The basement of Destiny’s Herbarium and Beauty Product Emporium had become a living throat, and the party hung trapped halfway down it, the sacred flower still in Barnaby’s keeping.
The chamber reeked of bruised greenery, scorched alchemical oil, and the sour breath of things that had once been men. Golden armor gleamed dully in the underground light. The guards had cast their helmets aside, and the faces beneath opened like rotten blossoms, mouths too wet and too hungry, teeth that looked cultivated rather than grown. Destiny stood among them as though the cellar were her court.
She had wanted the flower back, and she had said so plainly. But whatever velvet had once dressed her threats was burned off now. She looked at Barnaby with murder in her eyes and at the rest of them the way one looks at perfume spilled across an expensive dress.
“At last, my children,” she whispered. “It is time for you to feed.”
The plants answered. Vines dropped from the ceiling, roots split the floor, and leaves curled like fingers around ankles and wrists and armor straps. Waer’dara vanished into a snarl of dark green. Bartholemeow hissed as creepers wound about his small body. Bhakris strained against roots that cinched him fast. Even Barnaby felt the room seize him — the basement seemed to know the flower he carried and tightened around it in outrage.
Thalmiir tore loose on instinct and temper, ripping through the vines as if they had merely insulted him. Hat thrashed for a heartbeat and wriggled free with a goblin’s frantic cleverness. Waer’dara fought more coldly, muscles bunching beneath the coils until she wrenched herself out, breath sharp, eyes hunting the threats around her.
There was nowhere safe to land. The guards lurched in with their plant-mouths gaping. One snapped at Barnaby and missed by inches as the loxodon shifted in the vines. Another scraped its jaws across a raised shield, venom stringing from its teeth.
Hat answered with fire. His tiny cannon clattered into place, absurdly small against the horror of the room and entirely at home in his hands. Flame belched out in a cone, washing over one of the plant-faced guards and licking across Destiny herself. The guard burned like wet compost, sputtering and shrieking. Destiny recoiled — not only from the pain but from the insult, a hand flying to her singed hair as if that were the deeper wound.
Bartholemeow was still tangled, but he had never needed claws to draw blood. His voice dropped to a whisper sharp enough to slip between ribs, soft and intimate and dreadful, threading through the smoke to find some tender place beneath her vanity. Then the magic deepened into a dissonant pressure that clawed at her mind, and Destiny’s composure cracked. For one heartbeat she was no queen of the cellar at all, only afraid. She fled into the blackened hall beyond the chamber, her elegance gone to haste. Bartholemeow’s tail lashed once, satisfied.
Then Bhakris betrayed them. The compulsion Destiny had laid on him found its moment. Bound in vines, unable to step forward with blade and boot the way he wanted, he turned instead to the power that lived in his oath, and his voice rang heavy through the basement.
“Let your hands tremble and your hearts break. Bane be upon you.”
The curse settled over his companions like cold ash. Thalmiir felt it sink into his bones; Waer’dara stiffened under its weight; Bartholemeow shook it off with an offended flick of his ears. But the betrayal was done, and there had been nothing half-hearted about it. In its own wretched way it was honest.
Thalmiir stared, rage and disbelief warring on his weathered face. “You’re no rock,” he growled.
Waer’dara’s verdict was quieter and worse. “You’re gravel.”
Destiny came back from the hall like a blade drawn from its sheath, and her eyes found Thalmiir. Whatever fear Bartholemeow had carved into her had hardened into something colder. “You would be sad,” she told the dwarf, “if you weren’t so funny.”
Her magic struck, and laughter took Thalmiir by the throat. It wasn’t mirth. It was a cruel seizure of the soul, dragging something absurd and horrible out of his own mind and forcing his body to honor it. He collapsed, shaking and helpless, his laughter ringing strangely off the cellar walls. Somewhere inside it he could still see what he’d meant to do — charge the room, drag a guard off Barnaby, smash the thing down — and instead he lay choking on the joke of all that violence denied.
The guards pressed in. One sank its teeth into Barnaby, venom sizzling across his hide, but the loxodon only grimaced and held. Another tore into Bartholemeow, who stiffened for one terrible instant, then forced the poison back and spat defiance through clenched teeth.
Barnaby, pinned and battered with the flower still in his care, made his choice. The air bent around him. In a blur of arcane displacement he and Bhakris traded places — one moment Barnaby was caught amid snapping jaws, the next he stood free of the vines and Bhakris stood where he had been. It was an elegant thing, and a desperate one. Barnaby turned at once toward Destiny, trunk lifting, power gathering, and lightning leapt from him.
Destiny smiled. Her magic twisted the bolt aside, and it slammed into one of her own guards instead. For a heartbeat the thing’s bones shone white-hot beneath its armor before it collapsed into smoking ruin, the stench of cooked rot folding into the room’s choking bouquet.
