The crown lay in its box in Vare’s tower, looking far too small to have misplaced a man’s entire history. Thorn studied it while the others argued over what, precisely, he had done. Somewhere in Waterdeep, scholars were searching for records of a lich they had been researching only a short time before. Those records had vanished. The scholars remembered them. So did Thorn. He could still remember the barrier he had raised inside the crown’s vision, and he was beginning to dislike how easily the memory came to him.
There had been two histories of Nogbruth, both apparently true, both occupying the same years: a king in one place, a lich in another. Now the lich’s history was missing.
“That was the bad one,” Maledurk observed.
They knew little enough about the king to make the distinction uncertain, but there was some comfort in it. Perhaps Thorn had done something useful. Perhaps the danger they had been pursuing across worlds had ended without their realizing it.
Elora reached out to their researchers in Waterdeep. The answer offered little reassurance. Work on the king continued. As for the lich, some material seemed to have been misplaced. They were looking for it. Thorn’s explanation that he might have changed history earned a brief silence, followed by a chuckle and a promise to keep searching.
“At least they laughed,” he said.
Their own laughter faded sooner. They had spoken of gathering allies, of raising an army against whatever power had been interfering with their lives. Yet they still could not name that power with certainty. They had suspicions, connections, encounters that seemed too strange to be accidents. How were they to recognize victory when they had never properly identified the enemy?
And there was the crown. They had taken it from Nogbruth the lich. If the lich’s history had ceased to exist, the crown ought to present a difficulty. It remained stubbornly tangible, as did their recollection of obtaining it.
“Perhaps it existed without him,” Elora said.
Perhaps. That allowed the crown to remain in its box, but explained very little else.
Thorn wondered how many times someone might have used it before them. A change made far enough in the past could reach into everything that followed. They remembered their lives, certainly. That did not prove those lives had unfolded only once. Vare’s studies had revealed no memories beyond the ones associated with Nogbruth. If the crown held some account of its own making or its earlier wearers, he had not found it.
Elora looked into the box. “I’ll try it.”
There was scarcely time to discuss the proposal before she lifted the crown onto her head.
She fell.
Maledurk looked down at her motionless body. The others looked at the crown. Only then did they fully appreciate that the one person who had successfully freed its wearers was now lying unconscious beneath it.
Elora was walking through a forest. Weariness burdened her so thoroughly that for a moment she accepted it as her own. Her body seemed to have been traveling for hours, perhaps days. An ill-kept path wound ahead through the trees, pressed into the earth by feet and hooves rather than laid out by any careful hand. She did not recognize it.
She let the walking continue and pushed her awareness upward. The effort took hold. Her sight lifted free of the path and rose through the canopy until the forest spread beneath her. Mountains stood in what she judged, from the sun, to be the east. Farther ahead, a break in the trees suggested water descending from their slopes. At the sight of it, she felt a sudden certainty. That was where she was going.
She examined the forest as closely as she could. The trees and the coolness of the air suggested the northern Sword Coast, perhaps somewhere beyond the High Forest. The mountains lacked the snow she would have expected farther north. It was something to bring back, though hardly enough to guide Thorn to a particular place. No tower stood above the trees, and no landmark she knew offered a name.
Her awareness settled into the traveler again. The exhaustion returned with it, but now she could distinguish other feelings beneath the ache. Fear hurried her along the path. Excitement kept pace with it. Whatever awaited her at the river mattered enough to overcome the body’s demand for rest.
When she reached the bank, she searched the undergrowth with the confidence of someone who knew what she would find. A little boat lay concealed among the shrubs.
She drew it down to the water. As she climbed aboard, a reflection caught her eye. The crown rested on her head. The face beneath it was hers, and somehow it was wrong. She recognized herself with the unquestioning certainty of a dream, even while some part of her understood that she was looking at someone else. Then the boat moved, and the reflection broke.
She began to row downstream. With each stroke, relief loosened something inside her. The fear remained, but she had escaped something. She could feel that much. She had no chance to discover what.
The river went dark.
Voices surrounded her. Elora sat on a throne, looking down into a hall filled with people. Most were human, though she saw elves and dwarves among them, and a few dragonborn. They stood in little groups, conversing with the easy confidence of people who expected no danger from the room or its ruler.
Their clothing was fine and somewhat old-fashioned. The women’s broad skirts occupied considerable space. No one seemed dressed for war, and there was none of the expectant stillness that preceded a proclamation. If an occasion had brought them together, its formal business might already be finished. She could not make out the substance of their conversations.
