After a short bought of combat with an army of giant squid, a death squid, and a magma kracken, the party woke up to realize they were dreaming.
They left the Crossroads through the north door, finding themselves... in the North. Shade reported their location, and directed them toward Riptide. The party found Riptide snowboarding, but no sign of Loras.
Riptide reported that Loras has been gone for a few days. He'd been meditating or something up on the mountain, when Karn came by, and when Riptide came back, both were gone. All that remained were some terrifying snowmen, who were bleeding red blood. Oh, and Karn had been summoning Octavian.
The party contacted Karn, who revealed that Loras had agreed to become part of an artifact Karn now carried--a sword.
Largo thought summoning Octavian for a fight sounded like fun, so they did. Of course, calling his name from the top of a snow-and-ice-covered mountaintop caused a bit of an avalanche. The party was perfectly alright. While Riptide did get caught in it, the party figured he'd be fine, and focused on the being that had appeared: Octavian.
Octavian, a large man-thing covered in rocks and spikes, a scar across his chest, an acorn around his neck, and a shrunken Solar head with a hearthstone in it on his belt, wished to know what they wanted. Largo began to challenge him to a duel--as Takara jump-started the fight with a sneak attack.
While Takara's attacks landed, Octavian returned with an attack that blinded him. Takara's quick response to this was a rapid leveling of the playing field, making the area pitch black so Octavian could not see either. (Largo and Kai were fine, seeing through essence sight, while Amber's hearing was more than enough to compensate.) Amber quickly followed, removing Octavian's hearing as well--silence encompassed the field. Next, Largo did massive amounts of damage, as per his usual, leaving their enemy injured and on his knees before Kai. Instead of attacking an already downed enemy, Kai used the moment to burn the head of the Solar and retrieve the cracked hearthstone.
At this point, frustrated and tired, Octavian conceded the combat, asking to know what the party wished of him. Speaking for the group, Amber merely made the request of an all-expenses-paid trip for four to the lovely vacation spot of Malfeas. Octavian agreed, and left.
At this point, the party began to hear moans of pain. Riptide, who had been caught in the avalanche, had also been coated in Octavian's blood, and was in very bad shape. Kai was unable to heal him, and the party hurriedly brought him up to the Coatl.
The unfortunate friendly Abyssal was not only horribly injured, but demon-possessed, occasionally rattling off warnings about the coming war. Some of what he said was already known to the party, while other pieces were new (though less to Takara, who had neglected to share some things with the party): war is coming, the war between the living and the dead, the first blow has been struck, the light shall decide how things will occur, the light itself shall fall.
The first blow having been struck sounded particularly ominous, especially as Amber made an unsettling suggestion. The scar across Octavian's chest was new--and Karn had just battled him. Loras had willingly become his artifact sword. The first blow struck in the coming war was, perhaps, Loras' strike against Octavian, through a Solar's hand.
These revelations were not the low point of the day, however. After the prophesies, Riptide was overcome by his injuries, and passed away. Kai burned the body with a holy fire to send his soul to heaven, and the party mourned the passing of a good man.
Character Thoughts and Reactions[]
Followed by Session Forty