As if it resented losing one of its children, the basement clenched again. The vines on Bartholemeow squeezed until the breath ground out of him, then let go — bored, or satisfied. He staggered free, fur bristling.
Then Waer’dara made the room her own kind of nightmare. Webbing exploded across the chamber, luminous strands anchoring wall to ceiling, sealing Destiny and her last servant inside a glistening cage. Garden and spider-lair met in a grotesque marriage. Destiny slipped through the strands with unnatural grace and so did the guard, but the web had already changed the shape of the fight: it promised fire, and confinement, and the chance to make even a queen look foolish in her own domain.
She wasn’t finished. Her body shifted — limbs lengthening, multiplying, hardening — until a giant spider clung to the wall above the fray, black and many-eyed, its gaze fixed down on Destiny. The cellar stopped feeling like Destiny’s garden and started feeling like Waer’dara’s hunting ground.
Thalmiir, still recovering from the laughter that had floored him, looked up at the looming thing and found, somehow, approval in the horror.
Hat swung the little cannon around and let more flame roar. This time it washed over Destiny, her guard, and the waiting webs all at once. The strands caught and curled inward in bright lines. Destiny’s concentration shattered under the heat, Thalmiir’s laughter cut off and left him gasping and furious on the floor, and the guard withered in the blast — as disappointing in death as it had been in life.
Emboldened, Hat snatched a heavy seed pod from the surrounding plants and hurled it at Destiny with catapult force. She moved like a dancer. The pod shot past her; the plant-guard folded away from it in a boneless, unsettling dodge; Bartholemeow dropped to all fours as it whipped overhead; it missed Waer’dara on the wall and missed Hat himself by a margin narrow enough to flash a few possible futures across his eyes before it burst wetly against the stone behind him.
Hat glared through the smoke and sparks. “No fair,” he snapped. “I thought you loved plants!”
Destiny turned her head slowly and gave him a look so withering it carried its own weight. Hat, still wearing his stolen little likeness of her, felt very small. The contempt landed harder than any claw, and fear curled around him and pinned him where he stood, even as his hands kept twitching toward violence.
Bartholemeow saw his opening. If she wanted laughter, he would give her laughter. His voice slid through the ruined cellar again, elegant and merciless; a few murmured words stripped her poise, and then the spell bloomed. Her eyes went wide, her mouth opened, and the laughter took her the way it had taken Thalmiir. She fell among the burning remnants of the web, glowing strands curling around her while she shook with helpless, humiliating mirth.
Bhakris advanced. The betrayal had passed; his own will had come back, and with it the need to answer for what he’d done. Destiny lay before him, still beautiful, still dangerous, but no longer untouchable. He brought his longsword down with the weight of oath and shame behind it. Steel bit, radiance followed, and the smite struck her like judgment from a god more interested in finality than mercy.
Destiny stopped laughing. Fire licked at her. Blood and sap-dark ichor marked the wounds. Her eyes fixed on Bhakris, and her expression changed — no longer merely angry, but interested now in a different kind of damage. So she reached into them, past the vines and teeth, and took hold of memory instead.
What opened before Bhakris wasn’t death or pain or the plant-things gnashing at the edges of the room. It was rejection: the order he longed to belong to turning away from him, the one fellowship he wanted most closing its ranks and leaving him outside their light. It cut clean because it was already shaped like a wound he carried.
Thalmiir saw his family — siblings, children, grandchildren — destitute and desperate, every thread of their suffering leading back to him. They turned their backs. Some flung rotten vegetables over their shoulders with an aim so fine that one absurd corner of him almost felt proud. Mostly it just hurt.
Barnaby saw loneliness. The others turned from him, not in anger but in indifference, which was worse — no welcome, no place, the company he’d barely begun to belong to dissolving as if he’d never mattered.
Bartholemeow saw his life’s performance collapse into silence. Not boos, not mockery; those would at least be attention. He saw himself ignored, his wit and his talents and the long, loving work of his fascinating self all revealed as something nobody cared to notice.
Even Waer’dara, towering in spider form, was caught in the wave. Whatever she saw drove that monstrous body backward with the others, claws skittering on stone. The party broke.
The last guard, sensing its mistress’s command or its own panic, tried to run. Bartholemeow struck and missed. Thalmiir, terrified as he was, still had an axe in his hands and a lifetime of violence in his bones; the guard bolted past him and his blade caught it from behind, and its flight ended in a wet, final crash.
Destiny’s fury filled the basement. “I cannot believe,” she snarled, “that you pack of imbeciles and incompetents dispatched all of my guards.”