An irritation stirred in her. It had no clear object. Perhaps she resented being ignored while everyone talked below the dais, or perhaps the feeling belonged to the person whose place she occupied. She searched the hall for something more useful.
Banners hung upon the walls. The same unfamiliar device appeared on the courtiers’ livery. She knew neither the house nor the country it represented, though the hall itself resembled what Thorn and Maledurk had described from their own encounters with the crown.
Then she looked beside her. A second throne stood empty.
Grief struck with such force that the room seemed to draw away from her. Someone ought to have been sitting there. She knew nothing about that person. She had no name to call, no face to remember. Yet the empty chair hurt her with an intimacy that made questions feel almost indecent. Whoever had sat upon it was gone, and the one whose memory she inhabited had not learned how to look at the vacancy without suffering.
Elora made herself study the carving on its back. A sea serpent rose from stylized water. Upon its back rested a great butterfly. Her own throne bore the same creature and the same butterfly, and the banners above the courtiers repeated the design. Neither letters nor a motto accompanied it.
She held the image carefully in her mind. It was distinctive enough that someone might recognize it. Now she needed to return and tell the others. There was, however, the matter of the crown. Shrinking out from beneath it seemed worth trying.
She became a rat.
The throne swelled around her. Its seat became a broad plain, its carved arms towering above her head. For a heartbeat she waited for the crown to fall around her. Nothing fell.
Someone in the hall turned toward the dais and screamed. Faces swung in her direction. The comfortable conversations stopped. People began rushing toward the throne, and their expressions gave her little reason to wait for an explanation.
Elora darted beneath the chair. A sword thrust into the space after her. She flattened herself against the floor and scurried away from the blade. Another point scraped nearby. Shoes crowded the edge of her refuge.
The crown had changed with her, just as her clothes and the rest of her belongings did whenever she took an animal’s shape. She had carried it into the rat’s body. She had also, apparently, replaced the ruler of this hall with vermin in full view of the court. There would be time to consider that later.
She shot out from beneath the throne, raced across the floor, and reached a window. Then she jumped. For an instant there was empty air beneath her small body. She changed again. Wings caught the air, and she flew.
Behind her, astonished cries poured through the window. People leaned out to watch her escape, but no arrows followed. The castle receded as she flew toward the trees. When she found a road, she descended and resumed her own shape. The crown was still with her.
Elora gathered her will and called upon the restorative magic she had used to release the others. For a moment she stood upon an unfamiliar road beneath unfamiliar trees, reaching for a room she could no longer see. Then the forest vanished.
The crown slipped from her head. Elora opened her eyes on the floor of Vare’s tower. Her companions were gathered nearby, still considering how to remove it. Maledurk’s thoughts had been tending toward the careful application of tools. She was pleased to have returned before careful became necessary.
They listened as she described the forest and the hidden boat, the strange reflection, the court. She told them about the empty throne and the grief that had come with it. Most carefully of all, she described the sea serpent carrying a butterfly. At last they had something concrete to search for. A castle somewhere in the north was less useful. Thorn could not take them to a destination they could not identify, and even if they found its location, they had no assurance the building still stood.
Still, Elora had gone into the crown and brought herself out again.
“I didn’t do anything to change anything,” she said.
There was a pause. “The king turned into a rat,” came the reply, “jumped out a window, and became a bird.”
Put that way, the visit sounded less restrained.
They were still discussing whether the crown allowed them to inhabit a king’s memories, or something more complicated, when another message reached Elora from Waterdeep. The researchers had found the lich.
More than that, they had found additional material. Nogbruth’s armies had overrun dozens of cities. Thousands had died during years of warfare. At last, a great alliance drawn from nearly all the cities of the Sword Coast had raised an army and defeated him. Elora listened without interrupting. There was one difficulty, the researchers added. The information about the king could no longer be found.
She relayed the message, and the room went quiet. They had been discussing how to assemble such an alliance themselves. Now the scholars were describing it as history, the long struggle and its dead already consigned to records.
Elora looked at the crown. “I changed history.”
She could not say which action had done it. She had no way to follow the consequences from a startled court to burning cities. The report gave her no such explanation. It merely placed the lich back in the world and removed the king from the scholars’ reach. Her recollection of the empty throne remained painfully clear.
Thorn returned to a thought that had been troubling him since their conversation began. They had assumed some hidden enemy was arranging their lives. What if their own hands had been at work? What if each attempt to investigate the crown helped create the circumstances they were trying to understand?
