The temple foyer smelled like blood, sulfur, and burning flesh. Transcendentalist Elidyr was already pinching his nose before we cleared the door.
Dead moonlight guardians across the floor. The receptionist from the front desk, dead. And Beiydark’s Tyrannosaurus Rex lying in a spreading pool of blood, which I noted primarily because we would have to step around it. One guard was alive in the next room, in the kind of condition where alive is the kindest possible framing. Spesof asked him what happened. A psionic screech, he said — something piercing, and then the moonlight guardians started to lose control. Then the Drow came through the front door. He pointed at the entrance. He hadn’t moved since.
Momen handed him a health potion and we found Beiydark herself curled up under the T-Rex, near death, barely holding on. I knelt down, held her hand, and asked her if she remembered my name.
She looked at me. Then she looked at Spesof and thanked him instead.
Once she had enough health potion in her to talk, she laid out the same sequence from the other end of it. She’d stayed behind to reinforce the entrance after we left for the estate. A few minutes later: a massive psionic attack, the connection to the moonlight guardians broken, and then the Drow came in force. The timing was not coincidental. Elidyr noted, without much warmth, that Beiydark had received multiple reports of Drow in the surrounding forest and failed to act on them. Beiydark received this in silence.
We dropped the telepathic bond at this point. Momen noted — with the careful phrasing of someone who had just realized something he probably should have realized earlier — that the bond had been running for the entire investigation, within range of an elder brain. Everything we’d said to each other through it may have been heard. The mind flayers had presumably been listening, chosen not to act, and watched us approach.
We’d assumed a private channel. We hadn’t had one.
What we now had, in Momen’s accounting, was four separate factions operating against us at once: Torveldus behind the Minamata Malady, Aemmin Simserion’s operation behind the assassin, the mind flayers on their own agenda, and the Drow. Whether any of them were coordinating with each other or simply taking advantage of the same chaos was not clear. Beiydark’s guess was the same as ours — biding their time or simply aligning opportunistically.
I pulled Momen and Spesof aside and whispered, very quietly, that if Drusilia still had the Moonblade or had recently had it, and the sword was somehow disrupting the guardians, that made her at minimum a factor in the situation. This did not land. We moved on.
Beiydark told us the guardians to the east were mostly intact. We went east.
The first door Transcendentalist Elidyr opened had two Drow Inquisitors behind it. I had my bow up in the doorway. For the first round this went reasonably well. Then one of the inquisitors pointed his mace at Momen and Spesof and said something, and both of them were simply gone.
They had been banished. To the Elemental Plane of Chicken, which I understand is exactly what it sounds like — rolling hills, chicken-nugget stacking formations, a river of the pink precursor slurry. All fresh, all clean, entirely chicken. I only have secondhand accounts. Spesof came back eating.
The remaining inquisitor, now alone in the room with me and Elidyr, looked at me. He said something in elvish and pointed his mace.
I said “chicken parm.”
The Harm spell hit before I could do anything about it. Fifty-three necrotic damage, and the spell also lowered my maximum health down to match the damage taken. Momen, returning from the chicken plane moments later, identified it as disease-adjacent — it would persist for about an hour unless something cured it earlier. His tone when delivering this news was the tone of a man who did not currently have the spell that cures diseases.
For practical purposes this left me operating at a maximum health that Momen diplomatically described as “not much.” I described it as being snappable by a middle-aged man. We were both right.
I went invisible. I told the others to flag me when they needed a shot and otherwise not to count on me for anything close-range.
Elidyr finished the inquisitor who’d cast Harm. Momen and Spesof returned to the material plane, one of them still chewing.
The next corridor had magical darkness, a swarm of insects, and another banishment — this one sent Spesof to what the universe has apparently designated as the Elemental Plane of Toilet Paper. Elidyr went with him. They found each other in there. Then Momen pointed at the last inquisitor and finished him, and they both reappeared, Spesof with a small amount of toilet paper trailing from his boot.
We found survivors as we moved further in — workers barricaded behind locked doors, a few guards holding position in sealed rooms. Momen had acquired a zombie at some point with a head lolling at a truly unfortunate angle, which he’d been using to open suspect doors first. It was a sensible precaution. The zombie didn’t complain.
One guard reported that the south corridor had roughly thirty Drow, including someone described as a favored consort of Lolf. Lether, who had been in Drusilia’s chambers and came out to meet us, confirmed this flatly and added that he would not want to face that particular individual in a straight fight.
Drusilia was not in her chambers.
Lether and Durlin were there, having held the room against the moonlight guardians who’d turned after the psionic attack. But during the fighting Drusilia had vanished. Lether shrugged and gestured at the number of opponents he’d been managing at the time. Five on one. He’d had limited attention to spare.
A maid had survived in the corner, injured. She confirmed the screech and the guard chaos. She couldn’t remember anything about Drusilia specifically after the fighting started. She was not useful for this particular problem.
Momen cast Speak with Dead on one of the fallen guards. The guard’s answers were brief enough to raise more questions than they answered.
Then Momen tried Message, directing it toward where he knew Drusilia kept a private hidden room behind a sealed wall. A voice came back claiming to be Drusilia: she was in the room, she said. Lether had tied her up and thrown her in there.
Then, through the same channel, a voice claimed to be Lether.
Momen sent a confirming message to the actual Lether standing in the room with us. Lether looked genuinely confused and asked why he was receiving telepathic messages when we knew there were mind flayers about. Durlin made a similar point at slightly higher volume. Nobody had an answer that resolved anything.
The mind flayers had been listening to our bond for hours. The possibility that they could also respond through an open magical channel was not a comfortable thought.
Momen cast Investiture of Stone and walked directly through the wall.
On the other side: Drusilia. Gagged. Bound. On the floor.
We have thirty Drow and a consort of Lolf between us and the exit. The elder brain is still in Beiydark’s garden. Aemmin Simserion’s ritual is presumably still running. I have some fraction of my usual health remaining and about half an hour left on the disease clock. The Moonblade is somewhere in this building.
At least we know where Drusilia is.