Session 131

June 6, 2026

Part 1: The War Council and the Architect of Conflict

When the mirror shattered back in the ruined spire, the party’s consciousness was yanked into another vision. This time they found themselves watching a war council unfold. The room was lit by torches, and a heavy slab of warped wood served as the table, buried under maps and battle plans. Above it all hung a pitch-black sky.

Around the table sat figures from history: Celeste, Malith, Lia, a brown-haired eladrin with blue eyes and a big red bow in her hair), and the deity Jazouhr.

The mood was grim. The council was deep in argument over a long, brutal war between the mortal refugees who’d come from a foreign land and the native Edyrums. Lia made no secret of how sick she was of the senseless bloodshed. Then two Edrym representatives entered and laid the blame squarely on the mortals, insisting the mortals had thrown the first punch. Lia wasn’t having it. She fired back that the Edrym were the ones who’d pushed into territory that had been set aside for the mortals in the first place.

Celeste stepped in to cool things down. She wasn’t interested in rumors or finger-pointing. She wanted actual proof of who started the fighting, and made it clear that whoever was guilty should answer for it, rather than letting a war drag on that was grinding both sides toward extinction.

Pressed hard enough, Jazouhr finally gave up the truth: the real hand behind the war belonged to an entity called Korvathian. Lia knew the name at once. She recognized him as an immortal out of the Faelands.

According to Jazouhr, Korvathian had been working both sides. He’d engineered the original uprising and twisted events so it looked like the Edryms had struck first, deliberately lighting the fuse between the two factions. Celeste put it together fast: this whole war was never a real dispute between two peoples. It was one schemer’s grab for power. And just as that horrible realization landed, the vision snapped shut and threw the party violently back into their bodies in the dark ruins.

Back in the present, the party tried to wrap their heads around what they’d just witnessed. Aydriann leaned on an enhanced History check (rolling a 27) and managed to tie it all together. He pulled up something from the Silent Crown text: Korvathian was the ancient being who split his own spirit twice over to make two new entities, Zadimus the lawmaker and Valtric, the enforcer and cruel ruler of Eden.

That’s when it hit Aydriann and Mac just how deep this went. Valtric, the monster who took Charlotte and built that horrific golem system in Eden, came from the very same entity who started the ancient war on purpose. The same war that eventually gave rise to the oppressive Blood Laws.

Part 2: The Dark Descent & The Mirror Portal

After the vision cut out so abruptly, the party needed a minute to sit with everything they’d just learned about Korvathian. They tossed around the idea of reaching out to Malith once their mission wrapped, to set up a meeting and dig for more answers. Hoping for some direction in the meantime, Peach checked the magical compass that held the spirit boy Lux, who floated out of the compass. He greeted peach and said that he still couldn’t see anything in the Folly so that he could track. Worn down from everything that came before, they settled in for a 10-minute short rest while Orianna cast Prayer of Healing to patch everyone back up.

Then it was back down the pitch-black spiral staircase. They kept things tight: a telepathic bond re-established, Pass Without Trace running, and Orianna out front with a Candle of Arcane Light. They moved slow. As they passed an intact mirror, Peach nailed a 37 on Perception and confirmed it wasn’t the relic they were after.

But as they walked by the glass, a voice slipped into all their heads at once. “Are you coming down to help me? I’m trapped down here… An evil demon.” It claimed to be an eight-year-old girl who’d been stuck among the mirrors for a few days.

Nobody bought it. For someone supposedly in mortal danger, the voice had no real urgency to it. It came across as airheaded, almost weirdly relaxed. Rosiebynne said what they were all thinking, pointing out how often demons use illusions and the voices of children to reel in their victims. To settle it, Orianna fired off her Divine Sense and confirmed there wasn’t a single fiend or celestial anywhere within 60 feet of them on the stairs.

About fifty flights down, they finally hit the bottom of the spire. The room was black as pitch, with two things standing out: another upright mirror and a messy sigil carved into the sandy stone floor. The sigil was a circle with a cross inside it, a smaller X at the center, eight dots, and jagged cracks running through it like lightning. Aydriann rolled a 19 on Arcana and figured out that while the symbols didn’t match anything familiar, they belonged to the ancient and highly advanced civilization of Eistrae.

He then turned his attention to the standing mirror (rolling a 31) and confirmed it gave off conjuration magic and worked as a portal. No hesitation. Aydriann walked straight through the glass. Dax went in right behind him, and a moment later Orianna, Ember, Rosiebynne, Mack, and Peach were pulled through too.

They came out of the dark into a fully lit, desecrated stone chamber. The room had four corners and a stone ceiling, with four identical mirror-portals set into the north, south, east, and west walls like doorways. Torches burned in sconces beside each one. The floor was a mess of giant broken mirror shards jammed point-down into the ground, with maybe fifty candles scattered around them.

Part 3: The Labyrinth of Reflections & The Shifting Anomaly

The second they stepped into the lit room with its four mirror-portals, the party smelled a trap. An Investigation check (rolling a 26) turned up a small but deeply unsettling detail in the reflections. There were physically 50 candles scattered across the floor, but the mirrors only showed 42 of them. That was the puzzle in a nutshell: figuring out what was real and what was just illusion.

The “girl” piped up in their heads again, confirming she only counted 42 candles too. Between her hints and their own reasoning, the party started moving through the mirror-portals. Each room followed a strict math sequence based on the number of real, reflected candles: 1, then 3, then 5, then 7 in each chamber they passed into. Unfortunately this was a rouse pattern.

The moment they reached the room with 7 candles, the mask came off. The little girl’s voice twisted and dropped into something else entirely, the low, sinister growl of a grown man.

The voice tried to coax them through the East mirror, dangling promises of warmth and sanctuary on the other side. Peach wasn’t fooled. He rolled a 28 on Perception and stared hard into the East mirror. He could feel a hearth in there, sure, but it came wrapped in nothing but bad vibes and serious danger. The party trusted his gut, ignored the demon entirely, and took the North door instead.

The broken mirror shards all over the floor turned out to be a lethal hazard in their own right. Every time the party messed with them across the portals, things went badly:

Aydriann chucked a shard through an active portal just to see what would happen. It detonated the instant it crossed the threshold, hitting him for 58 force damage. He barely walked away, halving it down to 29.
Later, Dax tried something far dumber and picked up an entire inert mirror-door, then dragged it through an active portal. The result was a catastrophic aetheric backlash that blew up for 117 psychic damage. Dax rolled a 33 on his Dexterity save, halved it to 29, and just barely dodged getting killed on the spot.

Eventually they pushed into a huge chamber holding 100 candles, 70 of them real. Fed up with the head games and the endless loop, they hit the whole room with Prestidigitation and snuffed every candle at once, dropping the place into total darkness.

The entity wasted no time taunting them: “You chose wrong.”

Aydriann refused to take the bait and stepped through the North door anyway, only to find every bit of their progress erased. They were dumped right back into a barren starting room: one real candle, four doors, four corners, a rectangle, a ceiling of stone. Then the thing sent one last cold message into their minds: “You can always leave little one, but I don’t think you will.” And that’s where we left it, with the party realizing they’re well and truly trapped in a labyrinth that keeps resetting on them.