date: 2026-10-16
date_solaris_start: 1267-09-20
date_solaris_end: 1267-09-21
role: public
summary: "The party left Khasim's Crown and found the northern wardstone corrupted by something deep and far away, which Dravencoles could only push back. Beyond the dome they met Marshall Foxton's burned refugee caravan and dragged Hazim Tallystone along to show them where a black-robed wizard had gone. At an ancient temple of Faeren a red dragon came down off the cliff, killing Hazim and nearly Milo before Lirielle and Ferinthria brought it down, and Talan slipped inside as a lizard to open the doors."
scene:
  description: >-
    A young red dragon clings to the clifftop at the very top of the image, above a pair of great
    carved sandstone doors, its jaws wide open, breathing a colossal billowing wall of orange and
    yellow fire that spreads out and down to fill the upper two thirds of the whole frame and
    rolls across a narrow dry valley of brown dead vines and brittle trees. In the foreground,
    running straight at the viewer and about to burst out of the bottom of the frame, Hazim
    Tallystone: a soft, paunchy, round-shouldered man in his forties with thinning oiled hair
    combed across a widening scalp, sweating, eyes wide and mouth open in terror, wearing a plain
    open-collared cream linen shirt under a red coat gone shiny at the cuffs. The wall of fire is
    already swallowing him from behind: flames wrap his back, shoulders and arms, his coat is
    alight, and only his terrified face and reaching hands are still clear of it. The fire is the
    only light, throwing the scene into hot orange and hard black shadow.

The morning the party left Khasim's Crown, Mama Sherahn put her foot down: Jesse was staying behind to have an ordinary childhood. Momeline backed her, telling the boy that school had its uses. Milo came along instead, and was the first to notice something wrong on the road north: oases and springs he had known all his life were dry.

The wardstone Aleyna Sokari had sent them to was sick. Lirielle studied it through the Crown, Momeline laid a hand on the stone, and Dravencoles cast remove curse over it, and all three came away with the same vision: something deep and far away was poisoning the land around them, and the wardstone with it. Dravencoles' spell pushed the corruption back a little, but they knew it would return. Lirielle reached the city through the Crown, and the High Magisters agreed to send priests out to tend the wardstones.

Past the edge of the dome, black smoke stood up from the desert. The party followed it to a burned caravan of refugees from Lusteris. Ferinthria came forward wearing the Token of Obsidian Valor she had earned in Session 9 - Masks and Motives, and Marshall Foxton of the Obsidian Army knew it at once and told them what had happened. Among the refugees, Hazim Tallystone tried hard to be somewhere else, and Landor was furious the moment he saw him. Hazim had watched a black-robed wizard walk into a defile to the north, so the party took him along to show them the way, as part of paying off his debt. Landor gave the caravan water and the party sent them on to Solaris, offering Foxton the house they had bought there.

At the defile they found a temple of Faeren, older than anything Talan could place. Dravencoles tried the great doors and could not move them. Then a red dragon looked down from the cliff above.

Unable to reach it, Dravencoles threw a shield over himself and waited. Lirielle struck first with a lightning bolt, and the dragon answered with a wave of fire that killed Hazim outright, dropped Milo into death throws, and burned Talan, Dravencoles and Landor badly. Ferinthria held the creature paralyzed and followed with a lightning bolt of her own. Landor misty-stepped onto its back and hacked at it with his sunblade, keeping his footing just long enough to do some damage before he fell. Momeline landed her sneak attacks, but it was Lirielle and Ferinthria's magic that brought the dragon down, and Dravencoles reached Milo before he slipped away.

Dravencoles laid a prayer of healing over the party. Nobody mourned Hazim. They found a crack in the rock above the doors and sent Talan through it as a lizard, and a few minutes later the doors swung open with Talan standing on the other side, waiting for them.