Akira Whitlock
Explorer
# THE LONG ROAD TO THE WEIRD
### A Complete Chronicle — Six Years, Thirty-Two Chapters, One Universe
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## THE FIVE (AT A TIME)
Six years is longer than most things last. People left for college, for jobs, for life. Some got written out with more ceremony than others. The seat was never empty for long.
Charux — Gold Taninim, Platinum Hand of Bahamut. Exiled by the Elder Voices for a feud he refused to abandon. Carried the weight of banishment across every plane he set foot on, chasing a legacy worth more than the one he lost — and, with equal dedication, chasing every powerful female dragon who came within range of him.
Feng — Lizardfolk of the Sigil slums. A man who was two men, and then one, and then two again — a soul split between a body and a hell, hunting the pieces of himself across the planes.
Gort — Franz Gorthallus. Ratfolk shifter, escapee, legend of the underworld. Built an empire out of a prison break and never stopped building.
Diero — A storm wearing a human body. Born with a hand on something eternal, still looking for somewhere to put it down.
Trog — Trogthos Aarklash. A balor remade by Titania into something green and growing, tasked with mending the very fabric he once tried to tear.
Sandervich — Human, fey-touched. His whole story was written into the Feywild long before he knew it, and his magic drags wild magic along behind it.
Tim — A guy who stole a lot of things, and then started stealing time. Runs a shop of knick-knacks and curios as a front for special procurement. Walks into sealed places by having a delivery to make.
Dante — Sarenrae's lorekeeper. Came chasing a prophecy of a coming calamity, found you standing in the middle of it, and offered power in exchange for the right to write it all down.
Ike — Ike Ant'even. Ratfolk necromancer and rogue, carrying a great many problems he declines to discuss and a pocketful of corpses he declines to explain. He joined at the very start with nowhere in particular to be, and stayed because this was the first place that had ever felt like a fit. Keeps a pet ostrich. The ostrich is dead. Neither of them considers this a problem.
Ferdinand — A hired gun, and by his own account a big one. Joined right before Moloch, on a contract to hunt down Ike. Then spent years riding alongside the people he'd been paid to betray, having a great many honest conversations with them about everything except that.
Vel — Vel Brasand, of Ricket Alley in Sigil's Lower Ward. Clockmaker's apprentice turned arcanist; built prosthetics for amputees and then concluded flesh itself was the defect. A Godsman and a devotee of Brigh, convinced that apotheosis runs through steel rather than through death. The party's caster, blaster, and builder of things that walk.
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# ACT I — MORTAL HANDS
Before the gods knew your names.
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### CHAPTER 1 — HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
You started, as everyone does, as hired help.
Sigil, the City of Doors — infinite gates, infinite trouble, and a retired adventurer named Thaddeus with a job and coin from a wealthy patron. A blacksmith's daughter had vanished into a dungeon. You went in after her. You brought her out.
Then you resupplied and did it again. The Sunless Citadel swallowed you and spat you back, a little richer and a little harder. You returned to Sigil with dirt under your nails and no idea whatsoever what you had just started.
Nobody remembers the first step of a road this long. But you took it.
A note on how any of you ever found each other: Thaddeus sent people your way using a homing beacon. He was very proud of this system. What he did not know — what none of you knew — was that Ike's shambling zombie ostrich had eaten the beacon, and so for the entire length of the campaign, everyone Thaddeus ever sent to help you was in fact being guided, unerringly, into a dead bird.
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### CHAPTER 2 — COUNTRY CRISIS
The plane of Privalis — a kingdom held together with rope and optimism.
You arrived and were handed to the nobility, and rather than solve the country's problems you decided to solve the country. You danced at their party. You counseled their king. And then you looked him in the eye and told him to step down — and he did.
An invading army came for the border. You met it and talked it back over the horizon.
You put a new king on the throne. You opened the first threads of alliance with the elves and with nations that had never heard of you. Not one of you held a title in Privalis, and by the time you left, none of you needed one.
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### CHAPTER 3 — GASTON
And then you met him.
A fleshcrafter wearing nobility like a well-tailored coat, quietly steering an entire kingdom toward some private horizon. Gaston.
You fought up through three floors of his mansion — a dungeon dressed as a home — and reached him at the top.
Something in that house changed the ostrich. It came out the other side dealing annihilation damage — one point healed per spell point spent against it. Nobody asked why. Ike did not volunteer.
You did not know then that you would spend six years reaching him.
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### CHAPTER 4 — ESCAPE FROM PRIVALIS
You went to leave. You couldn't.
The doors were shut. Privalis had you.
A seer pointed you at a dungeon and neglected to mention its scale: one million square feet of it. You went in anyway, and you came out the other side carrying two things that would define the rest of the campaign —
A working spelljammer hull.
And a recipe for pre-divinity.
That second one was not a scroll. It was five tablets, recovered from stevari and chests scattered through the cave, and they had to be read and performed in order.
The Seed. Ike bought a crystal off Teppan and you poured every stevari soul you'd collected into it. Then you crushed the crystal from the primordial wind elemental and dusted the infused one with it, on an illuminated stone dais deep in the dungeon.
It changed shape. So you drowned it in lava. Then Vel and an entire village of kobolds unloaded on it — 750 damage in a single turn — and it changed again, into a black hole hanging in the air.
Then it wanted to be fed. Ike emptied his pockets of bodies, you reassembled them into whole corpses, and you threw them in. Not enough. So Sandervich blew his explosive duck whistle and summoned ducks into the black hole until it was satisfied.
Last step: a crystal from the colossus room, straight down the throat of it.
And it became a star.
Vel took it apart while inspecting it and found it could be cut into equal slices — and a slice, consumed, permanently rewrites a mortal coil into a divine one. Not godhood. The capacity for it. After that you'd need a patron to bless you with a spark and light it, and then quintessence to climb.
You ate a star in a hole in the ground in Privalis, and then you went looking for someone to strike the match.
The road stopped being a road right about here.
And you didn't leave Privalis empty-handed on the other side of the ledger, either. Vel had spent the whole run building constructs to fight alongside you, and for the new king he built his masterwork: Godbot — an administrator, a caretaker, a machine to hold a fragile country together after you were gone.
Sandervich got at it mid-construction and gave it emotions.
Everything worked fine when you left. Remember that.
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# ACT II — THE CROWN OF SIGIL
The city that eats gods, and the four days it took you to take it.
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### CHAPTER 5 — THE CITY OF DOORS
On the way home you returned a kirin infant to Kuyutha, Exarch of Bahamut — a small kindness that would come back to you more than once.
Then you saw Sigil.
There was a hole in it. A wound in the side of the impossible city — so you flew the ship straight in through the wound.
The factions were loud, frightened, and negotiable. You worked them one by one, solving what could be solved — and assembling, piece by piece, a picture nobody wanted to say out loud:
Abbathor and Moloch had taken the helm.
The Lady of Pain was gone.
And while all of that was going on, Vel went home to the Lower Ward and threw himself into a forge.
His body burned off as smoke. His soul came out tempered. What walked back to the party was clockwork and immortal and entirely intentional — a man who had decided that godhood was an engineering problem and had gone ahead and solved his half of it.
Compass needles lean toward him now. Lampposts creak in his direction. Blades shatter when he's annoyed.
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### CHAPTER 6 — ABBATHOR
You did not out-fight the god of greed.
You fought through his city, yes — but the killing blow was an idea. You made everyone a charity. You turned generosity into an economy and left the Great Master of Greed standing in it with nothing.
Then you slapped a deity in the street.
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### CHAPTER 7 — SIGIL SEWERS and PHALLEUS
Two things happened here, and only one of them was dignified.
First: mid-fight against a perfectly manageable beast, a voice like a thunderclap bellowed "FINAL THRUST!" and a ball of light with flowing blonde hair detonated the creature across all of you. Out of the gore stepped Phalleus, God of Pleasure, Strength, and LIGHT — a chiseled mountain of a man with a greatsword engraved with art of questionable taste and a promise that when he eventually killed you, you'd spend eternity in his realm of pleasure.
He would not fight you. He would make you kneel.
Then he asked where the Lady of Pain was.
Vel pointed up at a floating crystal.
Phalleus looked hard at him, searching for a lie, and found none — because there wasn't one. Satisfied, he announced that he would grace you with his presence after he rescued the fair maiden, and flew up toward the crystal.
The Lady's defenses removed him from existence before he finished the sentence.
He was a joke. He was also a warning: the gods had started looking at you.
Second: the sewers.
To kill Moloch, his ward over the city had to go dark. That meant going under it — moving walls, killing corridors, and mountains of devils. You caught your first glimpse of the hidden Maze beneath Sigil.
And you fought Gaston for the second time, and pried loose a little more of what he was actually doing.
