Session 4: The Dragon Cultists

Three seals remained. The cult needed all six broken to complete the ritual. The party needed to stop them before that happened. Simple enough, if you ignored every complicating factor — which, to be fair, Zax was prepared to do.

“We know where they meet. We burn the place down.”

Lyria explained, at length, why this was inadvisable.

The Infiltration

The annotated text had given them more than a location. In the margins, the cult scholar had written a schedule — and more usefully, a passphrase for entering the primary safehouse: “The night has no end for those who welcome the dark.”

Lyria spoke it with absolute conviction, wearing a borrowed robe and a hood that shadowed her face. Theron watched from the rooftop opposite. Mira waited two streets away with a prepared Beacon of Hope. Zax waited one street away with a very large axe.

The door opened. Lyria stepped inside.

The safehouse held eleven cult members, a young acolyte who looked profoundly uncertain about his life choices, and a man in better robes than the others — Mordain, the scholar. He was middle-aged, precise, and the kind of person who organised genocidal conspiracies with the disposition of a librarian sorting overdue books.

For twenty minutes, Lyria circulated through the room, gathering information with the systematic patience of a spy twice her age.

Then Zax tripped over a barrel in the alley.

The Fight

The crash was unmistakeable. Mordain was in motion before the cult members, already moving toward the door. Lyria dropped pretence and opened it herself — Theron’s arrow took the first cultist through the window in the same moment.

The fight was brutal and contained. Zax and Mira held the door. Theron covered the only other exit. Lyria, inside with nine hostile cult members, cast Hypnotic Pattern and held her breath.

Six of the nine went glassy-eyed and still. The remaining three had a very bad thirty seconds.

Mordain, who had made it to a back room, was apprehended by Theron — who had, without announcing his intention to anyone, slipped around the building and come in through the kitchen window.

“How did you—” Zax started. “I walk quietly,” Theron said.

What Mordain Knew

Mordain did not break immediately. He broke eventually — somewhere between Mira’s Zone of Truth and Lyria reading his personal journal aloud to him with editorial commentary.

The Cult of the Endless Night had not broken three seals at random. They had broken three specific seals: the ones most easily accessed, the ones unguarded for centuries. The remaining three were different.

One was beneath Neverwinter itself — under the city’s oldest district, the foundations that predated the eruption of Mount Hotenow.

One was in the High Forest, a week’s travel east, in a place Mordain called the Dreaming Hollow.

The third — and the most critical — was already targeted. A cult warband of thirty had left for the Dreaming Hollow three days ago.

And if they completed that seal-breaking, Mordain said with the calm of someone explaining inevitable mathematics, the entity bound beneath the earth — the shadow dragon called Skalarix the Unending — would begin to wake. Slowly, but irreversibly.

The room was very quiet.

“How long,” Mira asked, “before it wakes fully?”

Mordain considered. “Once the fourth seal breaks? Perhaps a month. Perhaps less.”

The Decision

The party had one night to rest, resupply, and make a decision. Three days’ head start. Thirty cultists. A shadow dragon stirring in the dark beneath the earth.

Theron began sharpening his arrows — all of them. Mira wrote a coded letter to Prior Aldric. Lyria organised her journal into what she titled, without apparent irony, “Volume I.”

Zax purchased a barrel of the Stonehill Inn’s best ale, drank half of it, and went to sleep smiling.

Session end: The race to the Dreaming Hollow begins. Next session — the High Forest.