Episode 11 – Narrative

The Slums After the Storm

The party moved fast when they saw the force leave the Templar Quarter. Derfel clocked them first: Templars, Noble house soldiers, and Dregoth cultists, all moving together towards The Slums. Korno needed warning, so they changed direction.

The slums were barely navigable. The tear storm had brought down the towering stacks of hovels that had once defined the district, leaving a maze of rubble with no clear paths and no sight lines. Kit-Chac picked the routes. Her cleared what needed clearing. Tchk'Tchk Gulbadani watched the angles. They moved.

Then they found the gang.

Children were being held, and the gang was taking offers. On Athas this is not unusual. The party, very uncommonly for this world, had a moral problem with it. They engaged the gang, fought them, and won. The children came with them, all but one. It cost the party time they did not have.

Too Late

By the time they reached the deep slums where Korno's safe house had stood, it was over. People were fleeing. The Templars were consolidating. Her read the scene at a glance, frontline instinct making the shape of it obvious, and Kit-Chac confirmed what the air already told him. Korno had been taken prisoner. The fight had finished before they arrived.

Tchk'Tchk Gulbadani assessed the Templar positioning. Anselem tracked the movement of the broader force. Salt read the fleeing crowd for anything useful. Pterrence stayed back with the children. The party pulled into the rubble to decide.

The Hidden Hollow

Derfel found her: a hollow in the rubble, almost invisible, its mouth turned away from the plaza. Inside was Leviath, half-giant, wife of the captured Korno, guarding roughly a dozen refugees, the ones who had not been able to run.

She had kept them out of sight and held them together, and she had the beginning of a plan. She told the party about the underground. Beneath Raam's well and cistern system, in the old aqueduct channels that had once watered the city, there lived an organisation, The Alliance. They had given her sanctuary, and that was how she had stayed alive in Raam this long. There were two ways down: a dry well in the centre of The Plaza, and another near the city walls at the edge of the slums.

The party took a long rest in the hollow and waited for night.

The Debate

Salt was clear on the central plaza: it was asking for trouble. Tchk'Tchk Gulbadani agreed. There were more than fifty soldiers, with patrols of six to eight Templars and Noble house guards, some mounted on Krodlu, others leading Enix lizards trained to sniff out anyone hiding in the rubble. Moving fifteen refugees (children, elderly, wounded, frightened) past that unseen was not a plan, it was a hope with a very short lifespan.

Derfel weighed the fog option, and Salt turned it over with him: throw obscurement across the plaza and push for the central well. Anselem ran the spell-slot maths against likely patrol response times. Her said nothing, but her expression said enough. Pterrence was already thinking about disguises.

The outer well won. Leviath knew where it was and would lead the refugees; the party would protect them.

Kit-Chac gave Leviath two water skins. Salt gave two more, noting wryly that even his water-genasi summoning falls a little short of what the party drinks in a day. Leviath received the water with a gratitude that changed the feel of the air in the hollow for a moment.

Through the Rubble

The formation settled naturally. Kit-Chac and Derfel took the front to scout. Her anchored the middle of the column alongside Leviath and the refugees. Tchk'Tchk Gulbadani moved through the body of the group. Anselem and Pterrence supported from within the column. Salt watched the rear, having suggested the rear guard in the first place.

Pterrence cast Disguise Self and took the shape of a Mansivar Templar guard, a walking lie the party could lean on at a distance. Salt conjured a false, partially rubbled wall with Minor Illusion and kept an invisible Mage Hand drifting at the far edge of his range, flicking debris over to pull patrol attention away from the column. Pterrence threw a Web into a corridor behind them as they passed, buying time against pursuit.

The cleverest moment was Derfel's. When a Templar Enix lizard came nosing towards the column, he used Animal Handling to call out the beast's release command, the word a handler uses when its work is done and its time is its own. The lizard stopped, rolled onto its belly, and lay there with its tongue lolling in the dust while its handlers cursed the useless animal and gathered round it. The distraction held. Brave worked the edges too, sent ahead so that a bark in the distance would warn the party of trouble.

Brave: Woof.

Her kept the refugees moving and helped the elderly over the rough ground. Kit-Chac managed the front. Anselem's fire stayed ready in his hands, lit only if needed. Most of the skill checks landed. Not all of them did.