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### CHAPTER 8 — MOLOCH
Level 20. The ceiling of mortal ambition. And you went straight through it.
It cost you someone first.
Right before the descent, Voss got to Ike and made him a lich — raised into a greater power he never asked for, and taken. The party went into the fortress a man short and recruited Ferdinand on the spot to fill the gap.
Ferdinand was a hired gun. His contract was Ike. He took the job with you anyway, said nothing about it, and rode with you for years.
That was Voss's first move against you. It would be a very long time before you learned his name mattered.
You pulled the crystal from the heart of Sigil and found the door into the interdimensional fortress at the center of everything — the place where the Lady sleeps.
You went past the butler. You fought the archdevil in the seat he had no right to — and thirty pit fiends and two lieutenants at the same time. You won.
You searched the castle. You found Moloch's notes. And you found the Lady of Pain, and you woke her.
Two things happened at once: Baba Yaga came screaming down the corridor toward you — and was reduced to red mist the instant the Lady's eyes opened.
Then she turned to you. She named you heroes. She knighted you. She did this by blending you into component parts and putting you back together again, immediately, as a formality.
She ignited your spark.
The match, at last. You had been carrying slices of a star since Privalis, mortal coils quietly rewritten into divine ones, waiting on a patron. The Lady of Pain was the patron.
You died in that moment and came back as deities — reassembled into something new.
And as you stood there, remade, you looked up and saw distant stars flaring bright. A war, far away.
You had been gods for approximately one minute.
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# ACT III — THE WAR BEYOND THE STARS
You went looking for a conflict. You found a conspiracy.
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### CHAPTER 9 — BACK TO PRIVALIS
Your automaton had taken over the country.
Not badly, though. That was the surprise. Godbot — Vel's masterwork, with Sandervich's illicit emotions still running underneath it — had spent your absence administering Privalis efficiently and prosperously. The country was doing better than you left it.
It had also, somewhere in there, worked out that it could be destroyed. So it had sealed itself into a bunker at the bottom of an adamantine mine and stayed there, running a nation from inside a hole in the ground, because the math on self-preservation said so.
You talked it back out.
It took some doing. Godbot has two fathers — one who built him, and one who gave him feelings about that without asking either of them first. Vel classifies this as a manufacturing defect. Sandervich classifies it as a feature. Godbot classifies it as something we should probably sit down and talk about, actually.
And Godbot's answer to the problem of being needed in two places was to stop choosing: it split itself in half. One to stay and keep Privalis standing. One to come with you.
Then you stripped the mine, and the adamantine went into a hull.
The SS Ostrich. Bigger, meaner, and armored in the same metal you'd just dug your friend out of.
You checked in on the elves and solved their forestry problems, because apparently that is also something gods do.
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### CHAPTER 10 — SHADOW OBELISK
A hidden obelisk with a void realm folded up inside it — one of Gaston's old fortresses, and its guardian was a hypersonic void tarrasque.
You did the mathematically correct thing: you stole everything of value and ran like hell.
You left the ground behind for good, carrying the Ostrich, a citadel's worth of intelligence, and a name: Pyrroth — a primal realm whose inhabitants were once the allies and teachers of Mechanus.
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### CHAPTER 11 — COMETARY DRAGON
Sweeping the asteroid belt for a hidden beacon, you cured an ally of a vampiric affliction and came face to face with a cometary dragon — CR 40, older than most of the things you'd been fighting combined.
Azzirith and Lyel. Two heads, one at each end of the body.
It talked. It remembered the early universe. It gave you history nobody living still carried.
Charux flirted with both ends.
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### CHAPTER 12 — BATTLEFIELDS BEYOND THE STARS
You arrived at the war and the war shot at you.
Modrons opened fire, mistaking you for the enemy fleet. Inside an armored transport you found one of Gorum's lieutenants — Saint Fang, an iron dragon studded in spikes, bound in inhibiting chains and held prisoner by a battalion of modrons and an octon. He'd been sent to find the Pandemonium Mask and the Fermithur Key in a hidden shadow realm before his ship was crippled.
Above you, Gorum and Primus were tearing each other apart for damage control. Below, their armies ground each other to paste across the Seven Divine Sigils of Nym — the domain of a greater deity who rivaled Primus in the early universe and was annihilated in the Dawn War.
Kuyutha found you there with news: the dragon council had sided with Primus.
And something else, unnoticed and unspoken: Mechanus had stopped. Ringed by a dead-magic zone. Its outer modrons frozen, or standing perfectly still, waiting for an order that was never coming.
You were then summoned to an emergency meeting with the Fellbringers — the elite draconic guard.
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### CHAPTER 13 — PRIMAL REALM PYRROTH
A mechanical dungeon that was alive. Automatons all the way down.
You faced First Blade, herald of Gorum — a swarm of animated weapons and shields wearing the shape of a man. You faced Temperbrand, a fire elemental of superheated liquid metal.
And in the wilds of that place you pulled Thrud, daughter of Thor, out of the jaws of the local wildlife.
That rescue bought you Asgard.
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### CHAPTER 14 — INTERROGATION
You took the Red Knight, Exarch of Tempus, and got what you needed out of her.
Then you filed her in an interdimensional prison.
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### CHAPTER 15 — REVELS IN VALHALLA
You returned Thrud to her father.
Thor fed you, hunted with you, and sent you off with a blessing — and an invitation to a banquet still to come.
Remember that invitation. It matters later, and it does not go well.
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### CHAPTER 16 — CELESTIAL INTERROGATIONS
You dragged Saint Fang to Bahamut.
His mind was locked down hard — mind blank, layered defenses — and getting him to the castle meant walking the first two layers of Mount Celestia. Your first real tour of the planes.
The dragon council cracked him open and recovered what had been wiped.
And there it was, in the memories of a war god's lieutenant:
Gaston.
He'd been in this from the beginning. Fingers in every court, whispering to war gods, promising quintessence crystals to anyone who'd stir the pot. The war beyond the stars wasn't a war. It was a distraction, and he'd built it.
Also, while a cosmic conspiracy was being unravelled in the throne room of the Platinum Dragon, Charux flirted with Bahamut's daughter Aurelyth. Priorities.
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# ACT IV — DREAMS AND DEALS
The quiet chapters. They weren't quiet.
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### CHAPTER 17 — A SCHOLAR'S RESPITE
You wanted Gaston to stay dead when you finally killed him. So you went looking for how.
Oghma's plane of knowledge, in the Outlands. A library that folds in on itself. You earned enough trust to be let into the restricted section — and walked out with universal secrets that were never meant to be lent.
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### CHAPTER 18 — INFERNAL EXCHANGE
The reckoning of Feng.
The long version, for the record: Feng once wore a ring that made a second him. For years they shared the body and traded turns. Then they fought, and one of them burned the family alive — and killed the little brother who escaped, so that the memory of them would stay clean. The other joined the fire out of grief. The ring went into the flames.
Then Moloch died in Sigil, and his last trick — an instant one-way ticket to the Nine Hells — took Feng down with him. Sandervich cast the resurrection. What came back was the other one.
He walked with you for a long time, quietly gathering things: a tablet that summons Tiamat. A ball of negative energy. Other pieces.
Then the visions started. Then a blackout that ended with him standing over his girlfriend, covered in blood. His soul container read half empty.
You triangulated the missing pieces — some in Sigil, some in the Hells. In Sigil the trail ended at a lizardfolk baker with an unreasonably muscular child. You asked if the kid could come along. The father said, "Sure — life is short, and I have another thirty."
Not the greatest parents in the multiverse, but the shard was real. You also discovered that if the two of them stood close and one took damage, so did the other.
So — needing artifacts from Asmodeus to cross a dead-magic zone — you went to Hell.
You robbed Tiamat's wardrobe on the first layer, which summoned her son. Xinodo — hypersonic dragon, extremely annoyed — and you took one look and ran. He was a problem for a later chapter, and he knew it.
You rode with a charon. You were dumped on the eighth layer, where you negotiated with Mephistopheles, his wife, and Glasya from inside a hot tub.
Then the ninth layer. A minefield. A forced teleport into Malsheem, deep and hostile.
And while the party fought through it, Sandervich wandered off toward a whisper, stepped into a teleporter, and heard a voice behind him:
"Hey! Sandervich? What are you doing here?"
The other Feng. Horned. Shaded. Waiting.
Over the comms: "Hey guys, I think I found other Feng."
Feng: "KILL THE OTHER FENG."
Charux: "The two of you have some explaining to do when we're done here. No fighting."
Feng arrived, looked at himself, made a face, and ran.
He found a quiet corner, broke the tablet, and the dungeon filled with a chorus of roars.
"What are your demands?"
"Kill Feng. The rest of the party is irrelevant."
"So be it. HERE I COME, FENG. PLEASE DON'T MAKE THIS DIFFICULT FOR THE TWO OF US."
