Vigilante Game Thirty-One: The Road to the Abyss is Paved with Good Intentions

The road to the abyss is paved with good intentions.

There’s something about reunions. The more important they feel, the more you plan for them, rehearsing what to say, handshake or a hug, the more likely they are to be unremarkable. Rushed. Just something that has to happen before you can get on to the matter at hand. I thought a long time about meeting Martin again, I’m sure we all had. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that things didn’t go as expected.

Now, standing in the now corpse-riddled palace of the Fey Lord Suzaku, surveying his cold body, a few things became clear. Our friend Martin, or at least what was left of him, was working to bring forth the world-breaker. Specifically, he was working to undermine us, and he was doing a decent job.

We determined fairly quickly that he was gone. It was likely that he had vanished in the plume of green flame that shot out of the palace as we climbed to meet it. We also determined that Suzaku and the blessing of thunder he carried with him were nearly beyond saving. Luckily, I found something in the Feywilds that could give us a chance.

I pulled the luck sword from its hilt, its polished edge glittering. With this sword, we had four wishes, four end-of-the-road efforts to mend the damage we had caused, or at least we hoped. I held the hilt close and whispered. With one wish gone, the Fey Lord opened his eyes.

We hurriedly explained what had happened, who we were, and that we were searching for the man, the thing, that had killed him. Suzaku absorbed the information, grateful that we had pulled him back from death, and resolved to assist us. However, when he attempted to bestow his blessing on us, he paused. Perplexed, he examined his hands, turning and flicking them.

“My magic,” he said, “this hasn’t happened before.” Then he fell.

We watched in dread as Suzaku struggled, his energy depleting rapidly. Somehow, Martin’s assault had caused lasting damages. If we didn’t move quickly, we would lose the lord again. We scrambled and failed to heal him before I remembered the jar currently sloshing around in my pack.

“Dandelion!” I shouted to Ulthrek, “Ask Princess Dandelion if she can shrink him!”

Ulthrek blew his horn, summoning the royal guard of Princess Dandelion and opening a portal to her palace in the hedge maze. we collected Suzaku and jumped through.

In this moment and, perhaps, only in this moment, we were lucky that the Princess had the temperament of a child. She giggled as she shrunk the Fey Lord so that we could stow him in an enchanted jar, powerful enough to keep whatever was in it alive indefinitely. She was less thrilled, however, when Edna began to channel her Patron.

Edna shook and her eyes flashed green as Rhiannon spoke through her, demanding that we meet with her at once. Apparently, when we traveled to the Fey Wilds we were followed by something sinister. The repercussions of this act were being felt across the plane, and before we could further pursue mending the Mother’s heart we would need to find and squelch the trouble that had spawned in our wake. Through Dandelion and Linde’s bickering, we forged plans to meet an emissary of Rhiannon who would direct us to her palace, where we would plan our next steps.

Time in the Feywilds happens like the magic there. It’s both dense and vague, moving through you and making changes as if on a whim. After what felt like weeks on our feet, our party slept in Dandelion’s castle waiting for our guide to arrive. While we rested, magic sunk into us, alerting us in small ways. This place would leave its mark on us, as we had on it.

After our rest, our guide and high councilor to Rhiannon, Raisa, was waiting for us. He sucked us into a bad of fairy powder and in an instant we were miles away, appearing again in a town by the shore. Raisa told us that we had a short while to kill while they arranged passage, and we knew exactly what we wanted to do with it.

In a field outside of town, I unsheathed the luck sword. We had been discussing, in passing, what it might take to get Martin back from whatever had him. We were going to wait until the Mother’s heart was sealed, but it was clear now that Martin was a pressing danger. More than that, he was our responsibility.

Properly drunk in preparation for what was about to occur, Ereden drafted our second wish. We called for a soul stamp, one matching Martin on the night before the masquerade in Bastion, a point when we were sure that he was free from corruption. If Martin was truly consumed by whatever held him, this could be the only way to get him, or some of him, back.

Hilda formed a magic circle and we rehearsed the third wish, taking time to practice and adjust our wording. I swung the sword in my hand, focusing on my breathing. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re ready or not. When it’s time, it’s time.

I uttered the wish and a sheet of darkness opened in the pristine field within the magic circle. We saw a form in the void, his form, but we also saw another. As if from parting curtains a metal monstrosity stepped onto the green grass, a six-armed adamantine golem with a twisted, wicked Martin on his back. A silence overtook our group as the creature walked through our magic circle effortlessly.

With a shout, I sprinted towards the golem. Raising the soul stamp over my head, I flew to Martin’s height and swung down, sticking the stamp between the shoulder blades of his corrupted body. The way that time slowed at the moment was cruel. It was a crack just wide enough to let the doubt settle, to let dread build. It was in that expanse between one breath and the next that something remarkable happened.