“We could be doing this to ourselves.”
The possibility was difficult to dismiss while the crown lay within reach of all four of them. There was a little humor in the argument that followed, though it did not dispel the unease. If they were their own worst enemy, perhaps they were also their best hope. Much depended upon how generously one chose to interpret the situation.
Eventually they needed a destination more useful than that thought. Vare had suggested returning to places they had visited before. Their travels had left enough unexplained behind them. Barovia, Strixhaven, the Underdark, Chult and Omu, the strange passages they had explored around the Barrier Peaks. Something might remain unfinished. Something they had once overlooked might make sense now.
Chult was accessible. So was Gracklstugh, if they wished to return to the Underdark. In the Barrier Peaks they at least knew someone they could question, for Kwalish might have answers. Barovia presented a less inviting problem. They did not know how to enter it deliberately.
Strixhaven had libraries. It also had people whose business was knowing things, and Vare could send them there. That was enough.
Vare gave them a wand for the return journey. Its magic would carry the whole group, with room for a few additional companions if necessary, back to the grounds outside his hedge maze.
“Outside?” someone asked.
He had extensive protections around his tower. He was not prepared to lower them merely to save his visitors a walk. They knew the route through the maze by now, and the protest subsided.
He also explained that he could answer messages they sent him, though he could not initiate such contact himself. While they were away, he would continue looking into what he could. Then he asked whether they intended to take the crown.
They did. Elora’s success in freeing herself made it possible to consider the thing a tool, however poorly understood. Bringing it to the places where their lives had gone astray might reveal something that another conversation in the tower would not.
They watched Vare’s reaction. He appeared interested, perhaps a little disappointed to lose the opportunity for further study. There was no anger in him and no effort to insist. The workings of the crown had always engaged his attention more readily than the possible end of the world. He would have liked to keep examining it. That seemed to be the extent of his desire.
He led them upstairs to a laboratory whose walls held scenes of distant places. Before one of these pictures, he stopped and made a series of gestures. The view changed. Marshland appeared within the frame. It looked unpleasantly familiar.
At Vare’s direction they gathered close and laid their hands upon the picture. “Have fun,” he said.
The picture pulled. Elora had a brief, appalling sensation of being stretched well beyond the proportions of a person. The tower drew away behind her. Bog and sky rushed toward her, and she landed with the others in a confusion of limbs that took a moment to resolve into their accustomed shapes.
They were back at Strixhaven.
Sedgemoor lay around them, damp and quiet. Elora recognized the place before she had quite recovered from the journey. Here, during their time at Witherbloom, they had worked to purify water tainted by the strange black substance that had caused so much trouble.
The recognition made her turn slowly, examining the ground. Vare had promised to send them to Strixhaven. He had said nothing about delivering them to this particular spot. It might be chance. After the messages from Waterdeep, chance was becoming a difficult explanation to trust.
No one else was nearby. That was ordinary enough. This part of the bog belonged to the grounds, but lay apart from the busy college buildings. They decided to speak to someone before disturbing anything.
The walk back brought them to raised wooden paths and, eventually, to students traveling between classes. No one paid them much attention. The college appeared to be conducting its affairs with the reassuring indifference of a place that did not presently require saving.
At the Biblioplex they asked for someone in authority. Professor Osgier, they were told, had office hours available. They followed the directions upstairs and along a corridor, stopping at a doorway nearly fifteen feet high. The professor sitting beyond it was a stone giant.
He wore an academic jacket with patches at the elbows and looked up from his desk as they entered. “I don’t think any of you are my students.”
They explained that the matter was somewhat more complicated. His office contained books and relics whose significance was less evident than their age. An old boot occupied a place of honor. A stone tool rested in another niche. Elora glanced from one object to the next while they described their previous stay, the troubles they had encountered, and their defeat of Murgaxor. Had anything similar happened since?
Osgier listened with growing puzzlement. The college had been quite normal, he said. The name did sound familiar, however. He turned to his shelves. The book he selected was of ordinary size. In his hands it looked delicate, and he handled its pages with a care that held their attention while he searched.
At last he found the passage. “Yes. Murgaxor.”
He read for a moment, then looked up at them. “This was eight hundred years ago.”
Elora stared at him. For them it had been about two years.
Osgier returned to the account. There had been unusual incidents at the school, many attributed to troublesome students. More dangerous events had followed, with strange weather and some impending calamity. Then the disturbances had ceased. Murgaxor had never been seen again. Four students had disappeared at the same time.