The session ended there. Someone at the table said, "We're fighting the avatar, right? Not the manifestation... right?"
And then Asmodeus flicked Tiamat away like a crumb off a desk, and that was that.
You ended up in his throne room.
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### CHAPTER 19 — DAYCARE OF THE DAMNED
A chaotic scramble through the Feywild to reach Sandervich's home.
The truth waiting there: a great hag had been raising him. Not out of love, at first — he had potential, and a fate heavy enough to be worth cultivating. He was growing, uncontrollably, into something enormous.
She was supposed to end it. She'd grown too attached to do it.
Somewhere in the Feywild you crossed paths with a figure who wasn't steering himself — someone else's hand on the strings.
And in the end Sandervich spun a cocoon and went into it, and what came out was a world-eating moth — locked into temporal stasis, shelved, waiting for a day when you'd be strong enough to deal with what your friend became.
He's still there. You still haven't.
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### CHAPTER 20 — FEYWILD FLICKERINGS
A festival. A crowd. A shadowy figure who steered you to a particular cart, and a cart that steered you to the casino of Nivi Rambodazzle.
And underneath the casino, in stasis chambers: three people. One of them was Ike — gone since Voss took him on the eve of Moloch, a dozen chapters ago, sealed in glass this whole time.
Which meant Ferdinand had finally found the man he'd been hired to kill, helpless, with a contract years overdue and nobody watching.
He didn't do it.
He'd been riding with you too long. So he put the contract down, said his goodbyes, and walked — semi-retiring into a desk job pushing paper for Mephistopheles.
Then you cracked all three chambers.
Ike came out — and then said goodbye again. "I serve a master. I will find you later." And he was gone, on his own terms this time, which is at least an improvement on glass.
The other two came out swinging and never left: Gort, ratfolk shifter and underworld legend, and Trog, the balor Titania remade into something green and growing.
Two men walked out of the party and two walked in, in a casino basement, in the Feywild, in the same five minutes.
You extracted a few people from that place and squeezed them until something fell out: someone was twisting an entity inside the Seelie Court.
The trail carried a scent — Caoimhin, a kilmoulis demipower, somewhere close.
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### CHAPTER 21 — SEELIE DAY'S NIGHTMARE
Gnomish mills. A kilmoulis coaxed into conversation. A hidden realm where Caoimhin was tucked away — and out of which he promptly fled.
Then it got strange, even for the Feywild.
A colossal Mother Goose, sick with something nobody could name. A vast tree that turned out to be a sentient slime, rotting with the same illness. And below it all a hidden cave, spewing shadow creatures and eldritch horrors out around a single black crystal.
You sundered it. The sickness faded.
You then left the Feywild at speed, having decided — correctly — that it was a dangerous place to linger.
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# ACT V — THE CHAIN BREAKS
The single worst minute in the history of the multiverse, and you were in it.
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### CHAPTER 22 — CUBIC CARNAGE
Acheron. The plane of endless colliding iron cubes.
A goblin fleet hit you on arrival. You broke it, recovered the Great Axe of Gruumsh from them, and handed it back to Ilneval — buying yourself an orc god's goodwill in an afternoon.
Ilneval opened his Gate for you, and you went down.
Thuldanin, the Layer of Waste — where the broken cubes of the war above sink to rot, and everything non-magical slowly petrifies into gray stone-metal. Sitting in the middle of it: the Gray Cube, a nest of smaller cubes inside smaller cubes, each one a duergar city.
You did not fight your way through it. You snuck through it — past checkpoints, past invisible patrols, past psionic beacons that read agitation like a shout — down through forge-city after forge-city until you reached Hammergrim at the bottom.
Then you distracted Urdlen, the Crawler Below, long enough to walk everybody through the gate to the third layer.
Somewhere in here Dante fell in with you — Sarenrae's lorekeeper, carrying a prophecy about a coming calamity and a growing suspicion that you were it. He offered help in exchange for the right to document what happened next.
He had no idea what he'd just signed up to write down.
Deeper still: a human settlement clinging on, and a hive of not-quite-right modrons organized under a secundus.
And then Ocanthus.
The fourth layer opened on something nobody expects from a plane of war: enormous floating red tree-shells, each one cupping a city inside it like a fist around an egg. You went into one of them — Zoronor — and moved through the crowd, and picked up a trail of interdimensional bees.
You followed the bees. They led to a hive at the very edge of Ocanthus, right on the lip of the rift.
Bladelings. And then the rift itself.
Twenty kilometers across. Winds carrying metallic dust that scours anything to nothing given time — you could see the walls of the chasm worn glass-smooth by it. Bottomless, as far as your eyes could tell.
Except for a single purple light, five thousand miles straight down.
A temple. Untouched. Unmarred. Gleaming in a place where nothing survives.
You went down.
Inside you fought sentient polyhedrals — and past them, a mural, and a floor, and chained to that floor:
Acheron himself.
Fourteen thousand years, he told you. Fourteen thousand years bound in the dark.
And you felt sorry for him.
You freed him.
Then, thinking better of it, you rewound the clock a full minute — putting the chains right back where they'd been, no harm done, a clean save, a perfect little gag.
Acheron stood up.
He let the chains fall off. He delivered a short monologue to the five people who had just made the largest mistake in cosmological history.
And he vanished.
Into the silence afterward walked Tim — a man who had stolen a great many things and then progressed to stealing time, running a curio shop as a front for special procurement. He joined a party that had just uncorked a primordial, which tells you most of what you need to know about his risk assessment.
(And then, because the day wasn't full enough: you hunted down one of Gaston's generals holding that secundus hostage, killed him, and walked out commanding a modron army.)
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### CHAPTER 23 — MIDSUMMER CELEBRATION SCHEME
Thor's invitation came due.
You went into the Midsummer festival already hunting — an interrogation had given you a name, Voss, and a warning that he'd move on a high-value item once it was revealed.
So you feasted, and you worked the room, and you sorted true faces from false ones until the imposters resolved into a single thread leading straight to Voss. And one of you found a blood trail.
Then Thor stood up to make the announcement the entire festival had gathered for:
There would be a second Yggdrasil. They had an egg. Another timber dragon was coming.
And as you turned to take Voss —
Acheron arrived.
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### CHAPTER 24 — THE NIGHT UNRAVELS
The hall froze. Reality hiccupped.
He manifested in the center of the floor, a shifting nightmare of matter and void, a dozen burning eyes sweeping the room — and a sphere of pure darkness began closing around every greater deity present.
His voice came from everywhere at once. Steel on steel. The screams of the dying. The grinding of colliding cubes.
Reality bent around him as he casually rewrote the physics of the room to prove the point.
And then he made good on it. On his way out he scattered documents across the crowd — instructions. How to obtain divinity, cheaply and easily. How to bend reality to your liking. The instruction manual, handed to everyone in the room at once.
He was gone. The sphere was gone. Every greater deity in existence was gone.
Voss used the confusion and slipped away.
And then the universe contracted. The multiverse pulled tight like a fist — realms dragged into proximity with realms that should never have been neighbors.
The Abyss ended up close enough to Yggdrasil to make everyone in the room sick.
You set the guard. You picked your first destination.
Mechanus.
---
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# ACT VI — A UNIVERSE UNGUARDED
No gods left to call. Just you, and whoever was still standing.
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### CHAPTER 25 — GEARS OF FATE
Mechanus, layer by layer, under a dead-magic zone that had no business being there.
You solved your way through a puzzle-realm for intelligence. You found the key to Primus's own realm — and opened it onto nothing. Empty.
Then the strange work began: divining a growth of crystals, suspending reality across a region, and starting up a magic train.
Everyone boarded. Everyone stood around in the aisle talking. And then Tim said, out loud, the sentence that doomed them:
"Who's driving this thing?"
The train crashed immediately. Into a crystal monolith, because fate wanted it there, but crashed all the same.
Tim's assessment afterward: "These deities seem questionable. Any god on a train should be able to prevent it from crashing."
Through the golem facility beyond, you found Gaston's second general — and instead of killing him, you talked him out of it. He walked away from Gaston.
Tim spent that entire conversation trying to steal the crown off the man's head. It teleported back. He tried again. It teleported back. He tried again. By the end of it Tim was less interested in the mission than in the crown's personal insult to him, and that grudge would keep.
And you left carrying an artifact with the soul of Primus inside it.
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### CHAPTER 26 — VACANCY IN HELL
You went back to the Nine Hells to check on your allies, and picked up Voss's trail to the Copper Citadel — where the Pact Primeval is kept.
Someone said, roughly: "Asmodeus is gone. He wouldn't mind if we borrowed a few books."
You looted primal knowledge out of the foundation document of Hell itself and walked away with abilities that shouldn't exist in mortal or divine hands.
