unliving curse.