“That was us.”
The professor glanced between his visitors and the book. He asked for their names again. Those were not the names recorded, he explained. The missing students had been Ophelia, Krenn Smith, Luna, and Bob.
“Yes,” they told him. “Us.”
Eight centuries lay between those names and the office in which they stood. Elora looked again at the old boot in its niche. Some object scarcely worth noticing in its own day had survived long enough to become a scholar’s treasure. Their struggle to save the college had survived as a brief account in a book the professor had needed to search for.
Osgier considered their claim. It was strange, he admitted. Yet the history was obscure enough that even he, the college’s foremost historian, had not recalled the details immediately. Their knowledge deserved his attention.
“You rock,” someone told him.
The stone giant chuckled. As far as he knew, nothing resembling those events had troubled the college since. It had been, he said, a small episode in the school’s long history.
Small.
They remembered Murgaxor’s ritual, the attempt to drain the life from Strixhaven, and the battle in the fortress basement. They remembered how close they had come to failing. But the students outside his office had lessons to attend. Eight hundred years had given the college other things to remember.
As they made their way back toward the bog, they pieced together their departure. Maledurk and Tempest had fallen during the battle as Bob and Ophelia, then risen again as themselves. Luna and Krenn had survived long enough to flee the collapsing chamber. After they stopped the ritual, the ceiling had begun coming down, driving them upstairs and out of the fortress.
Mist had waited outside. For a moment, Strahd’s face had appeared within it. Then their sight had blurred, and they had awakened in a prison cell in the Underdark, all of them restored to their familiar selves.
Remembering it together did not explain it. It did remind them how much had happened too quickly for them to question at the time. They could not be certain that they had left anything undone at Strixhaven. Osgier’s account suggested that their victory had held. Still, they had brought the crown to learn something, and the bog was a place to begin.
There were less solemn attractions to returning to college. The sound of a student celebration carried from the quad, and someone had thought to bring an old toga. Eight hundred years, it seemed, had done little to diminish the appeal of a party.
Elora went back to the place where Vare had delivered them and took out the crown. She waited for its familiar pull. Nothing came.
She put it on. The bog remained before her. She could hear her companions and feel the damp air against her face. No forest rose around her. No throne waited.
After a moment, she lifted it off. “Nothing.”
She passed it to Maledurk. He felt no desire to wear it, no strange compulsion in the metal. Their decision to carry it across worlds had seemed reasonable in the tower. Standing in the marsh with an unresponsive crown, they had to consider whether it would tell them anything at all.
There was another place to try. They set out for the ruined fortress where they had fought Murgaxor.
Erdun had sunk.
They remembered a fortress standing upon a little hill amid the bog, already ruined when they first approached it. A broken bridge had crossed the surrounding water. Magic had enclosed the place, and gaining entry had required effort. Now the protective barrier was gone. So was most of the hill.
Across the water, a narrow ring of land surrounded a flooded hollow. A few stone pillars protruded from its surface. Fragments of the old bridge remained on either side, leading toward a building that no longer stood above the marsh. Elora searched for the black substance they remembered. She saw none. The collapse had begun while they were fleeing. Eight hundred years of water and sinking ground had finished what they had barely escaped.
They stopped upon the bank. Elora put the crown on again. Nothing happened. They passed it among themselves. It lay quietly in every hand.
Perhaps it functioned only in certain places. That would explain something, although it did not yet tell them how to choose those places. They had come all the way back to the scene of the battle, and still the crown gave them nothing.
Then they looked again at the water. They were standing across from the fortress, and the chamber where the ritual had taken place lay somewhere beneath the flooded hollow. One of the surviving pillars offered a place to stand above it.
Elora could fly there. If they needed to search underwater, they had ways to breathe beneath the surface as well. For the moment, a closer vantage seemed sufficient. The others remained on the bank as she crossed.
She landed upon the broken stone and steadied herself. Water surrounded the pillar. Below its dark surface lay the remains of the fortress, the chamber they remembered, whatever eight centuries had left of the place where their lives had changed.
She drew out the crown. The urge returned at once. It was strong enough to make the quiet tests upon the bank seem remote. She wanted the metal against her head. She knew that wanting, recognized it even as her hands began to rise.
Across the water, Thorn, Maledurk, and Tempest watched her. Elora put on the crown. Her knees gave way. For a moment she sagged upon the narrow pillar, her balance lost, her companions still too far away to catch her.