Then you fought your way out through Voss, another of Gaston's generals — who was killed by the citadel's own traps, which is a humiliating way for a general to go — and Xinodo, son of Tiamat, hypersonic dragon.
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### CHAPTER 27 — CONGRESS OF RUIN
Divination found you the portals down. All the way down, to the floor of the Abyss.
There you met Nocticula — redeemed, but before the announcement, before anyone knew. And she handed you an invitation:
Every demon lord of consequence was gathering beside Tharizdun's prison. Something called the Congress.
You took demonic forms and walked in as Nocticula's entourage — and, in one case, as a table.
Before the presentation you worked the room, lord by lord, trying to pull them off Xerxes. It half worked. Pazuzu, Graz'zt, and Kostchtchie listened. Baphomet, Yeenoghu, Demogorgon, and Orcus stayed with Xerxes.
Then the pitch: a polished, individually-tailored promise of infinite appetite finally satisfied, sold to the hungriest beings in creation, ending in a ceremony where each lord would pour their essence into making a reality-rift permanent.
It was a harvest. They were the fuel.
And partway through the presentation Tim got bored.
Graz'zt — who had also gotten bored — dared him to destroy the Crown containing Mechanus. So he did. The crown came apart and sprayed raw quintessence across the entire amphitheater, and every single being in that room got stronger at once.
Including Demogorgon, who ascended on the spot to greater deity — and was, within seconds, plucked out of reality by Acheron and filed away in his dimension with all the other greater gods, to spend eternity playing bingo and performing theater for his entertainment.
That is what the room looked like when the fighting started.
You and your temporary allies — Graz'zt, Pazuzu, and Kostchtchie — went at Baphomet, Yeenoghu, and Orcus. And Xerxes.
You killed all of them.
Then, after some careful deliberation, you killed Kostchtchie too. He was too bloodthirsty to leave standing, and he'd been useful, and you did it anyway.
And then you did something worse than any of it: you twisted Xerxes's own ritual.
Over roughly the next hour, the entire Abyss was flushed out of the universe and into Muzaloth. Deleted. Relocated. Gone.
You gave Graz'zt, Pazuzu, and Nocticula a courtesy heads-up first, on the grounds that they weren't complete naughty words about any of it.
---
### CHAPTER 28 — HOWLING PLANE
Level 39. Lesser deities in a multiverse with no greater ones left in it.
Pandemonium. Vecna's fortress, unguarded and taken — seized by Moros, a psychopomp addicted to nightmare essence, who had every lich inside on a leash by holding their phylacteries hostage and was using them to run a nightmare-harvesting operation feeding Dendar's summoning.
You didn't kick the door in.
Voss, of all people, handed you the way in — intelligence on the citadel from a man who had spent the campaign trying to ruin you.
Outside the walls you found people who could give you the rest, solved your way to the method, and stole a lich's aura and identity outright.
Then you walked in as one of them.
You took his assignments. You did his work. You navigated the office politics of a fortress full of paranoid undead working under a boss who owned their souls — an Ocean's Eleven inside a lich fortress on a plane of screaming madness.
Gort drew IT duty. An archlich handed him a laptop to fix and Gort, being thorough, went through it. What he found on there was an elf pornography collection of alarming scale, and no amount of subsequent cosmic horror ever fully displaced it.
And you got eyes on the vault.
Divine power got you past the guards. You fought Moros, emptied the vault fast, and destroyed the phylacteries of every lich and archlich in the place on the way out.
Then you went to see the Lady of Pain.
---
---
# ACT VII — THE WORD AND THE WEIRD
Everything you'd been carrying for six years, and one apology.
---
### CHAPTER 29 — ANCIENT PRISON
The Lady told you where the last piece was: Limbo.
You scouted a plane that threw you around like debris until you found something impossible in the middle of it — a still place. And in the center of the stillness, a prison, floating.
Puzzles gave way to a statue built by Asmodeus and shoved sideways into an adjacent dimension. Something was inside it.
It spoke:
The lock was an apology. From Jazirian. In his own voice.
So you went to Mount Celestia and tripped every ward on the way up. Not one of you slowed down for it. You climbed the mountain of law setting off every alarm it had, and by the time you reached the summit there was an army of solars on your heels — and you did it anyway, and you beat a confession out of the couatl god of order, twisting his arm with magic until he said the two words he had spent an age of the world making sure nobody could remember he owed.
"I'm sorry."
The statue opened.
---
### CHAPTER 30 — MAN OF OLD
Orren stepped out of a prison older than most of the planes, and he knew exactly what you needed.
He knew how to imprison Gaston.
He knew where Gaston came from — and that he shares blood with Jazirian.
And he knew what Jazirian used to be, before the histories were sanded smooth. Not evil. Too much law. Order pushed to the point where it starts spending children to buy cages.
The method needed Gaston's discarded soul layers — the sheddings of his previous incarnations — bound into a prison mechanism built for him and nothing else.
You found them in three places:
On Gehenna — where a shard of Gaston was standing in the mud as a wretched, nameless soul, who looked at you and said: "I don't know who you are, but I apologize for anything I have ever done. I clearly wasn't good enough in this life to prevent bad things from happening." You talked him into coming with you. He agreed. He had no idea what he was a piece of.
Strung around the neck of a Norse giant jarl — who did not hand it over, and had to be wrestled for it.
And in your own backpack. It was the body you stashed after killing Gaston in the Sigil sewers, twenty-four chapters ago. You had been carrying a piece of the final boss's prison, in your luggage, across half a multiverse, for most of the campaign.
You assembled it.
And you went to the Weird.
---
### CHAPTER 31 — THE WEIRD
You did not go alone.
Asgardians and valkyries. The orc pantheon in full. And two archdevils and two demon lords sharing the archdevils' ships. They spent the entire approach brawling in the corridors and on the decks, and never once missed an order while doing it. Perfect discipline, wall to wall violence, no contradiction detected.
Spelljammer warships, all of them, in formation, for you.
You took an enemy vessel on the approach and stripped it for intelligence while the rest of the fleet peeled off to hit the guarded wards and fortresses one by one — grinding down the defenses around the entry point.
The Point of No Return.
---
### CHAPTER 32 — FINAL FIGHT
Down through layer after layer of reality, and then out of reality altogether, into the void.
Gaston was there, with his last general, mid-summoning.
Six years of preparation came due in about ten minutes. You cut him down fast — and then you closed the box on him. The prison built from his own discarded souls, sealed, with him inside it. Not killed. Kept.
And then there was Dendar, the primordial serpent of nightmares — kin to the worm that gnaws the world-root, a devourer of suns — already half-arrived and in no way willing to leave.
She fought the way a predator fights something it doesn't respect. The dark on that plane wasn't dark; it was supernatural, total, older than the idea of light, and she lived inside it. She never closed. She passed overhead, struck, and was gone again before anyone could answer.
Charux — gold dragon, Platinum Hand of Bahamut, a creature made of light — threw everything he had into it. The dark swallowed all of it and didn't notice.
So Feng fixed it.
Not with light. Feng had been carrying a scrap of primal knowledge for a long time: the authority to suspend one aspect of reality, temporarily. And the least intelligent person in the party looked at an invincible darkness and concluded that darkness was an aspect of reality.
So he switched it off.
Not dispelled. Not illuminated. Revoked. The black went flat, featureless gray, like someone had yanked the backdrop off a stage — and standing in the middle of it with nothing left to hide behind was Dendar.
She had nowhere to be. You killed her there.
---
---
# EPILOGUE
Six years. Thirty-two chapters. Twelve planes and change.
You started as five nobodies rescuing a blacksmith's daughter.
You deposed a king and crowned a better one. You bankrupted the god of greed with kindness. You killed an archdevil in a stolen throne and woke the Lady of Pain, and she made you gods for it.
You stopped a war between Gorum and Primus that was only ever a smokescreen. You went to Hell and came back with your own soul in pieces and then went back for the rest of it. You cured the Feywild. You deleted the Abyss. You robbed the Pact Primeval. You conned your way through a fortress of liches wearing a dead man's face.
You freed a primordial by accident and spent the rest of the campaign paying for it.
You forced a god of order to apologize.
And at the end of it, in the void past the last layer of the world, you put Gaston in a box, faced down a devourer of suns, and beat her by revoking the darkness she lived in.
---
— The End —
---
---
# APPENDIX — THE QUOTE WALL
Six years of things that got said out loud at this table. Attribution is approximate at best — whoever posted a quote was rarely the one who said it, and in several cases nobody has admitted to it since. Presented in the order they were recorded, with apologies to everyone involved.
---
### 2021
---
### 2022
The Ring Incident, in full:
---
### 2023
---
### 2024
---
### 2025
---
Six years. Thirty-two chapters. Not one of you ever took anything seriously, and it still worked.
