📜 Session Overview

The morning began where so many difficult ones do — with a question nobody was quite ready to answer. Whether they were truly prepared to challenge the tower of Sir Magnus Opus U'rilius Corbus hung over the group like smoke that wouldn't clear. This was not some ancient ruin waiting to be looted. The things they already knew made it something worse: dangerous, unnatural, and fundamentally wrong in ways that defied easy explanation. That question was tabled, not answered, as Aedric Vale and Agelaius Phoeniceus realmstrided to meet Vyr at the Manticore and returned with news — a new companion would be joining them. They had to be ready to meet them first.

So the party trained.

What followed was hours of hard, deliberate preparation, with dragon bonds and leyline energy woven into every exchange. Sinora used her shield on Warwick as Broj pushed the drill — and the shield struck back, leaving its mark. She refined the technique on the next pass, adding spikes while Aedric empowered her charge, and the lesson was carved directly into the exercise through pain and consequence. Aedric and Sinora traded blows and exchanged abilities until equipment was damaged and the edge of the party had been sharpened considerably. By the time they were done, they were more capable than they had been that morning, and the cost of that was written across their gear and their bodies both.

Then they returned to the Manticore and met Zar'Keth.

The first moments were tense in the particular way that happens when histories precede people into a room. Kin and Cord standing in the same space, both sides feeling out whether peace was real or simply the pause before the next conflict. But that tension eased. Enough was said, enough was left unsaid, and the ground between them held. Zar'Keth offered a glimpse of his power — a brief window into what he was capable of — and later, quietly, repaired Warwick's shield. It was not a grand gesture. It was better than that. It was the kind of small, considered act that does more to build trust than any declaration.

After equipment repairs and a quick trip to Myriam's for a replacement shield following the damage done in training, the party realmstrided back to Nymis Grove and boarded Loid. From there, the great creature moved with purpose — not traveling so much as collapsing the distance between them and the tower of Sir Corbus, arriving near it with the sudden surety of something that did not need to ask permission of geography.

The approach was uneasy from the first moment. Broj and his bonded dragon had been in conflict for the entire journey, a tension that simmered in every exchange, every silence, every choice Broj made. The dragon loomed over him in judgment when he broke through the canopy below and hit the ground — and Broj stood, said nothing, and began walking toward the tower as if the weight of it didn't exist. His eyes burned gold. Whatever was moving in him, it wasn't peace.

The party paused near the tower to rest and recover their strength. Warwick sent out an arcane eye to scout what lay ahead — and felt it smothered almost immediately, not weakened or deflected but utterly extinguished by an antimagic field radiating from the tower itself. Even so, what he had glimpsed before the eye went dark was enough to change the air among them. The tower was not a tower. It moved on spider-like legs, bristled with teeth, and carried itself with the particular wrongness of something that had borrowed the shape of a building to hide what it actually was — something alive, something ancient, and something that could think.

The party was still working out what that meant when Broj ran.

No signal, no coordination, no warning. He simply moved toward the tower, and the others took flight to follow. There was no clear plan beneath them as they closed the distance — only the motion of people reacting to one of their own charging at a living nightmare.

Then the tower disappeared.

Not destroyed, not dispelled, not retreating the way a frightened creature might scramble backward. It moved the way a Realmstrider moves — deliberate, purposeful, folding itself out of their world with the unhurried confidence of something that had already decided it was done with them for now. Before it vanished, a great eye within the tower turned upon the approaching group. It watched them. It studied them. And then it left, as though it had seen what it came to see.

The party turned back toward Loid, carrying with them something harder than failure. Zar'Keth gave it a name: Corbus was hunting Kin. The tower hadn't simply been found in the forest. It had been there because it was looking for something specific, and specific meant them. The horror they had approached was not indifferent, was not territorial, was not a creature defending its territory. It was a predator with a list, and they were on it.

That revelation had barely settled when the tension between Broj and his dragon finally became impossible to carry in silence. Their conflict had built across the entire session — in the training, in the approach, in the dash toward the tower — and now it broke open with a force nothing could hold back. Aedric forced the matter into a Zone of Truth, and in that space Broj spoke with the raw, unfiltered honesty the spell demands. His frustrations came out alongside his insults, tangled together in the way that pain often is when it has been held too long. This was not only about the dragon. It was about a bond under strain, about what it means when rider and dragon pull in opposite directions when the world is asking them to stand together.

Broj walked away afterward, trying to sort through what he called the battlefield — the landscape of his own mind where none of the rules of combat applied and none of his considerable strength meant anything. What it cost him was immediate and visible. He weakened. He struggled to stay on his feet. And his dragon stood over him in the dark, looming the way a judgment looms, their conflict still unresolved and the space between them still unclosed.

Around him, the others settled into quieter things. Hunting. Individual work. Rest. The kind of quiet that descends when a group knows they have done everything they can do tonight, and that tomorrow will require something more than what today asked of them.

It closed on unease rather than victory. A new ally brought into the fold and beginning to belong. Corbus revealed as something deliberately predatory. The understanding that Kin were being hunted settling over everyone who had any Kin among them. And Broj, the one who had never once backed down from anything the physical world had thrown at him, laid low by the battle he couldn't fight with his hands — the one happening in the space between him and his dragon, in the place where a bond either holds or it doesn't.

⚔️ Key Moments

✨ Character Moments

🖼️ Session Images

📝 DM Notes

Zar'Keth's introduction session landed well — the Kin/Cord peace held, the shield repair was a clean character beat, and his identification of Corbus as a Kin-hunter gives him immediate narrative weight. The tower realmstriding is a strong move: it turns a potential combat session into a revelation session, and the party now knows they are being hunted rather than simply approaching danger. That shifts the entire threat landscape. Broj's dragon conflict is the most emotionally live thread in the campaign right now — the Zone of Truth opened it fully and left it unresolved, which is exactly where it should be. Letting it breathe across the next session or two before forcing a resolution will serve it better than a quick fix. The antimagic field around the tower was a clean limitation to introduce: it raises the stakes of proximity without requiring a fight to communicate the danger. Corbus seeing the party before vanishing establishes mutual awareness — they know what it is, and it knows they're coming. The hunting of Kin is the thread that now ties Zar'Keth directly into the central threat, which is exactly the integration an introduction session needs to accomplish.

🎭 Looking Ahead