The Outer Well

The cover was heavy stone, half buried in rubble, but Leviath knew exactly where it was. Her and Kit-Chac shifted what needed shifting and the cover came off, revealing a shaft, thirty feet of darkness, the smell of old water and cold stone.

Leviath's half-giant strength made lowering the children clean and sure. Salt went down among the first to steady the elderly and the children as they reached the bottom, checking them over with a rough, kindly bedside manner. Her helped at the rim. One by one the refugees descended, then the party followed. The last one down, the cover was resealed above them. Pitch black. The aqueduct stretched ahead in the dark.

They were thinking about Templars, about the ambush they would set in this corridor: good chokepoints, the kind of fight they had prepared for. Salt and Pterrence discussed a false wall to seal the tunnel behind them. Tchk'Tchk Gulbadani kept his hands loose. Kit-Chac stood still.

Then something dropped down the other shaft, the central plaza well, and hit the floor in the dark some distance away. That shaft sealed too.

Three failed checks. The Dregoth Cultists had known someone went down the well. They did not know who, and they did not send soldiers. They threw a skull into the dark, sealed the entrances, and trusted what they had released to do the rest.

The sand began to move.

The Elemental

It assembled itself out of the aqueduct floor: a huge skull dragging itself upright, stone limbs forming beneath it, sand and gravel pouring endlessly through its ribcage and eye sockets. It was enormous, and it stood between the party and the refugees waiting somewhere ahead.

Salt moved first. Tasha's Mind Whip cracked through the elemental's awareness for psychic damage, stripped its opportunity attacks, and hobbled its action economy. Pterrence's Portent had quietly fixed the creature's save at a 10 to help it land.

Anselem stepped up: "HALT." The Command broke on the creature that time. He shifted to keeping people alive instead, Healing Word landing again and again on Her and the others as the elemental's multi-attack came down on the front line.

Pterrence threw a Web across the corridor. The elemental walked through it. So Pterrence changed the shape of the fight: Cloud of Daggers, upcast to third level, dropped squarely in the creature's path for sixteen slashing damage a round, then Ray of Frost to cut its speed by ten feet so it could not simply stride clear of the blades.

Kit-Chac closed in. Stunning Strike: immune. Flurry of Blows to topple it: earth instability, it could not be put on the ground. He kept hammering at it anyway with what damage would stick.

Her held the line between the elemental and the refugees, taking the brunt of its bludgeoning and slashing, her chipped bone shield absorbing more than it had left to give. At one point the creature bent Pterrence's webbing to haul her into the path of an incoming Guiding Bolt, and she took 27 to the back for it.

Derfel got Searing Smite onto his blade and drove fire into the creature each round, choosing to keep the fire burning rather than swap to Hunter's Mark.

Then Tchk'Tchk Gulbadani found the seam in the fight. The elemental had no defence against Command, and he used that without mercy: Command after Command to pin it in place, holding it inside the Cloud of Daggers while the blades ground it down. When it tried to break loose he reached for Telekinetic Propel, lifted the creature to five feet above the Cloud, and dropped it straight back into the spinning daggers. Round on round, the slashing did its work.

Salt kept the party standing through it. When Derfel dropped low, Salt stretched his reach an extra five feet and put Cure Wounds into him, pulling him back up. Anselem's second Guiding Bolt finally connected for radiant damage.

A section of the aqueduct ceiling came down under the accumulated violence of the fight, dropping a final weight of stone onto the creature. Its mass began to collapse. It fragmented: a medium sand elemental peeled away and dispersed, and the original skull dropped free, hitting the floor with a crash.

Her moved in and took The Skull.

The party stood in the dark, heavily wounded, ears ringing. Anselem started counting spell slots. Her checked the refugees, still there, terrified but whole. Salt saw to the worst of the wounds. Kit-Chac stood over the spot where the medium elemental had been until he was sure it had gone. Pterrence mended what could be mended. Tchk'Tchk Gulbadani said something that translated roughly as: what sort of person sends a sand elemental after refugees. Salt answered: the sort who suspects those refugees include a leader who might start a rebellion.

Nobody had a better answer than that. They moved forward into the dark, towards The Alliance.

Experience awarded: 1,243 XP each.