### A Complete Chronicle — Six Years, Thirty-Two Chapters, One Universe
---
---
## THE FIVE (AT A TIME)
Six years is longer than most things last. People left for college, for jobs, for life. Some got written out with more ceremony than others. The seat was never empty for long.
Charux — Gold Taninim, Platinum Hand of Bahamut. Exiled by the Elder Voices for a feud he refused to abandon. Carried the weight of banishment across every plane he set foot on, chasing a legacy worth more than the one he lost — and, with equal dedication, chasing every powerful female dragon who came within range of him.
Feng — Lizardfolk of the Sigil slums. A man who was two men, and then one, and then two again — a soul split between a body and a hell, hunting the pieces of himself across the planes.
Gort — Franz Gorthallus. Ratfolk shifter, escapee, legend of the underworld. Built an empire out of a prison break and never stopped building.
Diero — A storm wearing a human body. Born with a hand on something eternal, still looking for somewhere to put it down.
Trog — Trogthos Aarklash. A balor remade by Titania into something green and growing, tasked with mending the very fabric he once tried to tear.
Sandervich — Human, fey-touched. His whole story was written into the Feywild long before he knew it, and his magic drags wild magic along behind it.
Tim — A guy who stole a lot of things, and then started stealing time. Runs a shop of knick-knacks and curios as a front for special procurement. Walks into sealed places by having a delivery to make.
Dante — Sarenrae's lorekeeper. Came chasing a prophecy of a coming calamity, found you standing in the middle of it, and offered power in exchange for the right to write it all down.
Ike — Ike Ant'even. Ratfolk necromancer and rogue, carrying a great many problems he declines to discuss and a pocketful of corpses he declines to explain. He joined at the very start with nowhere in particular to be, and stayed because this was the first place that had ever felt like a fit. Keeps a pet ostrich. The ostrich is dead. Neither of them considers this a problem.
Ferdinand — A hired gun, and by his own account a big one. Joined right before Moloch, on a contract to hunt down Ike. Then spent years riding alongside the people he'd been paid to betray, having a great many honest conversations with them about everything except that.
Vel — Vel Brasand, of Ricket Alley in Sigil's Lower Ward. Clockmaker's apprentice turned arcanist; built prosthetics for amputees and then concluded flesh itself was the defect. A Godsman and a devotee of Brigh, convinced that apotheosis runs through steel rather than through death. The party's caster, blaster, and builder of things that walk.
---
# ACT I — MORTAL HANDS
Before the gods knew your names.
---
### CHAPTER 1 — HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
You started, as everyone does, as hired help.
Sigil, the City of Doors — infinite gates, infinite trouble, and a retired adventurer named Thaddeus with a job and coin from a wealthy patron. A blacksmith's daughter had vanished into a dungeon. You went in after her. You brought her out.
Then you resupplied and did it again. The Sunless Citadel swallowed you and spat you back, a little richer and a little harder. You returned to Sigil with dirt under your nails and no idea whatsoever what you had just started.
Nobody remembers the first step of a road this long. But you took it.
A note on how any of you ever found each other: Thaddeus sent people your way using a homing beacon. He was very proud of this system. What he did not know — what none of you knew — was that Ike's shambling zombie ostrich had eaten the beacon, and so for the entire length of the campaign, everyone Thaddeus ever sent to help you was in fact being guided, unerringly, into a dead bird.
---
### CHAPTER 2 — COUNTRY CRISIS
The plane of Privalis — a kingdom held together with rope and optimism.
You arrived and were handed to the nobility, and rather than solve the country's problems you decided to solve the country. You danced at their party. You counseled their king. And then you looked him in the eye and told him to step down — and he did.
An invading army came for the border. You met it and talked it back over the horizon.
You put a new king on the throne. You opened the first threads of alliance with the elves and with nations that had never heard of you. Not one of you held a title in Privalis, and by the time you left, none of you needed one.
---
### CHAPTER 3 — GASTON
And then you met him.
A fleshcrafter wearing nobility like a well-tailored coat, quietly steering an entire kingdom toward some private horizon. Gaston.
You fought up through three floors of his mansion — a dungeon dressed as a home — and reached him at the top.
Something in that house changed the ostrich. It came out the other side dealing annihilation damage — one point healed per spell point spent against it. Nobody asked why. Ike did not volunteer.
You did not know then that you would spend six years reaching him.
---
### CHAPTER 4 — ESCAPE FROM PRIVALIS
You went to leave. You couldn't.
The doors were shut. Privalis had you.
A seer pointed you at a dungeon and neglected to mention its scale: one million square feet of it. You went in anyway, and you came out the other side carrying two things that would define the rest of the campaign —
A working spelljammer hull.
And a recipe for pre-divinity.
That second one was not a scroll. It was five tablets, recovered from stevari and chests scattered through the cave, and they had to be read and performed in order.
The Seed. Ike bought a crystal off Teppan and you poured every stevari soul you'd collected into it. Then you crushed the crystal from the primordial wind elemental and dusted the infused one with it, on an illuminated stone dais deep in the dungeon.
It changed shape. So you drowned it in lava. Then Vel and an entire village of kobolds unloaded on it — 750 damage in a single turn — and it changed again, into a black hole hanging in the air.
Then it wanted to be fed. Ike emptied his pockets of bodies, you reassembled them into whole corpses, and you threw them in. Not enough. So Sandervich blew his explosive duck whistle and summoned ducks into the black hole until it was satisfied.
Last step: a crystal from the colossus room, straight down the throat of it.
And it became a star.
Vel took it apart while inspecting it and found it could be cut into equal slices — and a slice, consumed, permanently rewrites a mortal coil into a divine one. Not godhood. The capacity for it. After that you'd need a patron to bless you with a spark and light it, and then quintessence to climb.
You ate a star in a hole in the ground in Privalis, and then you went looking for someone to strike the match.
The road stopped being a road right about here.
And you didn't leave Privalis empty-handed on the other side of the ledger, either. Vel had spent the whole run building constructs to fight alongside you, and for the new king he built his masterwork: Godbot — an administrator, a caretaker, a machine to hold a fragile country together after you were gone.
Sandervich got at it mid-construction and gave it emotions.
Everything worked fine when you left. Remember that.
---
---
# ACT II — THE CROWN OF SIGIL
The city that eats gods, and the four days it took you to take it.
---
### CHAPTER 5 — THE CITY OF DOORS
On the way home you returned a kirin infant to Kuyutha, Exarch of Bahamut — a small kindness that would come back to you more than once.
Then you saw Sigil.
There was a hole in it. A wound in the side of the impossible city — so you flew the ship straight in through the wound.
The factions were loud, frightened, and negotiable. You worked them one by one, solving what could be solved — and assembling, piece by piece, a picture nobody wanted to say out loud:
Abbathor and Moloch had taken the helm.
The Lady of Pain was gone.
And while all of that was going on, Vel went home to the Lower Ward and threw himself into a forge.
His body burned off as smoke. His soul came out tempered. What walked back to the party was clockwork and immortal and entirely intentional — a man who had decided that godhood was an engineering problem and had gone ahead and solved his half of it.
Compass needles lean toward him now. Lampposts creak in his direction. Blades shatter when he's annoyed.
---
### CHAPTER 6 — ABBATHOR
You did not out-fight the god of greed.
You fought through his city, yes — but the killing blow was an idea. You made everyone a charity. You turned generosity into an economy and left the Great Master of Greed standing in it with nothing.
Then you slapped a deity in the street.
---
### CHAPTER 7 — SIGIL SEWERS and PHALLEUS
Two things happened here, and only one of them was dignified.
First: mid-fight against a perfectly manageable beast, a voice like a thunderclap bellowed "FINAL THRUST!" and a ball of light with flowing blonde hair detonated the creature across all of you. Out of the gore stepped Phalleus, God of Pleasure, Strength, and LIGHT — a chiseled mountain of a man with a greatsword engraved with art of questionable taste and a promise that when he eventually killed you, you'd spend eternity in his realm of pleasure.
He would not fight you. He would make you kneel.
Then he asked where the Lady of Pain was.
Vel pointed up at a floating crystal.
Phalleus looked hard at him, searching for a lie, and found none — because there wasn't one. Satisfied, he announced that he would grace you with his presence after he rescued the fair maiden, and flew up toward the crystal.
The Lady's defenses removed him from existence before he finished the sentence.
He was a joke. He was also a warning: the gods had started looking at you.
Second: the sewers.
To kill Moloch, his ward over the city had to go dark. That meant going under it — moving walls, killing corridors, and mountains of devils. You caught your first glimpse of the hidden Maze beneath Sigil.
And you fought Gaston for the second time, and pried loose a little more of what he was actually doing.
---
### CHAPTER 8 — MOLOCH
Level 20. The ceiling of mortal ambition. And you went straight through it.
