date: 2026-09-02
date_solaris_start: 1267-09-18
date_solaris_end: 1267-09-19
role: public
summary: "The party climbed into the Colosseum stands and found slaads butchering the audience and the senators being sworn in. Lirielle's counterspell stopped a second fireball that would have finished them, and Dravencoles (almost) took the last slaad down. Aghash was left carrying a slaad egg and went home to the Witchwood weakened after Dravencoles' cure burned him. On behalf of the Lowwater, the party carried a guild petition to the High Magisters and won it, and Aleyna Sokari sent them out of the city with a warning: the dome faltered for the first time in its history, and a wardstone to the north is being drained."
scene:
  description: >-
    A single figure, no one else in frame. Lirielle, a blue-skinned elf woman with long stark
    white hair and round wire glasses, wearing a tan coat over a collared shirt, hanging in the
    air with her boots clear of the ground, floating, weightless, drifting slightly off the
    vertical. Her white hair and the skirts of her coat stream upward and outward around her in
    slow banshee-like drift, as if she were underwater, lifted by nothing. One arm is thrust
    forward with the fingers spread. On her brow is the Crown of Judgement: a slender delicate
    band of silver-gold electrum, not a spiked tiara, its frame a fine lattice of small sapphire
    and obsidian stones worked into an open eye at the centre with coiling threads of fate
    curling out to either side, and thin hairline veins of starmetal arcing across it like
    constellations. The crown glows acid-green from within. Her eyes are two solid pools of the
    same burning green, no pupil and no iris, the glare washing up her cheekbones. Her expression
    is hard and pitiless, brows level, jaw set, a terrible unhuman calm with no warmth in it.
    Green fire pours off her open palm and coils up her forearm. She is outdoors in open daylight.
    Behind her, well back and slightly out of focus, a bright sun-bleached pale sandstone wall of
    large flat blocks, and above it a wide hot cloudless desert sky. The whole background is
    light, warm and airy, not a dark interior. No crowd, no other characters, no fire, no
    ornament, no landscape features.

The party came up out of the tunnels into the Colosseum and into a bloodbath. Slaads were loose in the packed stands, tearing through the audience and the senators waiting to be sworn in, and the party went straight at them.

Lirielle and Ferinthria leaned hard on chromatic orb and only worked out afterward that they had picked acid and fire against creatures resistant to both. Aghash went after the green slaad in the seats with Momeline landing devastating sneak attacks from range, and Landor's sunblade did terrible work on the death slaad while Dravencoles smote the red ones. Then the green slaad dropped a fireball across the whole party. Lirielle went down into death saves and Talan pulled her back. When it laughed and reached for a second fireball, certain it had them, Lirielle stood with the Crown on her brow and her eyes lit, and counterspelled it out of the air.

As Dravencoles went for the killing blow on the last slaad, one of the senators-to-be broke from his cowering and took it instead. The paladin was furious, and shoved him away. Only the holy burn of the Hammer of Elandria in his hand kept him from doing worse.

Aghash came out of it gravely wounded and carrying a slaad egg. The next morning Dravencoles cast remove curse on him, and the devil's own nature turned the holy magic against him: the egg came out, but it left him scorched and badly weakened. He went back to the Witchwood alone.

The party went down into the Lowwater and found what its people actually wanted, which was not revenge and not a riot but a guild of their own and a voice in the Senate. They carried it to the High Magisters, who resisted the idea strongly. Only Selene Anvari was with them at the start. Hadrek Vohn, who came out of the Lowwater himself and now calls its people lazy, argued the hardest. Then Aleyna Sokari turned to Lirielle and asked the crown-bearer to tell them what the city's future held if they said yes. Lirielle refused the question and told the council it had no business settling a matter of right and wrong with foresight. Sokari was impressed enough to grant the petition, and convinced at last that the Crown had truly chosen her.

Sokari kept Lirielle back afterward. The Crown makes her responsible for this city now, she said, and there is something wrong with it: the dome faltered for a few minutes, the first failure in its history, and a wardstone north of the city is being drained. She asked the party to look at it on their way out.

They returned to The Open Door with Mama, Milo and Jesse, and began packing to leave.