PS Hey guys, who has our flower in a stone box?

Ona, being extremely upset by the conduct of her associates, left in search of advice from persons whom she hoped she could trust. First she journeyed to visit her dear friend, Rena – Queen of the Lynaris Islands. Though Rena offered Ona a place in her court, she was unable to offer Ona any advice about how to proceed in her battle against the coming Darkness. Therefore, Ona left for Forest Isle, and told Rena that if either Duo or Arlain inquired after her, that the Queen was free to share whatever information that she felt was appropriate and helpful, including her destination. Upon arriving in Forest Isle, Ona met with Merrick and the Council of Druidic Elders. She discussed the unfortunate turn of events with Duo and Arlain and asked for advice on how to proceed. It was decided that her best course of action was to head to Avren. Ona spent time talking with a fellow druid who had journeyed there recently and with Arlain’s mother, who inquired after her son. Ona decided that for the protection of both herself and Annie, it was best if Annie remained in Forest Isle in the care of the other druids. With great sadness, Ona left her last true friend behind and journeyed on to Avren.

The party spent the whole session in different groups. Since there wasn’t a single experience shared by all members, only the events which the players decide to post will be recorded.

Inside the casino, the group checks out a few of the games and plays for a bit, then they get a feel for the layout of the place. While looking it over, a woman comes by and hands everyone drinks and slips Arlain a note. The note, from his sister Fael’eli, warns them that a very dangerous woman was hired as a new casino guard. Duo gathers across from stairs that lead down into an “employees only” area being guarded by a pair of men, one of whom is the man that Ona had previously interrogated in the city, and throws a homemade bomb at the guards. Unfortunately, the shrapnel from the explosion carries farther than he had expected, causing the party to get caught in the edge of the area of the bomb and killing several people who just happened to be around the area. During the ensuing panic, some of the guards from below rush up the stairs and Arlain, Himura, and Duo take advantage of the situation to run down them. Ona spends a few minutes helping as many of the people who were caught in the explosion as she can before she follows her allies down. After going through a meeting room, they find the vault guards waiting for them. The room that serves as a last line of defense to the casino’s vault has a pit in the center housing a stone bull, as well as an elevated platform that wraps around the room to give good positions for ranged fighters. Duo begins the fight by throwing his other homemade bomb into the room taking out several of the ranged fighters on the balcony. However, the female brawler pushes him into the pit with the stone bull and the creature turns Duo into a statue. One of the ranged fighters on the balcony throws alchemist fire at Himura, and the fire causes every bead on his necklace of fireballs to go off simultaneously. While this burns the fur off of Annie and gives Himura quite a scorch as well, everyone else managed to avoid the blast. Ona summons an earth elemental to help Himura take on the brawler while Arlain flies around the room dispatching most of the ranged fighters. Eventually, all of their opponents fall and they fish Duo out of the pit.

The party gets the key to the vault and continue on, where they find a huge pile of coins. They each load up with as much gold as they can carry, and Arlain finds a hidden door with a face on it. The door, which turns out to be animate, holds a conversation with Arlain for some time while he tries to figure out how to get past it. He tries speaking the password that was mentioned on the note they found in Fael’s room, but nothing happens. As the conversation is drawing to a close, the door itself says the word and opens up. Inside the hidden chamber, they find a dead body with a message carved into it: “We aren’t blades to hire. This one is your warning. I will come for you soon. If you resist, your family will die with you.” They ask the door about the body, but the most they can work out is that the body was placed in the room about 3 days ago even though no one has entered or exited the room in 4 days. On the table near the body, they also find some letters that seem to indicate that Fallion is trying to arrange an alliance with a tribal leader in Torgikan, arrange the fall of someone named Ariakas, and was using a contact in an attempt to hire Umbra. Arlain also finds a few books lying in the floor of the room, one of which he finds interesting and takes with him.

