ToA: Session 39

## **Familiar Sounds in Foreign Places**

As the Squad prepares to leave, they are interrupted by a sudden explosion going off by the river. With Daedalus still missing and an explosion happening nearby there can truly only be one explanation. And so the squad springs into action, starting by getting the villagers corralled and headed safely away from the source of the chaos. Then they hurry towards the explosion themselves, only to come upon the sight of the broken bridge, an unconscious Zipatoctl, a group of destroyed ghoul bodies, and a somewhat amber-ish lack of Daedalus. But that is not all, something else is there in the sky, something...wrong.

## **Wheel in the Sky**

While Kinlek keeps his focus on tending to Zipatoctl, Neb and Fargus look into the sky and see something they surely were never meant to. An aberration in the sky, a great twisting of two enormous snakes, each biting onto the tail of the other, creating an endless knot. From between them is a malformed mass of flesh, and the very attempt to comprehend it is painful to the mind. Neb looks upon it, and it is only thanks to the tempering of his time in the Fey Court and his most recent encounters with the infernal, divine, and eldritch alike that he is able to understand what it is before them. The great malformation is a fetus, bound by its twisted umbilical chord to the interlocked serpents, who drip some corrupted reality down upon them all. A drop of this reality falls upon a tree nearby Neb and coats it in what can only be described as an endless field of stars. Remaining calm through a sudden bout of analytical thought, he concludes it may simply be a window into another plane, distorting what is on the other side into something monstrous. Fargus, however, sees it through a wounded soul and internalizes its vile portents. He sees the ruby-strands of life that were once only visible to him through their gemstone aparratus swirling up into the fetus, being consumed.

As the tendrils of insanity start to burrow their way into Fargus's mind, Neb comes to a second realization. The charms were acting as a prison, a means of controlling the spread of the illness, and with the explosion damaging them, they now stand at a point of severe magical fallout. But these thoughts are interrupted as a group of ghouls lunge out from the waters.

## **The Might of the Child**

The Squad, shaken but far from unprepared, engage the ghouls in combat. Kinlek stabilizes young Zipatoctl while Neb sends a powerful blast into two of the ghouls, and Fargus rushes axe-first into the group. Neb, during his first move into the underbrush, notices that the ghouls are grotesque beyond the norm, looking to have been twisted into some sort of bestial, deranged take on their normal bodies. But it does not matter, as long as they can fight them off and get the situation under control.

But the battle takes a sudden shift as an arrow flies out from the underbrush, dripping with silvery star stuff and causes a wave that smashes into Fargus and Kinlek both. From the underbrush emerges the Daughter of the Dream Thief, looking vicious and enraged. Kinlek creates a healing field for himself and Fargus, while Fargus is still held up by the ghouls, knocking them down one by one. Neb focusses his efforts on the Daughter, blasting her over and over as he circles the clearing. But the Daughter somehow taps into the power of the fetus above them, and as she does it turns towards them and she coats each of the squad in some sort of glittering silver powder.
Worse still, after an especially potent blast from Neb, she catches sight of him, and with a piercing locking of the eyes sends him into a new mental hell, where he is forced to relieve his greatest fear again, and again, and again.

While Neb fights off the assault on his mind, Kinlek summons a great wall of fire, cutting the fight off from the underbrush where Neb manages to shake himself out of the fear. As Neb rises from the foliage, for a moment an etheral cloak of peacock feathers covers him, just as he shatters the Daughter's hold on his mind, and he strikes once more. The battle is not over yet though, as it seems the Daughter may have something else left up her sleeve for the squad.

**Will they manage to finish up the fearsome caster? What state will they find Daedalus in next? And what are they going to do about the giant snake issue that just keeps getting worse? Find out next time on Tomb of Annihilation!**