Then she fell into the bog.
The session began in Vare’s tower, with the party reviewing what they had learned from Thorn’s latest use of the crown. Thorn had discovered that he could influence events within its visions, and his intervention with a magical barrier had been followed by a change in the historical information available to the researchers in Waterdeep. The researchers had originally found two histories of Nogbruth occurring at the same time in different places. One concerned a king, and the other concerned a lich. Following Thorn’s intervention, they could no longer find the information about Nogbruth the lich. The party discussed whether the crown might have altered history repeatedly before they became aware of its capabilities. They wondered whether their remembered lives represented the original course of events or whether they had already lived through the effects of earlier changes without recognizing them. They also considered whether someone in their own time could be deliberately using the crown to manipulate the past for personal advantage. This remained a possibility they were discussing, rather than an identified explanation for their experiences. The group initially treated the disappearance of the lich’s history as potentially good news. The DM reminded them that they knew little about the king, so they did not yet have enough information to judge that version of Nogbruth. The party contacted the researchers for an update. The researchers were still investigating the king and did not understand what had happened to their material about the lich. They appeared to believe that the missing research had been misplaced or lost during their work. Thorn acknowledged that he might have changed history. After a pause and a chuckle, the researchers said they would keep looking and report anything they found. The party questioned whether there was still an imminent threat. They recalled discussing the assembly of a powerful force to confront an unknown entity they believed might be responsible for their experiences and might threaten the world. The DM clarified that the existence and role of this overarching enemy remained the party’s theory. Their researchers in Waterdeep had directed them to Vare to learn more, but the group had not established exactly what they were facing or how they would recognize that the problem had been resolved. The crown remained in the party’s possession and had been returned to its box after its removal from Thorn. Its continued existence raised another question, since they had taken it from Nogbruth the lich, whose history could no longer be found. The party considered whether the crown could have existed independently of the lich. They also wondered whether Nogbruth himself had used it to establish a particular history and whether other people might have worn it. They asked whether they could discover the crown’s own history or identify its previous users. Vare’s research had not revealed memories beyond the ones associated with Nogbruth that the party had already encountered. Elora volunteered to put on the crown and see whether she could obtain more information. As soon as she wore it, she lost consciousness and fell to the floor, much as Thorn and Maledurk had during their earlier experiences. The others realized that Elora was the only person they knew could remove the crown from someone affected by it. With Elora now unconscious, they did not have an established method for freeing her. Elora made a Wisdom saving throw of 29. Her surroundings went dark, and she then found herself experiencing a journey through an unfamiliar forest. The forest was dense, with a trampled path that appeared to be used by animals and probably people. It did not look maintained. Elora felt exhausted, as though she had been walking all day or perhaps for several days. She did not recognize the location. It did not immediately seem to be the High Forest where the party had previously encountered elves, but she could not identify it from her initial view. Elora tried to rise above the trees to examine the surroundings. Through an effort of will, she shifted her viewpoint upward and out above the canopy while the remembered journey continued below. From above, she saw forest stretching in every direction and mountains in what she believed was the east, judging by the sun. Ahead, a break in the trees suggested a river flowing down from the mountains across the route of travel. Seeing the possible river gave Elora a sense that it was her destination. She could not see Vare’s tower or any recognizable landmark that would establish her location. Elora made a Survival check of 20. The cooler conditions, terrain, and tree types suggested that she was still on the Sword Coast, probably somewhere to the north and near a mountain range. The Spine of the World was suggested, but the DM indicated that the setting probably was not that far north, where snow would be expected. The area might instead lie near mountains farther east, possibly north of the High Forest. Elora could not determine a precise location. Elora returned to the original viewpoint and continued toward the river. The movement required no physical effort from her, as though she were watching someone else’s experience from within it. Along with the fatigue, she felt excitement and fear. The excitement seemed to be helping the person whose experience she was following continue onward despite being tired. At the river, she found a small rowboat pulled onto the bank and concealed in shrubs and undergrowth. Although the boat was not obvious, she felt as though she already knew where to find it. She experienced pulling the boat into the water and beginning to travel downstream. While getting into it, she caught a glimpse of a reflection wearing the crown. The reflected face seemed both familiar and different. Elora recognized it as herself in the way someone might recognize a person in a dream even when the person’s appearance did not match. As the boat moved downriver, relief joined the fear and