WitW - Session 29
Jeatz fails to recall the night he obtained the key that opened the tower. He felt a sense of ownership over the tower and wanted to clean up the spider webs, which upset the pair of phase spiders that had taken up residence.
The party fought through the spiders, but not quickly enough. One spider inflicted Almyre with its poisonous bite. Horace—Dragonslayer, Ghoulbane, Arachnid Archnemesis—dealt the final blow to the threat. They tidied up a bit while taking a much-needed rest. They asked about the attack on the pixies referenced in the memory. Glitter heard Spinkle mention a near-extinction event, but it would have been a long, long time ago—around a thousand winters. Horace trained Glitter some more, bringing her one step closer to gaining proficiency with her armor.
They made their way up to a room with a daybed and scattered papers, whose writing had long faded. The lens revealed a very upset Endring sitting across from a pixie. The pixie said it was most likely Ariazel who was killing and stealing away the pixies.
The next room presented a bunch of gems swirling with twisted energy. Jeatz failed his wild surge on detect magic. Blinding shadows twirled around him, disturbing the gems, and summoned a corrupted, magic-hungry pixie. Almyre fired off a successful stasis spell, allowing the party a full two turns to lay into the creature. Jeatz, however, failed his surge check again and spawned four skeletons made from wood and bones fused together.
The creature finally got its turn and unleashed a deadly psychic blow, then consumed the magic within a gem, regenerating itself. Jeatz picked up a gem but was unable to overcome its magic, taking enough damage to knock him out. Almyre tried to attack the creature, but the pixie counterspelled. She then tip-toed over the gems to heal Jeatz. The pixie got one last burst off before Horace killed it.
Jeatz picked up a gem to pack it away, getting hit by a firebolt spell in the process. They wandered up to the next floor—a library full of now-empty books. The books themselves were not inherently magical, but Horace successfully found a helm of comprehend languages. The lens revealed Ariazel reading in a skin-bound book: "Changing one’s personhood from mortal to fey is possible; however, it will amplify the subject’s tendencies to their most extreme."
They moved upstairs, finding a puzzle awaiting them. They were locked on this floor until they figured out the light-bouncing puzzle. After some time, they got the riddle correct and solved the puzzle, allowing them to progress to the penultimate floor. The lens had much to show them.
In the vision, Endring confronted Ariazel about killing the pixies. Ariazel initially claimed it was so that he could become fey, hoping that Exurbia, Endring's mother, would accept him as the father of their children. Endring would rather die than see her children raised by a murderer. Ariazel then revealed his true intentions: becoming fey would allow him to master magic. He killed Endring, stealing her heart and corrupting it, creating the Lord of Night.
Jeatz noticed the room was devoid of magic, concluding that Ariazel must have absorbed all the magic. Horace surmised that Ariazel killed the pixies, distilled them, and consumed them to become a fey.
They walked out to the top of the tower, hesitated for a moment, and stepped through into the material plane. Horace looked up at the tree they had stepped through, noting it looked exactly like the one that had brought him to the Wild.