The soul stamp embedded into dark-Martin’s form began its work. As Martin materialized in front of us, his corrupted form was stripped from him like a layer of living shadow, peeled off inch by inch as its mortal remnants were re-written. Finally, Martin, as he had been when we emerged from Ocean outside of the Ocraite’s then home-base, fell to the soft grass and a figure like the pulsing, empty sky recoiled. We had him back, and we would fight to keep him.

Berthok swooped in on his flying broomstick and ushered the unconscious Martin out of harm's way as the rest of our party stood to face the twisted creature that remained. The metal monstrosity raised two of its arms and struck them together, causing the field of grass beneath it to bend in a growing circle as a shock wave struck our party. We retaliated, hammering the monster and the abomination still in Martin’s form with magic that pearled off like droplets of rain. Dread flashed through us and I tasted acrid panic. We were generally unprepared for the vile creatures we were so apt at finding, but this was something else entirely. We had to find a way out of this fight.

Ereden called in a favor, summoning members of the Unseelie court who looked on in horror at the wickedness we had welcomed into their plane. They shot the tortured pair with beams of ice, freezing them in place. My head swimming, I tossed my lucky sword to Tess. She lifted it above her head and did the only thing that felt reasonable at the time. She sent the two away, banishing them to the abysmal plane where we hoped they would be trapped forever. In the quiet that followed, we could almost believe that we had won.

Raisa rushed forth in a panic, stunned by what we had done and even less thrilled by the presence of the Unseelie court. He pulled them aside to talk things through, and we turned to Martin, laying in the lush grass.

When he opened his eyes, we were beaming. Somehow, we had ripped him out of the darkness which had taken so much, and which threatened to take so much more. It wasn’t perfect, there was a lot we had to catch him up on, but it was Martin. Our Martin. Home.

We helped him to his feet and loaded him up with bits and pieces of our extra gear. He was happy, joking around in a way that almost seemed surreal. The last threat that he remembered facing was a city of enemies and a Justinius’ clone army. It had been trying, certainly, but now we were facing the end of our world, maybe the end of every world. We could have felt guilty dragging him into an existence on the brink of collapse, but, honestly, we lacked the luxury or time. Our passage was chartered, a boat stood ready, and we had plenty to catch Martin up on as we sailed to meet Rhiannon.

We found her waiting pensively in her throne room, nearly just as agitated as she had seemed speaking through Edna in Dandelion’s castle. Immediately, she demanded that we disrobe and allow her to dig through our possessions. Quickly, she singled out our dream stones. As we explained their purpose, she crushed them together in her hands, shaking off their remnants.

Tersely, she explained the situation we were in. The mother’s heart, her living seal, had fractured, unleashing a herald. Martin, who had made too many deals with his demon patron was easy to overcome. He was also in possession of a dream stone and had been using it to stalk our party. She handed me an enchanted hand mirror to act as our new method of communication. Without the dream stones, we could no longer be so easily followed by the Herald in the corrupted form of Martin and his six-armed golem. That was the good news.

The bad news was, the Herald in Martin’s corrupted form had the blessing of thunder, which he had taken from the Fey Lord now living in a jar when he killed him and wrecked his palace. If we were going to restore the seal, we would need to retrieve the blessing from the abysmal plane where we had banished it. Rhiannon assured us that she could get us there, but the rest would be on us.

All of that would be in time, however. First, we needed to cleanse a spot of corruption from a pirate cove nearby. When we were followed by the Herald, portals began opening across the Feywilds. With more mind flayers to slay and monstrosities to repel before they crawled into this nearly pristine plane, we tried to out-pace our second guessing. Every step we had taken since we entered the living tree that was the mother had rippled into darkness. If we were going to set things straight and save our planet, we would need to chase those ripples to their end.

It was daunting, but we felt there was hope. After all, we were together.

-- Arlyn LaBelle is a poet, flash fiction writer and legal assistant living in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared multiple times in the Badgerdog summer anthologies as well as The Blue Hour, LAROLA, JONAH Magazine, The Oddville Press, Songs of Eretz, Grey Sparrow Press, Cease, Cows and The Southern Poetry Review. 

Thoughts on the Game: For this game I planned all sorts of stuff for them to do. But we actually didn’t touch on almost all of it. With the party using all four of their wishes, calling in one of their last favors, and creating more of a challenge by sending Martin’s shade into the abyss…. They were a bit tied up. But that is why I love D&D. Plan all you want and the players will make sure nothing gets done!

Vigilante is a group cooperative world gaming experience. A combination of several D&D groups are all active in the world and all of them influence the events of the town of Bastion and surrounding area. The guilds allow everyone to exchange items and it also allows players to switch parties to pursue different quests and be part of events. The story continues to progress in cool and inventive ways and I am so grateful to the collaborative Dungeon Masters for putting it all together, but there are still a ton of things to do and uncover and I look forward to more interesting and exciting adventures.