excitement. Elora had the impression of having escaped something, although she did not learn what that might have been. Her vision went dark again, and the scene changed to a castle throne room. She was now seated on a throne while courtiers and other people mingled nearby. The people appeared relaxed and in good spirits. They were talking among themselves rather than addressing her, and she could not make out their conversations. They did not seem to be waiting for a speech or anticipating an immediate event. Most of the people in the room were human, but Elora also saw elves, dwarves, and a couple of dragonborn. Elora searched for banners, coats of arms, inscriptions, or other identifying details. She saw banners and livery, but their colors and symbols did not identify any faction, country, or household she recognized. The castle did not resemble the one she knew from Barovia. It did, however, seem consistent with the descriptions Thorn and Maledurk had given of their own crown visions. The party recalled that Thorn had previously explored a similar castle and seen himself wearing the crown in a mirror. Maledurk had experienced a similar setting before going onto a balcony where people cheered for him. The courtiers wore fine clothing appropriate to being in the presence of royalty. Their styles appeared dated, with elaborate dresses and formal clothing, but there was no clear indication of a wedding, military gathering, or other specific ceremony. Elora felt slightly annoyed without knowing the cause. She wondered whether it might be because the people were ignoring her while she sat on the throne. Remembering that Thorn had cast a spell during a crown vision, Elora considered whether she could use magic to learn more. She continued examining the room. She noticed a second throne beside her own. It was empty, and looking at it brought an overwhelming feeling of sadness, as though someone who should have been there was gone. Elora examined the second throne and found a carved symbol. The same symbol appeared on her own throne and on some of the flags and banners around the room. The crest depicted a sea serpent emerging from the water with a large butterfly on its back. It appeared to represent a royal house, family, or similar authority, but Elora did not recognize it. There were no words or letters accompanying the crest. Elora wanted to return to her companions and describe what she had found. To try to escape the crown’s influence, Elora transformed into a rat, intending to become small enough that the crown would fall off. Her viewpoint shrank, and she found herself sitting on the throne in rat form. Someone in the crowd turned toward her and screamed. Elora could no longer see the crown, but she did not awaken in Vare’s tower. People began rushing toward her and did not appear friendly. Elora jumped down and ran beneath the throne, while the party discussed whether the crown had fallen away, shrunk with her, or disappeared into the transformation. The DM clarified that Elora’s equipment normally merged into her animal form when she transformed. The crown had become part of that transformation along with her other belongings, so becoming a rat had not freed her from it. People thrust swords beneath the throne in an attempt to reach the rat. Elora decided to escape through a window and transform into a bird. She scurried across the room, jumped out the window, became a bird, and flew toward the forest. Behind her, she heard shouting and surprised reactions, and she could see people looking out after her. No one appeared to be firing arrows at her, and she was able to get away. She then flew down to a road, landed, returned to her own form, and attempted to cast restoration on herself. Elora made another Wisdom saving throw, this time rolling 31. In Vare’s tower, her companions were still considering how to remove the crown from her unconscious body. Before the others put a removal plan into action, the crown fell from Elora’s head and she woke up. She told the party about the forest, the river journey, the throne room, and the crest. The party briefly considered traveling to the area she had seen. They did not know its exact location, however, and could not simply use Thorn’s staff to travel to an unidentified destination. Elora initially said she had not done anything to change events during the vision. The others pointed out that the person on the throne had transformed into a rat, fled through a window, and become a bird, which might differ from the original course of history. The group discussed whether wearing the crown actually transformed them into a king. The DM clarified that their understanding was that they were experiencing someone’s memories, with some ability to act within and manipulate those experiences. Thorn’s earlier experiences were reviewed. During his first attempt, he had struggled to influence events. In the later vision involving the undead army, he had begun from the viewpoint of someone resembling a general, then moved his viewpoint away and acted elsewhere. The researchers contacted Elora again with another change in their findings. They could now locate information about Nogbruth the lich and had discovered more about him than they had previously found. According to the newly available history, the lich’s armies had overrun dozens of cities and killed thousands of people over many years. He had eventually been defeated by a large army drawn from nearly all the cities of the Sword Coast. The party recognized a similarity between that historical alliance and their own idea of gathering a force against a major threat. The researchers could no longer locate the information about Nogbruth the king that they had found earlier. The party took this latest reversal as another indication that their actions with the crown had changed history. Unsure where to go next, the party revisited Vare’s earlier recommendation to return to locations connected with their previous adventures. Those places might offer information they could now interpret differently, or they