Session 15: Good Day Sunshine

The nursery was not a cradle but a cavern: a vaulted, web-laced chamber where violet eggs pulsed like heartbeats in the dark. Stone sweated with damp and the air tasted of iron. There, amidst shattered webbing and the stink of old bile, the battle refused to die. One purple worm writhed in a barricade of thorns, its hide rasping against a prison of living briar; the other reared in a crescent of shadow, its ringed maw opening like a gate to night. Tempest stood before that maw with light blazing along her scales, the echo of being swallowed and spit back out still a tremor in her hands. Maledurk was gone—taken whole by the first beast—and the cavern thrummed with the slow, muffled thunder of his life inside it.

Elora lifted her palm. She did not call for strength that needed tending—there was already a thorn-wall to mind and losing it would loose a nightmare. Instead she summoned a cold the Underdark had forgotten, a sky-storm memory dragged down to the deeps. Hail hammered the stone in a sudden cataract; sleet fanned in white curtains; jagged ice pummelled scale and sinew. The worm raking through the thorns shuddered, tore free a step, and then faltered, choked by the ground turned treacherous beneath it. The storm made a voice of the cave, and its voice was winter.

Inside the other beast, Maledurk fought the nearer darkness—the slick, suffocating press, the burn. The world was heat and lurch, and the heartbeat around him boomed like a war drum. There were no footholds, no breath to spare, only the stubborn animal of his will and a hunter’s certainty that teeth bite outward as well as in. He raked, struck, felt the jolt of knuckles into meat, the stubborn give of something that would not yield. He grinned in the dark. “Then I will.”

Across the cavern, Thorn traced a figure in the air with a duelist’s precision. The world held its breath as a narrow, emerald line bloomed from nothing—no roar, no thunder, only a line that was absence made visible. It kissed the worm’s side and unmade what it touched. Rock could not have stood against it; flesh had no chance at all. The monster convulsed, and a perfect, smoking circle opened in its flank. Maledurk saw it—saw not the sky, but light itself, honest and clean—and drove toward it with a roar that was swallowed by the thing that swallowed him.

The second worm struck. Tempest dragged a ward up like a pane of crystal and the tail glanced from it in a shower of sparks; the ward shattered into a cascade of lightning that leapt with playful treachery, lacing from the worm before her to the one pinned in thorns. The arc left the first beast a smoking husk. Its enormous body sagged, then collapsed upon itself, a festival balloon deflating into dead weight as Maledurk tumbled out through Thorn’s burning ring.

Light did not leave Tempest’s hands. She lanced radiance through the second worm, a spear of daylight that carved a path through its throat. It shuddered and kept coming. The hail slackened. Elora’s answer came quick and cold as a blade thrown in a back alley: a shard of ice that sang with speed and certainty, burying in scaled hide and bursting in a white blossom of frost that glittered across the worm’s armor.

It still lived. Things born beneath stone learn long lessons in endurance.

Maledurk was already moving, steam rising from him, smoke and acid and stubborn laughter clinging to his breath. He crossed the cavern at a brutal lope and met the monster head-on. He did not swing a great arc or plant a banner in the dark; he did the simpler, older thing—leaned forward and bit, teeth to hide, jaw to bone, the way a street dog settles an argument. Flesh tore. Warmth filled his mouth. The worm shivered, faltered, and finally bowed to gravity and hunger and the end of its own momentum. It went still.

Silence returned by inches: first to the cave, then to the blood, then to the heart. In the aftermath, the four stood among slush and thorn and the sour reek of the dead. Bramber, his face torn between the fear of lingering and the arithmetic of profit, eased his lizards and cart back into the nursery’s fringe. One fat egg already lay swaddled in rope. Thorn rose on whispered currents to the web again—careful cut, slow lowering, a thief’s respect for weight and consequence—and a second egg kissed the cart with only a murmur of webbing.

Elora’s hands, still cold with conjured winter, warmed as they passed over Tempest and Maledurk. The burns from stomach acid lost their angry red; torn flesh drew shut with an almost human sigh. She watched Maledurk’s eyes clear and felt a quiet satisfaction bloom beneath her ribs. The cavern’s hush deepened—and was broken again, a low mutter in the stone, east of them. Rumble. Another. The sound of something large remembering it had company.

They did not linger to see what came.

Bramber snapped the reins and the lizards leaned into the traces; the four fell in guard around cart and guide, slipping into a tunnel barely wider than the beasts that bored it. It fit like a sheath fits a blade—close, scraping, every step a reminder that monsters had made this road. The rumble faded behind them as if swallowed by another, deeper night. They bled back into the main artery of the Underdark and pressed on, past chalk marks and frost mold and the old graffiti of fear.

