Anar reached for the cover of the lectern book and tried to force it shut. He needed a 20. He rolled a 1. For a fraction of a second the runes flashed and he was somewhere else — a vast dark space, and in it, a face made of darkness and tentacles reaching toward him. He pulled his hands back. He was still in the room. The book was still open.
Puck's hand was through the bubble membrane. Anar grabbed it. Both rolled Strength with advantage — Anar hit 19, Puck rolled a natural 20. Puck came through fast, skin visibly stretching across his face as the membrane let go. His boots didn't make it. They walked on their own to the center of the circle and stood there, aging.
Puck's dagger missed the book on a 3. The bubbles were shrinking. He gave Anar his last Bardic Inspiration die — D6 — and said: "My Lord, help me get my friends out." Anar rolled 19 plus 1 strength modifier plus the D6. Exactly 20. The book closed. The bubbles vanished.
Penelope and Orimene stepped off their circles. Puck — already pulled through earlier with Anar's help — was simply free of the ritual at this point too. All three had aged roughly ten years. Anar, who had never entered a circle, was unchanged. Orimene had been around twenty-three. She now looked thirty-three. Anar observed that her knees would ache when it rained.
Anar roped the closed book before anyone asked him to. The cover was wrong — not deer, not cow, not anything he had ever skinned or tracked or hunted. He tied it tight, put it in his pack, and called it the demon book. He would have liked to burn it but noted this was not the time.
The mimic was exhausted, bleeding from the tongue wound, and more afraid than hostile. Penelope sat close and observed it until she understood that. She pulled the curtain rod free. The mimic stayed still and made a sound somewhere between a whimper and a creak. Then Anar came through from the kitchen and ended it. Penelope noted the contrast.
Anar's Stealth was 22 but the floorboard squeaked. A cultist opened the curtain: "Excuse me, can I help you?" Anar said he was Steve. Puck stepped out and said he was also Steve. The cultist handed them pamphlets. Anar's instinct not to disrobe ("I'm too shy") was accepted without question. They were inside.
While Puck played Pip off-key and Anar chanted out of rhythm, Anar pulled out a thalar — a kazoo-like instrument nobody at the table knew he was proficient with — and joined the cult chant. The ritual continued around them. No one stopped them. The thalar was apparently convincing enough.
The Grand Priest of Krokulmar stepped toward the side door. Anar brushed past him and picked his pocket on a 27. He took 3 points of static damage from the contact and learned, empirically, that the priest wore nothing beneath his robe. This information did not surface in-game. The priest identified himself by title, interrupted by the shock.
Orimene rolled a natural 20 on Perception and spotted the unused side door behind stacked boxes. She snuck through it. The room on the other side held body parts in a green-flame pot, a limb pile, and shelves of preserved heads in jars. She failed her Constitution save on a Nat 1. Her Wisdom Insight of 18 confirmed what she feared: Elra's head was in one of those jars. It turned and looked at her.
Orimene's grief at seeing Elra's head triggered a wild magic surge — not from a spell, but from the emotional shock acting on her existing wild magic condition. D100 came up 42. The DM ruled: Inflict Wounds on self. D10 = 3 damage. Penelope caught up, and Orimene pressed her face into Penelope's hair.
The priest cast Mass Suggestion ("grovel"). Anar failed, went prone, rerolled with Fey Ancestry advantage, succeeded. Puck made the save. Puck played along well enough (Performance 15) to follow up immediately with Suggestion from Zala's spellbook: "Take me and my friend to Marcos and leave everybody else here, not chanting. Tell them it's done." The priest failed on a 13. He had them shackled and led downstairs.
Orimene used her Thaumaturgy booming voice and threw it across the ritual room as if one of the acolytes had spoken. The DM ruled three minutes of mass confusion. Several cultists drifted upstairs. Three mandatory chanters stayed. It was enough of a gap for Penelope and Orimene to slip into the vestry without a roll.
Penelope cast Spike Growth on the statue (20ft radius, cultists on difficult terrain), then wild shaped into a brown bear as a bonus action and sat against the vestry door. Strength check: 21. That was the DC. The session ended with her there, the door behind her, cultists confused on both sides of the situation.
The spiral staircase opened into two dome caves joined by a twelve-foot archway. Markos stood in it — regalia headpiece, thousand-yard stare, reading the Codex aloud in Deep Speech, tentacles visibly growing larger from him with each phrase. Puck cast Command ("Drop"). Markos's head turned all the way around Exorcist-style to look at him. Then turned back. He kept reading.
In Markos's domain: a headless figure in full plate armor, kneeling at the center of a magic circle, a greatsword laid across its lap, dry-ice tendrils drifting from the neck hole. Four crystals with Far Realm glimpses inside. Two guards. Puck and Anar shackled. No exit visible. The session ended here, with no resolution on any of it.