During Ona and Arlain’s exploration of the room, Himura, who had been watching over his stone brother, rushes in to report that the female brawler they had killed before entering the vault had somehow snuck out of the area. Ona, taking advantage of the fact that she was seen helping victims of the explosion, leaves the casino to purchase an ointment to turn Duo back to flesh and returns to the group. However, when Duo is returned to flesh, his body is unable to handle the transformation and he dies. Arlain casts invisibility on himself to aid in sneaking out of the casino while Himura takes the classical approach to stealth. Ona walks out of the area with Duo’s body, using her position as a healer to avert suspicion of her actions. They get Duo to a temple of Astriana where he is revived. Duo and Arlain argue over the ethics of his actions back in the casino, during which Arlain references the by-standards in the casino as being more innocent than Ona given their past adventures and thus deserving no harsher punishment for their presence than Ona should receive, but the two can not come to an agreement. Arlain, Ona, and Duo each split up going their own ways, with Himura following his brother.

The party lets the pair of cloaked figures walk away together as Duo rejoins the group to tell them that he recognizes the voices of the two- he thinks they are the woman who had the bear and Fael’eli. He convinces the group to head back to the inn where Arlain and Ona had left Fael so that he can try to catch her missing to support his claim. When the group heads back there, they head up the stairs just in time to see a man straightening from a bent-over position in front of her door and head out of the inn. The group knocks on the door to Fael’s room. At first, Arlain discredit’s Duo when his sister calls out to leave her alone from the other side of the room, but as they go back and forth over it in front of the door she occasionally interrupts them with things that seem to be replies to a completely different conversation. Duo pops open the lock to her room and they open the door to find no one inside, and they find two notes lying in the floor by the door: a poorly written love poem begging Fael to give some man another chance with her and a paper that only has the words “He doesn’t trust keys anymore. The password is ‘fickle’”. Ona takes the papers and chases after the man who they saw at the door earlier while Arlain and Duo continue to debate over the significance of the empty room and what to do next. While they are talking, they hear the woman’s voice comes from the empty bed one last time while they stand at the open door. Duo, Himura, and Arlain then decide to catch up with Ona who has Annie tackle the guy they saw by Fael’s room. While Annie has the man pinned down, a guard comes by and starts to draw his sword to help the man, but strangely looks over the rest of the party and decides to quietly walk by like nothing is happening. Ona interrogates the man and comes to the conclusion that he left the mysterious note about the password, but the man seems to be too afraid of something else to betray who he is working for or why he left the note.

The group lets the man go and heads back to Fael’s room where they start looking over the place for clues as to what is going on. In their search, Arlain discovers that the ring that Fael was wearing in the bar has some sort of enchantment on it to slightly influence the way blood moves, and in the top drawer of her dresser there is a weird glyph. In the center of the glyph is a folded piece of paper under a small vial of blood. He determines that there are several spells around the glyph and the blood, most of which seem to be traps for anyone who messes with the setup, and while the group is trying to figure out the significance of it all, Himura, who was keeping watch outside, gives a signal that Fael is coming back to her room. Duo and Ona make their escape from the room, however Arlain opens the door to greet his sister who has a dagger at his throat before she realizes who it is. Arlain demands some answers from her about what she is doing, but Fael refuses to give him the upper-hand. Instead, she turns on him, yelling at him for breaking into her room and disrespecting her belongings. However, her tone quickly changes when she looks over at the strange glyph with the blood in the center. After confirming when he opened the drawer and discovered it, she ran forward and embraced him barely holding back tears. She let him go with a smile and told him that they would have to talk later- it was getting too late and everyone needed rest.

After staying up nearly all night, the party slept until midday. When they woke up, Arlain, Ona, and Himura find that Duo had left his rooms prior to them waking and had wondered off on his own. On their way out, Ona is stopped by the innkeeper who tells her that her package arrived. He hands her a small parcel, and inside is a black dress and a note that reads “so you will have something more appropriate next time”. She takes the dress back to the dress shop where the tailor says a young human woman with slightly curly red hair had purchased the dress and told her to deliver it to the inn for Ona. Ona leaves the dress to get it altered to fit better as the group begins tracking Duo through town trying to figure out where he wondered off. They find that he had visited the blacksmith’s shop to gather metal shavings and an alchemist shop to buy alchemist fire and bags of combustible materials before heading down into the underground gambling den. The rest of the party finds their way into the den which, despite literally being underground, is a two story building brightly lit with a clean streaming of water running by the front. Inside they find Duo and start looking into this city under the city.