When Bramber finally spoke, it was with a merchant’s politeness. He had a name to sell these to—Guzarin, a wizard—but that trail bent deeper into the dark. The other choice was the surface. His eyes flicked, uneasy, to ceilings that did not exist.

They chose the sky.

Days became a shawl they could not put down. The twist of tunnels, the steady rise and fall of the land beneath the land—these replaced battle and counting and talk. They slept where the wind did not reach and woke to the same black. Food was a ritual; footfalls a catechism. When change came, it announced itself not with sight but with a strange brightness painted on the walls ahead, as if light had remembered them and come looking.

The last bend opened onto a slope that lifted their feet and their hearts together. Breath burned their lungs for the good reason at last. And then the mouth of the world.

The first sky after months felt like treachery. It was too vast, too clean. The wind had a license to go where it pleased. The smell of pine and cold river struck them like wine on an empty stomach. They stood in the mouth of a mountain and looked over a clot of green hills stitched with a single silver thread—water moving toward an ocean they could not see. The cold made their eyes water and the truth made their chests ache.

Night fell and for the first time in an age there were stars, not bioluminescent mold pretending at them, but the old lights, cold and sharp. Each of them watched in silence, letting bones remember what ceilings cannot teach.

By afternoon of the next day they saw a clutch of buildings crouched in fields, smoke rising in peaceable threads. Brackenford had the humility of places that do not lie about their size. The people there were kind in the way of folk who have learned kindness the expensive way. From their mouths came bearings and names: a road called the Long Road not far off; Triboar two days north; the river east, if one wished speed with less suffering of feet.

Bramber’s shoulders lifted when they entered the open. He was never made for the sky. He clicked his tongue at his lizards, patted the roundness of his new fortune, and thanked them with a sly, genuine smile. He had what he came for; they had what they needed. He turned his cart toward the mountains—toward the comfort of ceilings and the known dangers of the deep—and vanished into the seam between hill and horizon.

They went east. The river took their weight and made them light again. Water knows the world’s map better than any road; it drew them through yellow grass and stands of alder, past oxbows wheeling under hawks, past the last whispers of the Underdark that clung in their ears and were rinsed clean by current and time. Tempest skipped stones as if hurling small moons; Thorn watched eddies with the same attention he gave to spells; Maledurk trailed a hand and felt the ache in his jaw fade until it became merely a memory of victory. Elora leaned back against the boat’s worn plank and tried to pin down the shape of what had happened to them below. The mind, like a river, is fond of forgetting the precise banks that held it.

At length the water widened and slowed, telling its own rumor of the sea. They left it before salt, for they knew the lay of these lands by smell and tree and cloud. The road remembered them, then the walls, then the gates. Waterdeep unfolded like an old song, every note in its place and every word weighted with the history of mouths that sang it before. They crossed into the city with travel still in their blood and the roughness of the river still on their skin.

Trollskull Alley received them the way old friends do: without ceremony and with relief. Warm brick, familiar lintels, the double door they had kicked in once upon a time and repaired with care, the bakery’s hearth humming out a welcome sweet enough to hurt. Somewhere, a floorboard sighed where a friendly shade paced its rounds. They set packs down and let the weight of below fall from their shoulders. No dragon thundered overhead. No worm shifted the earth underfoot. Only city heartbeats—boots, wheels, the debate of gulls.

And yet. The quiet carried a question none of them could put down. The tunnels had twisted too cleverly; the time had bent; they had entered one story and left in another. The Underdark had changed them in the ordinary, homely ways—scars, habits, knowing when to be silent—and in a way that felt like waking from a dream that leaves fingerprints. Elora stood at a window and watched the last light strike rooftops in ranks. Thorn catalogued starlight again, this time framed by chimney smoke. Tempest held her hands up to the bakery’s oven, turning them in heat that did not bite back. Maledurk leaned against a beam and closed his eyes, listening for rumbles that never came.

Tomorrow would be for asking the city what it knew: who had moved the pieces, why the board had shifted, whether the hole Thorn had burned in a monster was kin to the hole that had opened in their days. Tomorrow might be for running, racing, laughter, for setting their feet to a lighter path. But tonight, above ground and under sky, they let themselves be home—and beneath the comfort they nursed the ember of a promise: to follow the thread of their lost time until they found the hand that tugged it.