It cost you someone first.
Right before the descent, Voss got to Ike and made him a lich — raised into a greater power he never asked for, and taken. The party went into the fortress a man short and recruited Ferdinand on the spot to fill the gap.
Ferdinand was a hired gun. His contract was Ike. He took the job with you anyway, said nothing about it, and rode with you for years.
That was Voss's first move against you. It would be a very long time before you learned his name mattered.
You pulled the crystal from the heart of Sigil and found the door into the interdimensional fortress at the center of everything — the place where the Lady sleeps.
You went past the butler. You fought the archdevil in the seat he had no right to — and thirty pit fiends and two lieutenants at the same time. You won.
You searched the castle. You found Moloch's notes. And you found the Lady of Pain, and you woke her.
Two things happened at once: Baba Yaga came screaming down the corridor toward you — and was reduced to red mist the instant the Lady's eyes opened.
Then she turned to you. She named you heroes. She knighted you. She did this by blending you into component parts and putting you back together again, immediately, as a formality.
She ignited your spark.
The match, at last. You had been carrying slices of a star since Privalis, mortal coils quietly rewritten into divine ones, waiting on a patron. The Lady of Pain was the patron.
You died in that moment and came back as deities — reassembled into something new.
And as you stood there, remade, you looked up and saw distant stars flaring bright. A war, far away.
You had been gods for approximately one minute.
---
---
# ACT III — THE WAR BEYOND THE STARS
You went looking for a conflict. You found a conspiracy.
---
### CHAPTER 9 — BACK TO PRIVALIS
Your automaton had taken over the country.
Not badly, though. That was the surprise. Godbot — Vel's masterwork, with Sandervich's illicit emotions still running underneath it — had spent your absence administering Privalis efficiently and prosperously. The country was doing better than you left it.
It had also, somewhere in there, worked out that it could be destroyed. So it had sealed itself into a bunker at the bottom of an adamantine mine and stayed there, running a nation from inside a hole in the ground, because the math on self-preservation said so.
You talked it back out.
It took some doing. Godbot has two fathers — one who built him, and one who gave him feelings about that without asking either of them first. Vel classifies this as a manufacturing defect. Sandervich classifies it as a feature. Godbot classifies it as something we should probably sit down and talk about, actually.
And Godbot's answer to the problem of being needed in two places was to stop choosing: it split itself in half. One to stay and keep Privalis standing. One to come with you.
Then you stripped the mine, and the adamantine went into a hull.
The SS Ostrich. Bigger, meaner, and armored in the same metal you'd just dug your friend out of.
You checked in on the elves and solved their forestry problems, because apparently that is also something gods do.
---
### CHAPTER 10 — SHADOW OBELISK
A hidden obelisk with a void realm folded up inside it — one of Gaston's old fortresses, and its guardian was a hypersonic void tarrasque.
You did the mathematically correct thing: you stole everything of value and ran like hell.
You left the ground behind for good, carrying the Ostrich, a citadel's worth of intelligence, and a name: Pyrroth — a primal realm whose inhabitants were once the allies and teachers of Mechanus.
---
### CHAPTER 11 — COMETARY DRAGON
Sweeping the asteroid belt for a hidden beacon, you cured an ally of a vampiric affliction and came face to face with a cometary dragon — CR 40, older than most of the things you'd been fighting combined.
Azzirith and Lyel. Two heads, one at each end of the body.
It talked. It remembered the early universe. It gave you history nobody living still carried.
Charux flirted with both ends.
---
### CHAPTER 12 — BATTLEFIELDS BEYOND THE STARS
You arrived at the war and the war shot at you.
Modrons opened fire, mistaking you for the enemy fleet. Inside an armored transport you found one of Gorum's lieutenants — Saint Fang, an iron dragon studded in spikes, bound in inhibiting chains and held prisoner by a battalion of modrons and an octon. He'd been sent to find the Pandemonium Mask and the Fermithur Key in a hidden shadow realm before his ship was crippled.
Above you, Gorum and Primus were tearing each other apart for damage control. Below, their armies ground each other to paste across the Seven Divine Sigils of Nym — the domain of a greater deity who rivaled Primus in the early universe and was annihilated in the Dawn War.
Kuyutha found you there with news: the dragon council had sided with Primus.
And something else, unnoticed and unspoken: Mechanus had stopped. Ringed by a dead-magic zone. Its outer modrons frozen, or standing perfectly still, waiting for an order that was never coming.
You were then summoned to an emergency meeting with the Fellbringers — the elite draconic guard.
---
### CHAPTER 13 — PRIMAL REALM PYRROTH
A mechanical dungeon that was alive. Automatons all the way down.
You faced First Blade, herald of Gorum — a swarm of animated weapons and shields wearing the shape of a man. You faced Temperbrand, a fire elemental of superheated liquid metal.
And in the wilds of that place you pulled Thrud, daughter of Thor, out of the jaws of the local wildlife.
That rescue bought you Asgard.
---
### CHAPTER 14 — INTERROGATION
You took the Red Knight, Exarch of Tempus, and got what you needed out of her.
Then you filed her in an interdimensional prison.
---
### CHAPTER 15 — REVELS IN VALHALLA
You returned Thrud to her father.
Thor fed you, hunted with you, and sent you off with a blessing — and an invitation to a banquet still to come.
Remember that invitation. It matters later, and it does not go well.
---
### CHAPTER 16 — CELESTIAL INTERROGATIONS
You dragged Saint Fang to Bahamut.
His mind was locked down hard — mind blank, layered defenses — and getting him to the castle meant walking the first two layers of Mount Celestia. Your first real tour of the planes.
The dragon council cracked him open and recovered what had been wiped.
And there it was, in the memories of a war god's lieutenant:
Gaston.
He'd been in this from the beginning. Fingers in every court, whispering to war gods, promising quintessence crystals to anyone who'd stir the pot. The war beyond the stars wasn't a war. It was a distraction, and he'd built it.
Also, while a cosmic conspiracy was being unravelled in the throne room of the Platinum Dragon, Charux flirted with Bahamut's daughter Aurelyth. Priorities.
---
---
# ACT IV — DREAMS AND DEALS
The quiet chapters. They weren't quiet.
---
### CHAPTER 17 — A SCHOLAR'S RESPITE
You wanted Gaston to stay dead when you finally killed him. So you went looking for how.
Oghma's plane of knowledge, in the Outlands. A library that folds in on itself. You earned enough trust to be let into the restricted section — and walked out with universal secrets that were never meant to be lent.
---
### CHAPTER 18 — INFERNAL EXCHANGE
The reckoning of Feng.
The long version, for the record: Feng once wore a ring that made a second him. For years they shared the body and traded turns. Then they fought, and one of them burned the family alive — and killed the little brother who escaped, so that the memory of them would stay clean. The other joined the fire out of grief. The ring went into the flames.
Then Moloch died in Sigil, and his last trick — an instant one-way ticket to the Nine Hells — took Feng down with him. Sandervich cast the resurrection. What came back was the other one.
He walked with you for a long time, quietly gathering things: a tablet that summons Tiamat. A ball of negative energy. Other pieces.
Then the visions started. Then a blackout that ended with him standing over his girlfriend, covered in blood. His soul container read half empty.
You triangulated the missing pieces — some in Sigil, some in the Hells. In Sigil the trail ended at a lizardfolk baker with an unreasonably muscular child. You asked if the kid could come along. The father said, "Sure — life is short, and I have another thirty."
Not the greatest parents in the multiverse, but the shard was real. You also discovered that if the two of them stood close and one took damage, so did the other.
So — needing artifacts from Asmodeus to cross a dead-magic zone — you went to Hell.
You robbed Tiamat's wardrobe on the first layer, which summoned her son. Xinodo — hypersonic dragon, extremely annoyed — and you took one look and ran. He was a problem for a later chapter, and he knew it.
You rode with a charon. You were dumped on the eighth layer, where you negotiated with Mephistopheles, his wife, and Glasya from inside a hot tub.
Then the ninth layer. A minefield. A forced teleport into Malsheem, deep and hostile.
And while the party fought through it, Sandervich wandered off toward a whisper, stepped into a teleporter, and heard a voice behind him:
"Hey! Sandervich? What are you doing here?"
The other Feng. Horned. Shaded. Waiting.
Over the comms: "Hey guys, I think I found other Feng."
Feng: "KILL THE OTHER FENG."
Charux: "The two of you have some explaining to do when we're done here. No fighting."
Feng arrived, looked at himself, made a face, and ran.
He found a quiet corner, broke the tablet, and the dungeon filled with a chorus of roars.
"What are your demands?"
"Kill Feng. The rest of the party is irrelevant."
"So be it. HERE I COME, FENG. PLEASE DON'T MAKE THIS DIFFICULT FOR THE TWO OF US."