Since Xavorin senses something weird in the air, Arlain decides to leave him outside the city while the rest of the group headed into Dralengard. When they enter, a messenger from the Wayfarer’s Guild comes by with letters for the party, and no guard questions their entrance despite Neal’s Proclamation. The group then heads off to look over the Drallos’ mansion when Ona notices a strange cloud in the sky that isn’t moving as it should if it were a natural cloud. Ona and Arlain decide to spend a few hours staring into the sky to watch how the strange cloud is moving, but Duo and Himura get bored and decide to wait for them in a nearby bar. When Arlain and Ona enter the bar to join their friends, a man near the door pulls Ona aside to give her a message. At the same time, the woman who was sitting by Duo at the bar gets up and slaps Arlain. The woman turns out to be Fael’eli, Arlain’s elven half-sister, who was a little upset that she had not heard of Arlain joining the Wayvern Knights until Neal sends out word marking him as a traitor. Ona heads over to meet Fael, and while they are talking, a cloaked woman with a grizzly bear walks into the bar and is also taken aside by the man who talked with Ona. After hearing his message, the woman walked back out and Duo followed her out to try to figure out what is going on. While Duo is out, Himura stays behind to keep an eye on the guy who was giving the messages, and Ona and Arlain head back to Fael’s inn with her.

After their separated adventures, the party regroups to talk about what they have discovered. Duo intimidates the man that gave Ona the message at the bar, but he seems to have little useful information. Duo lets the man go and reports to the rest of the party that in the time that it took him to teleport in front of the woman with the bear, the bear had somehow disappeared. The woman was the woman that Ona noticed talking with Neal during the execution for treason. He tried to get information out of him, but she ran from him threatening to tell the guards he was harassing her when he wouldn’t let her pass by quietly. Ona and Arlain report they tried to get information about Fallion from Fael, but she was too drunk to be of much help so they left her to sleep. However, Ona also relates that the message that she received from the man in the bar was about a meeting at a nearby dress shop. The group scouts out locations around the dress shop where they can watch over the area while Ona waits in the designated area for the meeting. When the time approaches, two figures cloaked in black robes silently approach the meeting location from opposite ends of the street. They ignore all hails from Ona and her casting faerie fire on one of them. As they continue on with an unaltered pace, Duo gets nervous about Ona’s safety and teleports behind the lit figure, but before he can do anything she quickly gives some obscure directions and the two cloaked figures teleport away. The two party manages to find the cloaked figures again walking down a different street. Duo teleports behind the lit figure again, but the person anticipated his move and had a dagger in him as soon as he got there. Duo let retaliated with a lightning swift swing of his katana, but the figure was even faster and disarmed the samurai. The other figure came up and whispered in the first one’s ear and the two let Duo go and continued on their quiet walk.

After finally getting some rest, Arlain introduces the rest of the party to the wyvern knight who helped them fight off skeletons the previous night, Norton Bormire. However, this is a problem with Bormire- he has been branded a traitor of the Wyvern Knights for an attempt at overthrowing Fallion Drallos and his hold of the fertile lands in Myrddral. After talking with him for some time, Norton convinces Arlain that his cause was noble, and Arlain tells the party that he plans to help the knight clear his name. Even though Arlain can’t tell his companions what convinced him for fear of revealing the secrets of his order, the group decides to help their companion and travel to Dralengard. Before their journey, they drill Norton for everything they can learn about the city and the noble who controls it. He tells them that he knows Drallos has connections with a local thieves guild and suspects connections with a local assassin guild as well. Moreover, he seems to have a hand in an elaborate underground gambling ring in the city, and Norton’s wyvern was uncomfortable around the skies of the city requiring him to leave the mount far outside when he ventured in. During their journey to the city, Ona managed to dispel the traps on the chest from the drow city. Inside, they find several letters about the affairs of the city and the movements of the houses, but only two of the letters mean anything to the group. The first is a letter detailing the matron mother’s concern that Gasayne is starting to entertain blasphemous ideas, and the other a letter that mentions a prophecy of the Oracle that says that after the fall of House De’Urden the tree-born will reunite the drow. At the bottom of the latter, there are furious scribbles about how House De’Urden will not fall. She states that they were able to convince House Nailo to send someone out to observe the strange tree being grown by the cultists and stop the prophecy from being fulfilled.

