Session 134

June 20, 2026

Red Crystal

In the beginning, there was Elysia. And then there was not.

Her destruction did not end her so much as scatter her. Twenty shards of her being…splintered outward, each a fragment of something that had once been whole, each carrying a sliver of the power she had held undivided.

Four of these shards were captured by three vessels. And now they converge within a single universe, drawn together by ill fate. Jazourh…Venatrix…Korvathien.

The others watched from beyond. They did not move. They did not act. They understood, as we all came to understand, that intervention carried a price too terrible to pay…a cosmic catastrophe that would unmake existence itself. So they watched, and they feared, and they kept their hands hidden.

Within Jazourh, two shards warred.

Chaos and Creation. They conflicted inside the Vessel, inside Jaz, like growth and ruin attempting to become the same thing, each pulling, each refusing to yield. Innovation, Venatrix, dwelt here too, seeking always for opportunity, content to stand beside her friend Jaz and wait for the moment worth seizing. Venatrix loved the conflict. She drank it in. Where others saw two forces tearing at each other, she saw a tool, a thing that could be harnessed to work great wonders.

Then there was Korvathien.

The Malice shard…Korvathien did not struggle against it as Jaz struggled against his own. He accepted it. He welcomed it as though it had always been his true self, waiting to be returned to him. Spite. Hate. Pain. Subversion. These were not afflictions to Korvathien. They were a homecoming. He worked in shadow, moving puppets across the board, and he had slipped into Jazourh’s realm without notice…a seized opportunity…Jaz opening his doors to refugees…Korvathien thought Jaz naive and slithered in. Unfortunate for Edmeera.

He took Edmeera.

Through his Malice, he tore her mind and her body asunder. It was not quick. The process stretched across months, because Edmeera fought him. She resisted with everything she was, and still, in the end, her mind was reshaped. Remade. Reborn, as Korvathien called it.

But the reshaping demanded his attention, all of it. He devoted himself so completely to the practice of pain, to the slow craft of breaking and rebuilding her, that he never noticed what was being taken from beneath him.

Jaz stole Yllena from Edmeera’s domain.

Had Yllena fallen into Korvathien’s hands, it would have meant the end…the end of this world of Edryms, and the end of the mortals who had fled to it seeking refuge. Chaos forbade the theft, to not intervene. Creation overruled…Creation understood what Chaos would not: that ruin was the only harvest to be reaped if the Yllena tree fell after Edmeera fell. So Jaz acted, and the tree was saved, and a doom was deferred.

Edmeera saw none of it as it truly was.

She saw it through Korvathien’s lies, and she believed them. She believed Jaz had betrayed her. That Jazourh had never come to save her from Korvathien’s wrath. That he had crept into her domain and stolen away the one thing she held most dear. Yllena. She saw her creator as all powerful, that he could have prevented this from happening. Korvathien knew though along with Jaz, that the two held a stalemate and there wasn’t anything Jaz could have done save the cost of the shards in open conflict.

How could she know, a fight between the shards would shatter Velumaris itself, the cosmos that cradled Lacuna within it. She knew only that she was alone. That she was hurt. And like a wounded animal, she sank into the oldest instinct of all, the one that lives beneath thought: survive.

So she agreed to Korvathien’s plan.

He would unmake everything Jaz had created. And it began, as these things so often do, with a single spark…

The Long Corridor

The next room gave way to a corridor, long and low and made of old stone, and this time the portal behind them did not go dark the way every other one had. It stayed open at their backs, breathing, while the passage ahead ran on farther than it had any right to. They walked it anyway, the way they had walked everything else in the maze, one careful step after another.

A voice found them partway down. Not the one from the visions. This one was deeper, closer, and it did not bother with riddles. It wanted to know what they were, and it did not much like the answer it found. It reached into them as they walked and named what it touched. Some of them it called uncommitted. Others it called cruel. Brutal. It said the word like it had tasted it before.

Aydriann had no patience left for being weighed. When the voice asked, again, what it was they sought, he cut straight through it.

“I’ve answered your question. We’ve given you the answers that you seek. Whether or not you believe us is your choice. Let’s move on.”

The voice did not move on. “Cruelty. Mortals hold brutality. These are why I question your motives.” It called them empty things, brutal things, and it told them why. Everything it had ever been, it said, had been shaped by watching what people were capable of, people like Vanessa, the woman from the visions who had opened her friend’s throat and felt nothing. So it asked them the question it had clearly asked itself a long time ago. Why should a monster get any say in where the relic ended up.