might contain unfinished business. The locations discussed included Strixhaven, Barovia, Chult and Omu, the Underdark, and the Barrier Peaks, where they had encountered Kwalish. They recalled that their time in the Barrier Peaks had involved traveling through goo in a small submarine and encountering bubbles that took them to different places. Those earlier experiences with travel between locations or dimensions might be relevant to their present questions. The party considered taking the crown to these places and having Elora use it to look for information. She had now demonstrated that she could enter one of its visions and free herself, apparently without injury. They discussed several ways to choose a destination, including proximity, the likelihood of finding useful information, the order of their previous adventures, and the presence of unanswered questions. One theory raised during this discussion was that the party might be responsible for its own troubles. Repeated use of the crown could have created the situations they had experienced, making their own interventions the source of the problem they were trying to solve. This remained speculation. The DM outlined the available travel options. Chult was accessible by teleportation because they had been there repeatedly. They could also return to Gracklstugh in the Underdark, and they knew where the Barrier Peaks were. Strixhaven existed in another dimension, but Vare knew it well enough to send them there. Barovia was the destination for which they lacked a clear means of return. Kwalish offered a specific person to consult in the Barrier Peaks. Strixhaven offered a school, a library, records, and people who might help them investigate. The party had less of an immediate idea of what to seek in Chult or the Underdark. The group chose Strixhaven. They wanted to gather information and find out whether the school remained safe after their previous intervention. Vare agreed to send them and gave them a wand that could return them to a point outside his hedge maze. They would then need to make their way through the maze to reach his tower. Vare explained that his magical protections prevented him from arranging their return directly inside the tower. He was unwilling to lower those protections merely to spare them the walk, especially since they already knew the route through the maze. Vare asked whether they intended to take the crown or leave it with him. The party decided to bring it, believing it might prove useful at the places they planned to revisit. A party member watched Vare’s reaction and made an Insight check. He did not appear upset or surprised by their decision. The impression was that he would have liked more time to study the crown but would not insist on keeping it. His interest seemed academic rather than possessive. The group recalled that he had been particularly interested in understanding how the crown worked. Vare explained that the return wand could transport the whole party and potentially a couple of additional people if necessary. He did not provide a construct to accompany them. He also agreed to continue looking for information while they were away. The party could send him messages, and he could reply, but he said he could not initiate messages to them himself. Vare led the party into a laboratory containing pictures of different places. He studied one picture and made magical gestures, causing its scene to change to terrain resembling the bog near Strixhaven. He instructed everyone to place a hand on the picture. With another gesture, he pulled them into it. They felt stretched like taffy, landed in a distorted heap, and then returned to their normal shapes. The party arrived in Sedgemoor, the bog associated with Witherbloom. Elora recognized Witherbloom as the college associated with her earlier time at Strixhaven. They were not standing directly in the mud. They recognized the area as a location where they had previously purified water while investigating the black oil that had been appearing around the school. During that earlier investigation, they had believed the oil originated in the bog. Purifying certain places had been intended to stop more of it from being created. Their arrival at this particular purification site might have been significant, but they did not know whether Vare had deliberately sent them there or whether it was a coincidence. No one was nearby. The location was part of the broader campus but lay away from the buildings, so the absence of students or staff was not unexpected. Rather than repeat their earlier purification work, the party decided to speak with someone in authority and learn what had happened since their departure. They followed the routes back toward the school, using raised wooden walkways over parts of the bog. As they approached the buildings, they encountered students going about their activities. The students paid little attention to the party. Nothing in their behavior suggested an immediate emergency. The party went to the Biblioplex, which housed the library and was also associated with the school’s administration. At reception, they asked to speak with a dean or another person who could help. They were directed upstairs, to the third door on the right, where Professor Osgir was holding office hours. Osgir’s office had doors nearly fifteen feet tall, noticeably larger than the other doors along the hall. Inside, a stone giant about ten feet tall sat at a desk wearing an academic jacket with elbow patches. Osgir did not recognize the visitors as his students and asked how he could help. The party explained their previous involvement at Strixhaven and asked whether anything unusual had happened since they left or as a consequence of their actions. Osgir seemed confused by their account and said that the school had been quite normal. Some of what they described sounded familiar, so he consulted books from the shelves in his office. The office also contained old objects displayed as relics, including a worn boot and what looked like a stone tool. These