After leaving the chambers of the former house mage, the party moves on to what they discover is the bedroom of the matriarch of the drow house. Inside the room, they encounter a guard that remains from many years ago to kill intruders- the undead husk of a deadly spider. The group dispatches of the creature and immediately begin gathering any valuables that remain in the room. In two different places, they find the flora growth from Lahonna’s visit has begin tearing away at false walls to reveal hidden passages. After finishing the job that the plants have started, the group discovers a secret exit from the house that leads to an underground river with a swift current and a blue flower with needles of red coloring in the petals sitting beside a folded letter. Reading the letter, they discover that Lahonna has left them a parting gift to help them escape from the house without going back out into the city where nearly the entire population of drow are waiting for them. Thankful for the backdoor, the party jump down the shaft and ride the river out of the city.

The river pulls them through tunnels for quite some time before they find vines growing seemingly from nowhere and grab on to them to climb out. Once out of the water, they find that they are in a different part of the cavern with white flowers on the wall that spell out a warning against a creature sleeping in the next room. As they quietly make their way out, they quickly recognize where they are from their previous exploration of the Red Hound Cavern nearly a year ago. Thanks to their strong memories, they are able to find their way back to the surface with little trouble. However, on the surface they get another reminder of their past adventures when they find that Chindri Potapov has made camp not far from the cavern entrance, and the gnome notices them leaving the cavern. To their surprise, he starts shouting at them about how "the treacherous bitch `Aetai " had betrayed him to the Reavers and has sent the group to finish him off. The party tries to tell him that they have no clue what he is talking about, but he is thoroughly convinced that they had already killed Stelig Dravid and Trikesi Chiron, and will not listen to a word they say. The gnome raises several troll skeletons from the ground around the cavern, although no bones were resting on the surface, and uses them to begin his assault against the party. The very act of being near the gnome seemed to drain away the life force of his opponents and funnel it back into him, while at the same time negative energy shot out from him to heal the damage done to his skeleton minions. After failing to non-lethally subdue the gnome, the party finally pushes him to death, but find that he has been converting himself into an undead creature the entire fight. Facing an opponent for whom death is only the mid-point of combat, the party finds themselves in for a long and grueling fight to try to give him true death while all along he continues to drain their life force from them and replenish his own. Eventually, they are able to overcome the gnome, and a wyvern knight who happened to fly by the area comes in to help them clean up the undead remaining from the fight.

Inside the drow house, Arlain steps forward to collect a lock of hair from the head of Lolth. Afterwards, the group examine the raised dais when they inadvertently set off jets of noxious gas that quickly fill the room. The party rushes out of the room, but not before the effects of the gas set in making it difficult for them to think properly. The group continued down the hallway and found a pair of stairways leading to the second floor. They take the stairways and attempted to continue through the house, but in doing so they accidentally triggered anti-intrusion measures and a very big earth elemental assaulted the party. The elemental’s powerful attacks killed Arlain and Duo before Ona was able to get the upper hand by summoning a fire elemental to help even the odds. With about half her companions dead, Ona decided to use the deity summoning beads to call Lahonna. The arrival of the goddess resulted in the smooth worked stone of the house to spring full of grasses and flowers. Ona and Himura paid respects to their goddess and she brought the entire party back to full strength, including Duo and Arlain. Lahonna talks briefly with the party before leaving them to go back to her duties.

