They were still five feet from the circle when the session resumed. The wooden doors had shut behind them. Markos was still chanting, still feeding whatever pulled at him from the other side of the ritual, still laughing off the failed spell the party had thrown at the end of last session as though it had been a polite suggestion. The thing taking shape in the circle — black tentacles fusing and writhing, approximating the structure of a head — was no longer entirely metaphorical.
Anar leaned toward Puck and spoke in Gnomish. He had something glass in his pack. He had a plan. Puck did not ask for details, which was probably the right call given the time available. While Anar reached for his pack, Puck tried the only other option that presented itself: he talked directly to Markos about his daughter. Gertie. If this ritual finished, she would die. Markos wavered — genuinely, visibly — and then something in the circle pulled the hesitation away. A slam echoed down from the stairs above. More doors closing.
Initiative rolled. The conversation was over.
The fight went sideways fast. Puck raised Mirror Images of himself as a first action — four copies to confuse anything swinging his way. Orimene, watching Markos jerk and spasm through the ritual, said quietly that he looked like another sacrifice, not a caster making a choice. Penelope shifted into bear form.
One of the guards hit Anar for thirty-four points. He went to zero hit points before his second turn.
Anar did not wake up on the floor. He woke up standing behind himself, looking at his own body collapsed in the dirt. The fight was still happening around it, but he was somewhere else — a threshold state, the kind of place that doesn't have a good name in common language.
He was not alone there. Figures waited in that space: the previous adventuring party, the ones who had come to this manor before the current group and had not come back. One identified herself as Elra. There was a barbarian, a halfling, a rogue. They did not say much. They pointed.
Four Far Realm crystals existed in that space, tethering something to the material plane. Anar smashed all of them. His death saving throws ticked in the background of the material world — one failure, then two successes. He was still alive. Just barely.
Puck's Healing Word reached him and pulled him back. He woke up on the floor of the ritual chamber, which was not a pleasant place to wake up, but was better than the alternative.
The ritual ended. Markos was released from whatever had been running through him. His hands were injured — the demonic book had done something to them when he'd held it. The Codex itself vanished into the circle, which then went quiet.
Puck let the Disguise Self drop. He had been wearing Gertie's face since somewhere in the middle of the fight — a calculated gamble that hadn't needed to pay off, since the ritual ended through other means. Zala came through from her room. She was in human form. The curse that had been on her was gone. She looked at what was left of the ritual chamber and did not say much about it.
The party searched the chamber. They found smudge sticks — herbs for cleansing spirit contamination — along with a leather-bound tome and fragments of summoning crystals, four of them. The coins they'd expected weren't there. Zala offered a meal and drink to help the party recover. Anar wanted out — the party declined. Later, as they passed the guest house, Gertie offered to refill Anar's wineskins. He accepted, grateful.
Then Anar went still for a moment. The entity — whatever had been driving Markos's ritual, whatever had retreated when the circle went quiet — had not actually left. It whispered to him. Not to anyone else. Just to Anar.
"I won't forget you, Anor. I'll always be here."
Anar told Zala immediately. She took it seriously. She said she would follow up.
Zala wanted the Codex. The party had retrieved it when the circle closed. There was a strength contest — she won — and she said she would lock it away somewhere it could not be used. The party did not push back. It was hard to know whether that was the right call; it was also hard to know what the right call would have looked like. She walked out with the book.
They left. The grounds outside were different than they'd been going in — nature had come back. Birds. Sunlight. The Seelie Market was visible in the distance. Whatever the ritual had been doing to the surrounding area had stopped when the ritual stopped, and the world had immediately started correcting.
Gertie paid them: two hundred and fifty gold pieces each.
Back near the gatehouse in Greyhawk City, Penelope checked the wagon. Under cotton, she found three bundles of human skin and a five-pound bag of small pearls — thumbnail-sized, dozens of them. She covered the bundles before the others reached her. The rest of the party does not know what she found.
At the Seelie Market, they met a gnome bard. He had been valedictorian at the same bardic college Puck attended. Orimene said something about Riley — something undone — and didn't elaborate.
Someone asked about Puck's mentor. Puck deflected: "Let's just say Fred." A placeholder. The gnome bard's reaction implied he knew who was actually meant, and that the person in question had disappeared from the bardic college at Rift Canyon. Weeks away by boat. No plan for what to do about that.
The session ended there. The entity was still active. The mentor was still gone. The Codex was in Zala's hands. Penelope was carrying information nobody else had. The market buzzed around them like nothing had happened in the manor at all.