suggested an interest in archaeology or historical artifacts rather than valuable treasure. Osgir carefully handled an ordinary-sized book, which appeared small in his enormous hands. He located a reference to Murgaxor and recognized the name as someone who had caused trouble for the school. The date puzzled him. According to the records, the events the party described had occurred eight hundred years earlier. Reading further, Osgir found accounts of strange incidents around the school. Many had initially been attributed to students causing trouble. The records also described an impending calamity involving unusual events and dangerous weather. The disturbances had then stopped abruptly, and Murgaxor had not been seen again. Osgir found a further note that four students had disappeared at the same time. The party immediately identified those students as themselves. Their current names did not match the record. Osgir read out the names Ophelia, Krenn Smith, Luna, and Bob, and the party confirmed that these were the identities they had used during their earlier lives at Strixhaven. Osgir found their claim highly unusual but interesting. He described himself as the college’s leading historian and acknowledged that even he had not remembered these details without consulting the records. He regarded the incident as a relatively small event in the school’s long history. As far as he knew, nothing similar had occurred since then. The party reviewed its own notes and recalled that Murgaxor had been a former student attempting a ritual to drain the life force from Strixhaven. They had stopped him during that ritual. The group established the difference in elapsed time. Their confrontation with Murgaxor had occurred roughly two years earlier in their own experience, while Strixhaven’s records placed it eight hundred years in the past. They decided that testing the crown at Strixhaven might reveal information connected with their earlier experiences there. Some of the party suspected that returning to the bog could be useful because that was where they had arrived. They recalled the black oil and the disturbances associated with their previous investigation, including inanimate objects coming to life and pursuing people, and creatures changing into dangerous forms. The DM reviewed the conclusion of their earlier Strixhaven adventure. The fight against Murgaxor had been difficult, and Bob and Ophelia had been knocked unconscious before becoming Maledurk and Tempest and helping finish the battle. Luna and the party’s other student identity had survived the confrontation. After the ritual was stopped, the basement where the fight took place began collapsing, and the group fled upstairs as the ceiling fell around them. Outside, mist surrounded them. They briefly saw Strahd’s face in it before their vision became blurred and they collapsed. When they awakened, they were in a prison cell in the Underdark, once again in their familiar identities as Elora, Thorn, Maledurk, and Tempest. The DM corrected the recollection that they had gone directly from Strixhaven to Barovia. The dinosaur-racing episode and the travel involving Barovia belonged to a different part of their adventures. The party again considered whether their return meant that they had left something unfinished at Strixhaven. The DM clarified that this was not established. They might find new information, unfinished business, or something else relevant to their current investigation. They debated whether to test the crown at the place where Vare had delivered them or at the ruined fortress where they had fought Murgaxor in the basement. The party first chose to return to the bog location where they had arrived. During the discussion, one party member joked about attending a campus party in an old fraternity toga while Elora investigated. Elora put on the crown at the bog site, but nothing happened. She remained conscious, and touching it did not produce the familiar urge to wear it. She passed the crown to Maledurk to see whether he sensed anything. He also felt nothing unusual. The party then traveled to the former fortress, hoping the crown might respond at the site of their battle with Murgaxor. The fortress had once stood on a small hill in the bog. Now the location resembled a crater, with a ring of land surrounding water and a few stone pillars projecting above the surface. The building appeared to have collapsed and sunk into the bog. This was the site’s actual present condition, rather than a vision produced by the crown. They saw no black goo. The magical barrier that had once surrounded the fortress was also gone. Portions of the old broken bridge remained on both sides of the water. Beyond it, only a narrow, roughly circular strip of land surrounded the submerged remains of the fortress. Standing on the nearby land and looking across the water, Elora tried wearing the crown again. It still did nothing. The party passed it around to see whether it reacted to any of the others. No one felt its pull. They considered whether the crown worked only in certain locations. The DM clarified that they were still standing across the water from the actual site of the confrontation. The place where the battle had occurred was now underwater. Elora proposed flying across and standing on one of the remaining pillars to test the crown closer to that location. The party also recalled that they could use bubbles around their heads if they needed to enter the water, but they did not do so before Elora’s next attempt. Elora flew to a partly exposed stone pillar. The rest of the party stayed on the surrounding land and watched her. When Elora brought out the crown on the pillar, she felt a strong urge to put it on. This was the first such reaction since the party’s arrival at Strixhaven. Elora placed the crown on her head. Her companions watched her collapse, apparently unconscious, and fall from the pillar into the water. The session ended with Elora in the water wearing the crown, while the other party members remained on land.Session Notes