The Interrogation of Intent

Deeper into the corridor, sixty-six candles burning along its length, the voice kept at them. It stopped talking about cruelty and started talking about ambition, about passion, about the wanting it could feel coming off the group. One of them it marked as uncommitted. The rest it set beside Vanessa again and called them the same kind of hungry. It said it was only what the mirror’s making had made it, a thing built out of the brutality it had been forced to witness, and it asked once more why creatures like that should be trusted with anything at all.

Aydriann gave it a fight. He was not going to stand there and be lectured by his own reflection. The party was not here for themselves, he told it. They were here because people they loved were going to die if they were not, and there was nothing in that worth this much suspicion. The voice threw Fernando back at him, said it guarded the relic from monsters because it had watched Vanessa murder him. The voice gave them one more vision. A vision which showed Vanessa killed everyone. Even the little one the dark entity considered innocent to all the chaos. The voice has said it like the little girl. When Vanessa did what she did, the dark entity only knew of what Vanessa produced. Violence. In the dark entities methodology, it terrorized Vanessa to her death.

The voice pressed the party further but Aydriann turned the knife around.

“You killed a murderer… what does that make you?”

It had no clean answer. He pressed it, and pressed it again, until it was plain that the only one in that corridor calling itself a monster was the voice.

The Shifting Path

The corridor was not honest about its own shape. They caught it in the act when a trail of oil they had poured out earlier turned up again somewhere it should not have been, the same mark in the wrong place, the passage folding back through itself while they walked it. It did not matter. Rosibynne’s pattern still held under everything the voice threw at them, the same math it had always been, real candles counted against the total. Sixty-six candles put them at the eleventh step. They followed the count out of the corridor and into a room lit by seventy-eight, the twelfth.

The Room of Reflections

The voice went quiet in the end. It told them they had found its pattern, and it opened the last portal and invited them through to see what waited. It left them a warning first. The next room would show them themselves, and it would learn from that whether their ambition was a thing worth sparing or only more of what Vanessa had been.

They argued it out on the threshold. Dax read it as a test of trust, not a trap, the entity wanting to see whether they would walk through on faith. Aydriann did not buy it for a second. He had a seventh-level spell already up and burning before anyone took a step, braced for some monster of brutality to come out of the glass at them. Trap or not, they went through, into a chamber of ninety-one candles.

At its center a wide circle of glyphs had been cut into the floor and lit from within, and four great mirror shards stood around it. The voice spoke one last time, one last comparison between what they wanted and what Vanessa had wanted, and then it simply broke. No fight came. The whole of it fell apart into a heap of plain glass with the sound gone out of it, and the party was left standing over the pieces.

The Golden Shard

Dax ran Detect Magic across the wreckage and found one piece that did not belong with the rest, a single shard still burning with power in a pile of dead glass. It did not look like the others. It had an intricate golden border worked around its edge, and where the rest were clean geometry this one was wrong on purpose, a splotch of a shape with no straight lines to it. That misshapen golden piece was the divination relic Cerouse had sent them down here to find.

Aydriann took the time to run an Identify ritual over it, and the ritual could only tell him so much. The mirror was an Artifact, and an Artifact does not give itself up to ordinary divination. Whatever it truly did, Identify would not name it. What it did make plain was the price of admission. To reach the thing’s real power, someone would have to attune to it, either across a full long rest or by living alongside it long enough to earn it.

He and Dax turned their attention to the glyphs on the floor after that, and read them as the far end of a teleportation gate, a Point B with the doorway drawn to receive rather than to send. The room was somewhere you arrived, not somewhere you left from. Point A was still out there, wherever it had always been, and the guess between them was that it traced back to Eistrae and whatever people had first raised this place.

Back to the Stair

Rosibynne stowed the relic in her bag and they stepped through the one portal still lit, and it set them down where the whole thing had started, on the dark spiral stair outside the maze. That was where the easy part ended.

The argument was over the relic itself. Cerouse had given them a way out before they ever went in, told them plainly that with the demonic threat rising they were free to walk away with nothing and no blame in it. Aydriann wanted to take a different door entirely. He did not think the mirror should go back to Cerouse at all. It was too dangerous to simply hand over, and there was too much use in it for what they were trying to do in Eden. The entity had spent the whole descent testing them, threatening them, breaking itself apart rather than let them pass clean, and to him that was proof enough of what the thing was and what it might do in the wrong grip.