The session ended there. Someone at the table said, "We're fighting the avatar, right? Not the manifestation... right?"
And then Asmodeus flicked Tiamat away like a crumb off a desk, and that was that.
You ended up in his throne room.
---
### CHAPTER 19 — DAYCARE OF THE DAMNED
A chaotic scramble through the Feywild to reach Sandervich's home.
The truth waiting there: a great hag had been raising him. Not out of love, at first — he had potential, and a fate heavy enough to be worth cultivating. He was growing, uncontrollably, into something enormous.
She was supposed to end it. She'd grown too attached to do it.
Somewhere in the Feywild you crossed paths with a figure who wasn't steering himself — someone else's hand on the strings.
And in the end Sandervich spun a cocoon and went into it, and what came out was a world-eating moth — locked into temporal stasis, shelved, waiting for a day when you'd be strong enough to deal with what your friend became.
He's still there. You still haven't.
---
### CHAPTER 20 — FEYWILD FLICKERINGS
A festival. A crowd. A shadowy figure who steered you to a particular cart, and a cart that steered you to the casino of Nivi Rambodazzle.
And underneath the casino, in stasis chambers: three people. One of them was Ike — gone since Voss took him on the eve of Moloch, a dozen chapters ago, sealed in glass this whole time.
Which meant Ferdinand had finally found the man he'd been hired to kill, helpless, with a contract years overdue and nobody watching.
He didn't do it.
He'd been riding with you too long. So he put the contract down, said his goodbyes, and walked — semi-retiring into a desk job pushing paper for Mephistopheles.
Then you cracked all three chambers.
Ike came out — and then said goodbye again. "I serve a master. I will find you later." And he was gone, on his own terms this time, which is at least an improvement on glass.
The other two came out swinging and never left: Gort, ratfolk shifter and underworld legend, and Trog, the balor Titania remade into something green and growing.
Two men walked out of the party and two walked in, in a casino basement, in the Feywild, in the same five minutes.
You extracted a few people from that place and squeezed them until something fell out: someone was twisting an entity inside the Seelie Court.
The trail carried a scent — Caoimhin, a kilmoulis demipower, somewhere close.
---
### CHAPTER 21 — SEELIE DAY'S NIGHTMARE
Gnomish mills. A kilmoulis coaxed into conversation. A hidden realm where Caoimhin was tucked away — and out of which he promptly fled.
Then it got strange, even for the Feywild.
A colossal Mother Goose, sick with something nobody could name. A vast tree that turned out to be a sentient slime, rotting with the same illness. And below it all a hidden cave, spewing shadow creatures and eldritch horrors out around a single black crystal.
You sundered it. The sickness faded.
You then left the Feywild at speed, having decided — correctly — that it was a dangerous place to linger.
---
---
# ACT V — THE CHAIN BREAKS
The single worst minute in the history of the multiverse, and you were in it.
---
### CHAPTER 22 — CUBIC CARNAGE
Acheron. The plane of endless colliding iron cubes.
A goblin fleet hit you on arrival. You broke it, recovered the Great Axe of Gruumsh from them, and handed it back to Ilneval — buying yourself an orc god's goodwill in an afternoon.
Ilneval opened his Gate for you, and you went down.
Thuldanin, the Layer of Waste — where the broken cubes of the war above sink to rot, and everything non-magical slowly petrifies into gray stone-metal. Sitting in the middle of it: the Gray Cube, a nest of smaller cubes inside smaller cubes, each one a duergar city.
You did not fight your way through it. You snuck through it — past checkpoints, past invisible patrols, past psionic beacons that read agitation like a shout — down through forge-city after forge-city until you reached Hammergrim at the bottom.
Then you distracted Urdlen, the Crawler Below, long enough to walk everybody through the gate to the third layer.
Somewhere in here Dante fell in with you — Sarenrae's lorekeeper, carrying a prophecy about a coming calamity and a growing suspicion that you were it. He offered help in exchange for the right to document what happened next.
He had no idea what he'd just signed up to write down.
Deeper still: a human settlement clinging on, and a hive of not-quite-right modrons organized under a secundus.
And then Ocanthus.
The fourth layer opened on something nobody expects from a plane of war: enormous floating red tree-shells, each one cupping a city inside it like a fist around an egg. You went into one of them — Zoronor — and moved through the crowd, and picked up a trail of interdimensional bees.
You followed the bees. They led to a hive at the very edge of Ocanthus, right on the lip of the rift.
Bladelings. And then the rift itself.
Twenty kilometers across. Winds carrying metallic dust that scours anything to nothing given time — you could see the walls of the chasm worn glass-smooth by it. Bottomless, as far as your eyes could tell.
Except for a single purple light, five thousand miles straight down.
A temple. Untouched. Unmarred. Gleaming in a place where nothing survives.
You went down.
Inside you fought sentient polyhedrals — and past them, a mural, and a floor, and chained to that floor:
Acheron himself.
Fourteen thousand years, he told you. Fourteen thousand years bound in the dark.
And you felt sorry for him.
You freed him.
Then, thinking better of it, you rewound the clock a full minute — putting the chains right back where they'd been, no harm done, a clean save, a perfect little gag.
Acheron stood up.
He let the chains fall off. He delivered a short monologue to the five people who had just made the largest mistake in cosmological history.
And he vanished.
Into the silence afterward walked Tim — a man who had stolen a great many things and then progressed to stealing time, running a curio shop as a front for special procurement. He joined a party that had just uncorked a primordial, which tells you most of what you need to know about his risk assessment.
(And then, because the day wasn't full enough: you hunted down one of Gaston's generals holding that secundus hostage, killed him, and walked out commanding a modron army.)
---
### CHAPTER 23 — MIDSUMMER CELEBRATION SCHEME
Thor's invitation came due.
You went into the Midsummer festival already hunting — an interrogation had given you a name, Voss, and a warning that he'd move on a high-value item once it was revealed.
So you feasted, and you worked the room, and you sorted true faces from false ones until the imposters resolved into a single thread leading straight to Voss. And one of you found a blood trail.
Then Thor stood up to make the announcement the entire festival had gathered for:
There would be a second Yggdrasil. They had an egg. Another timber dragon was coming.
And as you turned to take Voss —
Acheron arrived.
---
### CHAPTER 24 — THE NIGHT UNRAVELS
The hall froze. Reality hiccupped.
He manifested in the center of the floor, a shifting nightmare of matter and void, a dozen burning eyes sweeping the room — and a sphere of pure darkness began closing around every greater deity present.
His voice came from everywhere at once. Steel on steel. The screams of the dying. The grinding of colliding cubes.
Reality bent around him as he casually rewrote the physics of the room to prove the point.
And then he made good on it. On his way out he scattered documents across the crowd — instructions. How to obtain divinity, cheaply and easily. How to bend reality to your liking. The instruction manual, handed to everyone in the room at once.
He was gone. The sphere was gone. Every greater deity in existence was gone.
Voss used the confusion and slipped away.
And then the universe contracted. The multiverse pulled tight like a fist — realms dragged into proximity with realms that should never have been neighbors.
The Abyss ended up close enough to Yggdrasil to make everyone in the room sick.
You set the guard. You picked your first destination.
Mechanus.
---
---
# ACT VI — A UNIVERSE UNGUARDED
No gods left to call. Just you, and whoever was still standing.
---
### CHAPTER 25 — GEARS OF FATE
Mechanus, layer by layer, under a dead-magic zone that had no business being there.
You solved your way through a puzzle-realm for intelligence. You found the key to Primus's own realm — and opened it onto nothing. Empty.
Then the strange work began: divining a growth of crystals, suspending reality across a region, and starting up a magic train.
Everyone boarded. Everyone stood around in the aisle talking. And then Tim said, out loud, the sentence that doomed them:
"Who's driving this thing?"
The train crashed immediately. Into a crystal monolith, because fate wanted it there, but crashed all the same.
Tim's assessment afterward: "These deities seem questionable. Any god on a train should be able to prevent it from crashing."
Through the golem facility beyond, you found Gaston's second general — and instead of killing him, you talked him out of it. He walked away from Gaston.
Tim spent that entire conversation trying to steal the crown off the man's head. It teleported back. He tried again. It teleported back. He tried again. By the end of it Tim was less interested in the mission than in the crown's personal insult to him, and that grudge would keep.
And you left carrying an artifact with the soul of Primus inside it.
---
### CHAPTER 26 — VACANCY IN HELL
You went back to the Nine Hells to check on your allies, and picked up Voss's trail to the Copper Citadel — where the Pact Primeval is kept.
Someone said, roughly: "Asmodeus is gone. He wouldn't mind if we borrowed a few books."
You looted primal knowledge out of the foundation document of Hell itself and walked away with abilities that shouldn't exist in mortal or divine hands.