Resuming their exploration of the drow house, the group next stumbles into the room of the head priestess of Lolth. Inside the room, they find the body of the priestess in front of a note from Gasayne De’urden made of bits and pieces of dead spider bodies, as well as the arachnid body of Lolth. On their way out of the room, the group inadvertently trigger another trap- this time the body of Lolth grows a spider head with poison dripping from the fangs and arms sharpening into blades. While caught off-guard, the body of the former spider queen is taken down without too much hassle. Continuing onwards through the house, Arlain and Duo enter the former room of the house mage and are immediately overcome with a vision. They relate to Ona and Himura what they just saw and look through the bedroom for anything that may be useful. Inside a chest, Arlain finds a note explaining the vision: the mage found a way to make the next person who entered the room after his death watch some of the memories of Gasayne in hopes that it would help them avenge the drow. While the group has already learned much in their trip through the house, they are still in need of an alternate route out so that they do not need to rely on the hospitality of drow to make it back to the surface alive.

The party finds the lifeboat that they left on the shore. They take the boat back to the merchant ship where they continue on to the city of Byrsa in Penatos . When they arrive, they find the city quite active with people gathering in the forum. As the group heads toward the meeting, they are drawn aside by Bleys who offers them cloaks. He says that after everything that happened after Dranimrev conquered Dramere, he no longer trusts public announcements. Duo stays behind to hear a message that Bleys carried from Seijuro Hiko while the others continue on to the public forum to find Neal and I’enas with the woman with whom they spoke near the end of their stay on the Lynnaris Islands. I’enas cast a powerful zone of truth spell to start a public interrogation of the woman during which it is revealed that she killed her superior officer in Cross believing that she was following Ona’s orders. Even more confusing, the woman on trial insists that while in Cross she sent a message to the party using a secret code that was taught to her back in Myrddral before she joined Neal’s army. The woman says that she recognized Ona as her contact from Myrddral, because when they last talked she was told that she would make herself known again by bringing a bear into a place where such animals are not allowed. The woman is then executed for her crimes, and Neal, after revealing that the Oracle had predicted his greatest ally would really be his greatest threat, makes a public declaration that Arlain, Duo, Himura, and Ona, people he formerly considered friends, are to be killed or turned in to him for their crimes.

The party heads out of the gathering doing their best not to attract attention to themselves and make their way to the Wayfarer’s Guild to get away from the city before Neal and I’enas notices them. After brief discussion, the group pays to be teleported to Lision’s March in Myrddral. The city seemed to be rebuilding ever since the party took care of their problem, and Arlain, Duo, and Ona have gained celebrity status within the city. However, they manage to get out of the city with only a few people noticing them and trying to get them to stay. They make their way back to the Red Hound Cavern where they find the strange tree had burst out of the cave and died during their adventures. They climb down the tree to where they met Aramil Nailo. There, they found that the tree trunk had spread open revealing a hollow and several people who were sent to investigate after them pinned dead against the wall by wooden growths. They continued down further along the path newly opened by the tree to find that it led to the Underdark.

Exploring the tunnels in the Underdark, the party stumbles across a temple that seems to have not seen much traffic in recent times. In the temple, they find many strange symbols scrawled over the walls, which they recognize to be symbols of various evil gods, demon princes, and devil lords, as well as a worn symbol of Lolth and a broken statue of the drow goddess. The group heads further into through the tunnels where they find a drow city, which they decide to explore. The people in the city are gathering around the town center where a drow woman wearing thin wooden clothing in place of normal cloth is addressing the city. After talking with the other drow, she turns to the party and accepts their “offer” to look into an abandoned house in the city. The group is escorted by the entire city, each drow with a loaded crossbow ready, to a large estate to which they all seem to fear to get too close. The leader of the drow tells the party that they are to go inside and find evidence of where one of the drow that used to live in that mansion has gone. When the party enters the house, they are greeted by a large room adorned with a painting of the drow family that used to live there- including the one who they have seen with the Reavers- and the dead bodies of many of the others in the painting. As a centerpiece to the room, they find the dead matron mother of the house along with the decapitated head of the goddess Lolth.