Some sessions are delicate negotiations with the unseen, others begin with a failed stealth check and end with someone on fire.

This was the latter.

We Have a Guest Player

This session opened with something we hadn’t done before: a proxy.

With Akkira’s regular player absent, a friend of the family stepped in to pilot her character for the night. Around the table, she quickly earned a temporary nickname: Akkiro. Same druid. Slightly different energy. Entirely new pair of hands on the dice.

There is always risk in that. A character is muscle memory. Instinct. Timing. But from the first decision, Akkiro moved like someone who understood the rhythm of the party: comfortable, confident.

And, as we would soon learn, very fond of bears.

Wyvern Tor

Morning came, and with it a decision that had lingered long enough. Wyvern Tor had become home to a nuisance band of bugbears led by the orc Brughor Axe-Biter. The party had no interest in parley. No interest in patience.

They would remove the problem, and they attempted stealth. They failed.

“Subtlety evaporated. The assault had begun.”

The guard spotted them and called out for reinforcements, only to be cut down before his warning carried far. Subtlety evaporated. What followed was a textbook assault.

Steel struck true. Spells found their marks. The bugbear bandits rallied inside the cave, but momentum had already shifted.

And then came the moment we still talk about. Akkiro Wild Shaped. Not cautiously, not reactively, but decisively.

“Inside that narrow throat of stone, chaos met fur and teeth.”

Fur and muscle surged forward as a bear scrambled up the embankment and into the cave mouth. The charge was relentless. Inside that narrow stone throat of Wyvern Tor, claws and teeth made quick work of the remaining defenders. The cave that had sheltered brigands became their trap.

Only Brughor remained. Driven back toward the center of the cave, he made his final stand beside the very campfire that had warmed him minutes earlier. He fought hard. He fought loudly.

And then, in a cruel symmetry, he fell into the flames, and the blaze consumed him. And the fire that had been comfort became pyre.

“The fire that had been comfort became pyre.”

Wyvern Tor fell silent after that. Not tense, not watchful.

Empty.

Conyberry

From fire, they walked into stillness.

As the party approached the ruins of Conyberry, the world seemed to quiet itself.

Buildings reduced to skeletal remains. Cobblestones swallowed by weeds and wildflowers. Broken windows whispering with wind. The Triboar Trail cutting through what once was life, now overtaken by moss and damp earth.

Even over Discord, the mood shifted. Voices lowered, laughter thinned.

Sister Garaele’s words lingered in memory: “Agatha’s lair is a few miles outside town along that path.”

An overgrown trail led northwest into Neverwinter Wood. Ancient trees leaned inward like watchful sentries. Vines coiled like muscular serpents around bark long untouched. Sunlight filtered down in fractured beams, unable to warm the chill settling into the air.

The deeper they went, the colder it became.

Then they saw it. A domed shelter woven from gnarled branches, grown together deliberately. Moss and lichen obscured the entrance. A low, arched doorway framed by towering trees.

And beyond it … Waiting.

The One Question

Inside, the lair felt ancient. Not abandoned.

Shelves of dusty tomes and glass vials. Elven-carved chests faded by centuries. A table at the center bearing remnants of a life long past: a tarnished silver mirror, scattered parchments, a withered rose.

The air held its breath. Then the temperature dropped. A pale light flickered into being.

Agatha formed before them, translucent, terrible, and grief-wrought. Hair drifting as though caught in an unseen current. Eyes cold and piercing.

“Foolish mortals. What do you want here? Do you not know it is death to seek me out?”

One question. One only.

No offering demanded. Precision required.

One question. One only.

The party had deliberately chosen not to present Sister Garaele’s silver comb up front. No bribery. No assumptions. They would attempt respect.

Lazmr stepped forward.

By now, he had quietly assumed the mantle of the party’s Face, measured, steady, deliberate. He addressed Agatha not as a monster to be appeased, but as an ancient being owed dignity.

He asked about Bowgentle’s spellbook.

The roll came, with advantage.

Silence filled the Discord channel. Even the ever-present microphone glitch, the laptop’s cursed cutout that muted voices whenever sound played, seemed irrelevant in that moment.

Success.

“You could feel the tension drain from the room when the number was spoken aloud.”

You could feel the tension drain from the room when the number was spoken aloud.

Agatha did not shriek. She answered. At length.

She spoke of centuries past. Of trades and dealings long forgotten. She told them she had passed the spellbook to a necromancer named Tsernoth of Iriaebor more than a hundred years ago.

Her end of the bargain had been kept, the answer was clear, complete, final.

The party bowed their heads respectfully and began to leave. And then Lazmr paused.

He reached into his pack. Withdrawn from its wrapping was Sister Garaele’s silver comb.

He stepped to the center table, beside the tarnished mirror, beside the withered rose, and placed it gently upon the wood.

“A gift,” he said quietly. “From Sister Garaele.”

“A gift,” he said quietly.

No roll, no request, no expectation. Just grace.

He turned and walked out. And I, behind the screen, was stunned.

So was Agatha.

I let the party put distance between themselves and the hut before it came.

A whisper, barely audible over the breeze in Neverwinter Wood.

“Beautiful,” she breathed. A pause.

“Precious.”

It was soft, not venomous, not hateful.

Reverent.

For a fleeting moment, she did not sound like a banshee at all, but like something broken being handed back a fragment of what it once loved.

The party did not turn around. They did not need to.

Breath Released

Everyone had been tense. I made sure of that.

The descriptions were heavier. The pauses longer. The mysticism thicker than usual. I wanted them uncomfortable. I wanted them aware that brute force would not save them here.

And when the answer came, when Agatha did not turn violent, the collective exhale was almost audible, even through faulty microphones and intermittent audio cuts.

It was one of those rare moments where a social encounter feels more dangerous than combat.

And wins.