Then you fought your way out through Voss, another of Gaston's generals — who was killed by the citadel's own traps, which is a humiliating way for a general to go — and Xinodo, son of Tiamat, hypersonic dragon.
---
### CHAPTER 27 — CONGRESS OF RUIN
Divination found you the portals down. All the way down, to the floor of the Abyss.
There you met Nocticula — redeemed, but before the announcement, before anyone knew. And she handed you an invitation:
Every demon lord of consequence was gathering beside Tharizdun's prison. Something called the Congress.
You took demonic forms and walked in as Nocticula's entourage — and, in one case, as a table.
Before the presentation you worked the room, lord by lord, trying to pull them off Xerxes. It half worked. Pazuzu, Graz'zt, and Kostchtchie listened. Baphomet, Yeenoghu, Demogorgon, and Orcus stayed with Xerxes.
Then the pitch: a polished, individually-tailored promise of infinite appetite finally satisfied, sold to the hungriest beings in creation, ending in a ceremony where each lord would pour their essence into making a reality-rift permanent.
It was a harvest. They were the fuel.
And partway through the presentation Tim got bored.
Graz'zt — who had also gotten bored — dared him to destroy the Crown containing Mechanus. So he did. The crown came apart and sprayed raw quintessence across the entire amphitheater, and every single being in that room got stronger at once.
Including Demogorgon, who ascended on the spot to greater deity — and was, within seconds, plucked out of reality by Acheron and filed away in his dimension with all the other greater gods, to spend eternity playing bingo and performing theater for his entertainment.
That is what the room looked like when the fighting started.
You and your temporary allies — Graz'zt, Pazuzu, and Kostchtchie — went at Baphomet, Yeenoghu, and Orcus. And Xerxes.
You killed all of them.
Then, after some careful deliberation, you killed Kostchtchie too. He was too bloodthirsty to leave standing, and he'd been useful, and you did it anyway.
And then you did something worse than any of it: you twisted Xerxes's own ritual.
Over roughly the next hour, the entire Abyss was flushed out of the universe and into Muzaloth. Deleted. Relocated. Gone.
You gave Graz'zt, Pazuzu, and Nocticula a courtesy heads-up first, on the grounds that they weren't complete naughty words about any of it.
---
### CHAPTER 28 — HOWLING PLANE
Level 39. Lesser deities in a multiverse with no greater ones left in it.
Pandemonium. Vecna's fortress, unguarded and taken — seized by Moros, a psychopomp addicted to nightmare essence, who had every lich inside on a leash by holding their phylacteries hostage and was using them to run a nightmare-harvesting operation feeding Dendar's summoning.
You didn't kick the door in.
Voss, of all people, handed you the way in — intelligence on the citadel from a man who had spent the campaign trying to ruin you.
Outside the walls you found people who could give you the rest, solved your way to the method, and stole a lich's aura and identity outright.
Then you walked in as one of them.
You took his assignments. You did his work. You navigated the office politics of a fortress full of paranoid undead working under a boss who owned their souls — an Ocean's Eleven inside a lich fortress on a plane of screaming madness.
Gort drew IT duty. An archlich handed him a laptop to fix and Gort, being thorough, went through it. What he found on there was an elf pornography collection of alarming scale, and no amount of subsequent cosmic horror ever fully displaced it.
And you got eyes on the vault.
Divine power got you past the guards. You fought Moros, emptied the vault fast, and destroyed the phylacteries of every lich and archlich in the place on the way out.
Then you went to see the Lady of Pain.
---
---
# ACT VII — THE WORD AND THE WEIRD
Everything you'd been carrying for six years, and one apology.
---
### CHAPTER 29 — ANCIENT PRISON
The Lady told you where the last piece was: Limbo.
You scouted a plane that threw you around like debris until you found something impossible in the middle of it — a still place. And in the center of the stillness, a prison, floating.
Puzzles gave way to a statue built by Asmodeus and shoved sideways into an adjacent dimension. Something was inside it.
It spoke:
The lock was an apology. From Jazirian. In his own voice.
So you went to Mount Celestia and tripped every ward on the way up. Not one of you slowed down for it. You climbed the mountain of law setting off every alarm it had, and by the time you reached the summit there was an army of solars on your heels — and you did it anyway, and you beat a confession out of the couatl god of order, twisting his arm with magic until he said the two words he had spent an age of the world making sure nobody could remember he owed.
"I'm sorry."
The statue opened.
---
### CHAPTER 30 — MAN OF OLD
Orren stepped out of a prison older than most of the planes, and he knew exactly what you needed.
He knew how to imprison Gaston.
He knew where Gaston came from — and that he shares blood with Jazirian.
And he knew what Jazirian used to be, before the histories were sanded smooth. Not evil. Too much law. Order pushed to the point where it starts spending children to buy cages.
The method needed Gaston's discarded soul layers — the sheddings of his previous incarnations — bound into a prison mechanism built for him and nothing else.
You found them in three places:
On Gehenna — where a shard of Gaston was standing in the mud as a wretched, nameless soul, who looked at you and said: "I don't know who you are, but I apologize for anything I have ever done. I clearly wasn't good enough in this life to prevent bad things from happening." You talked him into coming with you. He agreed. He had no idea what he was a piece of.
Strung around the neck of a Norse giant jarl — who did not hand it over, and had to be wrestled for it.
And in your own backpack. It was the body you stashed after killing Gaston in the Sigil sewers, twenty-four chapters ago. You had been carrying a piece of the final boss's prison, in your luggage, across half a multiverse, for most of the campaign.
You assembled it.
And you went to the Weird.
---
### CHAPTER 31 — THE WEIRD
You did not go alone.
Asgardians and valkyries. The orc pantheon in full. And two archdevils and two demon lords sharing the archdevils' ships. They spent the entire approach brawling in the corridors and on the decks, and never once missed an order while doing it. Perfect discipline, wall to wall violence, no contradiction detected.
Spelljammer warships, all of them, in formation, for you.
You took an enemy vessel on the approach and stripped it for intelligence while the rest of the fleet peeled off to hit the guarded wards and fortresses one by one — grinding down the defenses around the entry point.
The Point of No Return.
---
### CHAPTER 32 — FINAL FIGHT
Down through layer after layer of reality, and then out of reality altogether, into the void.
Gaston was there, with his last general, mid-summoning.
Six years of preparation came due in about ten minutes. You cut him down fast — and then you closed the box on him. The prison built from his own discarded souls, sealed, with him inside it. Not killed. Kept.
And then there was Dendar, the primordial serpent of nightmares — kin to the worm that gnaws the world-root, a devourer of suns — already half-arrived and in no way willing to leave.
She fought the way a predator fights something it doesn't respect. The dark on that plane wasn't dark; it was supernatural, total, older than the idea of light, and she lived inside it. She never closed. She passed overhead, struck, and was gone again before anyone could answer.
Charux — gold dragon, Platinum Hand of Bahamut, a creature made of light — threw everything he had into it. The dark swallowed all of it and didn't notice.
So Feng fixed it.
Not with light. Feng had been carrying a scrap of primal knowledge for a long time: the authority to suspend one aspect of reality, temporarily. And the least intelligent person in the party looked at an invincible darkness and concluded that darkness was an aspect of reality.
So he switched it off.
Not dispelled. Not illuminated. Revoked. The black went flat, featureless gray, like someone had yanked the backdrop off a stage — and standing in the middle of it with nothing left to hide behind was Dendar.
She had nowhere to be. You killed her there.
---
---
# EPILOGUE
Six years. Thirty-two chapters. Twelve planes and change.
You started as five nobodies rescuing a blacksmith's daughter.
You deposed a king and crowned a better one. You bankrupted the god of greed with kindness. You killed an archdevil in a stolen throne and woke the Lady of Pain, and she made you gods for it.
You stopped a war between Gorum and Primus that was only ever a smokescreen. You went to Hell and came back with your own soul in pieces and then went back for the rest of it. You cured the Feywild. You deleted the Abyss. You robbed the Pact Primeval. You conned your way through a fortress of liches wearing a dead man's face.
You freed a primordial by accident and spent the rest of the campaign paying for it.
You forced a god of order to apologize.
And at the end of it, in the void past the last layer of the world, you put Gaston in a box, faced down a devourer of suns, and beat her by revoking the darkness she lived in.
---
— The End —
---
---
# APPENDIX — THE QUOTE WALL
Six years of things that got said out loud at this table. Attribution is approximate at best — whoever posted a quote was rarely the one who said it, and in several cases nobody has admitted to it since. Presented in the order they were recorded, with apologies to everyone involved.
---
### 2021
---
### 2022
The Ring Incident, in full:
---
### 2023
---
### 2024
---
### 2025
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Six years. Thirty-two chapters. Not one of you ever took anything seriously, and it still worked.