But the fear had done its work. Thalmiir stumbled toward the elevator, muttering that they had to save themselves. Waer’dara skittered after him, a grotesque and frantic companion in spider form. Bartholemeow fled too, squeezing into the already crowded lift beside the enormous spider and the panicked dwarf — which, for a cat, may have been a terror all its own. Thalmiir jabbed at the controls, the doors closed, and the elevator began to rise, carrying half the company away in a slow, mortifying retreat set to imagined elevator music and very real panic.
Bhakris ran the other way, plunging through the dark hall beyond Destiny, after distance rather than victory. A door slammed shut behind him with the finality of a trap. Whatever relief came of putting a wall between himself and Destiny was thin; he was alone on the far side of it, and still afraid.
Barnaby stayed closest to the heart of it, and the hallway guardian woke. The dark passage, calm a moment before, erupted into violent life. Pseudopods lashed from the walls and tendrils hammered him from every side. He braced as best he could while the room beat at him like a storm trapped indoors, pain bursting across his broad frame. Still he held the flower.
Destiny stood at the mouth of the hall — wounded, burned, stripped of her guards, and terrible all the same. Her voice softened into negotiation, though there was no kindness in it, only arithmetic.
“You rightly cower before me,” she said. “This empire is only the beginning. And despite outward appearances, you seem a more capable lot than I imagined. So I’m willing to offer an arrangement.” Her eyes settled on Barnaby and the bloom in his hands. “Return the flower to me and we’ll find some accommodation we can both live with. We might have to let the dwarf go, but the rest of you — I can see a place for you in my organization. Give me the flower, and I’ll call off the hallway guardian.”
Barnaby stood in the dark, bruised, the guardian still seething around him. Behind him, Bhakris had vanished past a sealed door. Above, the elevator hauled Thalmiir, Waer’dara, and Bartholemeow away from the fight. Hat was frightened but defiant beside him, cannon ready, fire still possible. The flower was in Barnaby’s hands, and Destiny blocked the way. For a moment the offer hung between them like perfume over poison.
Then Barnaby charged. He shoved himself out of the darkness far enough to see her, trunk lifting, spell gathering, the air thick with the promise of lightning. He aimed not at the bargain, not at the fear or the loneliness she had conjured in him, but at Destiny herself. Power snapped out of him — and missed, tearing past her to light the smoke for one bright, useless instant.
Barnaby stood with his trunk still raised, the sacred flower still his, and Destiny still alive in front of him. The basement held its breath.
The session opened with the party already in combat in the basement of Destiny’s Herbarium and Beauty Product Emporium. The party’s current task was tied to Barnaby the Prodigious, Emeritus, who had been sent by a community of sprites to recover their sacred and important flower. The party had successfully reached Destiny’s basement and obtained the flower. Barnaby was currently holding the flower. Hostilities had already broken out after the party had attempted clever stealth and deception. The fight began at the top of a round. The battlefield situation at the start of the session was: At the start of the round, Destiny used a lair action. Destiny addressed the room and called to her “children,” telling them it was time to feed. The plants throughout the basement responded: Thalmiir Brukur, while raging, resisted the grasping vines. Hat struggled against the vines but managed to free himself. Waer’dara Dryaalo’ara was caught and restrained by the plants. Bartholomeow was caught and restrained by the plants. Bhakris Edge was caught and restrained by the plants. Barnaby was also treated as restrained during the following actions. On Waer’dara’s turn, she used her action to break free of the plants. A guard acted next. Hat took his turn. A burned guard acted after Hat. Bartholomeow remained restrained by the vines. Bhakris, still under the magical compulsion to betray the party, remained restrained by the vines. Destiny returned from the blackened hallway. Another guard attacked Bartholomeow. Thalmiir’s turn came while he was affected by Tasha’s Hideous Laughter. Barnaby took his turn while restrained and with two enemies threatening him. At the top of the next round, Destiny’s lair action triggered again. Waer’dara took her turn. A guard acted next. Hat acted again. Bartholomeow took his turn. Bhakris attacked Destiny. Destiny started her turn in the burning web. Destiny then used a fear effect. After using the fear effect, Destiny moved south of Bhakris. A remaining guard attempted to flee. Destiny reacted angrily to the death of her guards. Thalmiir’s turn came after he had been restored to the initiative order. Barnaby took his turn while frightened and holding the flower. Waer’dara, still in giant spider form and affected by the fear, also fled. Hat was frightened by Destiny’s side-eye, not by the same fear spell. Bartholomeow took his turn while frightened. Bhakris took his turn while frightened. Destiny took her turn after the party began scattering. Barnaby, still inside the dark hallway, heard what happened. Destiny then monologued. Thalmiir, still panicking in the elevator, continued trying to activate it. Barnaby then faced Destiny’s offer. The session ended mid-combat.Session Notes