Born of Blood

Hachiman sets off with Balthesar to find the party's riding lizards and return to Riverdrown with several stacks of wood. Meanwhile, Roach, Tingle, Taigus, and Lau arrive at the Archive after three days of grueling travel. They ascend the mountain's windy steps and come to a large courtyard before the Archive's ornate gates, finding two bleeding eladrin on the ground.

The party comes to their aid. They discover that one is already dead, but Taigus tries staunching the wounds of the other. He fails to do so, however, and the eladrin's life slips away as he warns of a "horned man". Having noticed that the Archive's gates were recently opened, Roach reopens them with Jamorn's key and leads the party inside.

They come to a large room with a circular computer console at its center and statues of the four elven gods along its walls. Initially dumbstruck by the advanced yet ancient technology, they figure out how to access the Archive's information from the console. Among other things, the party learns that a demigod named Iornas, revealed to be the boy in white, is the avatar of Iornu and that an eldritch monster attacks the planet every 2,800 years. The last time this happened was 700 years ago, triggering the Bright War.

Roach requests to enter the Blood King's tomb, but he is informed that only those with Level-3 access may enter it. They are also informed that a tiefling with Level-3 access entered the Blood King's tomb not too long ago. After his image is displayed on the computer's holographic monitor, the party quickly identifies him as none other than Chazu, the thief who stole Elgaroth's sapphires and later joined Riverdrown's City Watch. They ask the Archive how he obtained Level-3 access, which prompts the computer to check its records. It concludes that Chazu never presented any official documentation and must've tampered with the Archive's systems to give himself access to the tomb.

The party promises to bring Chazu to justice in exchange for Level-3 access, to which the Archive hesitantly agrees. It opens a portal to the Blood King's tomb, but before heading through it, the party wipes all memory of themselves from the Archive's databanks. On the other side of the portal, they are met with cold darkness. They come to a large chamber where Chazu is standing atop a dais, whispering incoherently to the Blood King's shield and Valfigor's twin, Reni. Chazu is surprised to see Roach and his friends. He tells the boy that he does not wish to kill him, only to wield his sword.

Having come so far, though, Roach refuses to give up Valfigor, instead challenging Chazu to a duel for the right to wield both of the Blood King's artifacts. They begin fighting to the death as Lau, Tingle, and Taigus silently watch from the corners of the room. Roach nearly manages to kill Chazu, but the thief surges with power at the last minute and knocks Roach unconscious with *finger of death*. To stop Chazu from getting Valfigor, however, Taigus fatally shoots him in the head. On his corpse, they find nothing more than a key to the archive, a couple dozen gold, and a magically sealed adamantine strongbox with "*property of the Prince*" engraved on its top.

Shortly thereafter, Roach is healed. He rests with the party, then weakly grabs Reni and Valfigor to reunite the halves of the Blood King's soul. Blood drips from Roach's face and a roaring inferno erupts from his body, lashing the room with whips of flame. When the fire dies down, he emerges from the smoke as a changed person. His sword and shield are restored to their natural, much stronger-looking appearances, his hair and eyes are redder, and his wings are slightly larger. The Blood King explains to Roach that their souls are now merged in perpetuity.

The party takes the strongbox back to the Archive and learns that it belongs to a 6,000-year-old, elven prince named Ludax - an alias of the archdevil Xauld. As Lau, Tingle, and Taigus leave the Archive with Roach, they choose to remain cautiously optimistic about the reawakening of the Blood King.