Session 06 — Agatha the Banshee
Date played: TBD Location: Agatha’s Lair, Neverwinter Wood
The trail to Agatha’s lair grew sicker the closer they got — plants wilting, the air going cold and wrong. Traps lined the approach: two wands wedged into trees and aimed at the path, a pressure plate that triggered a blast of wind and fire from a hidden sconce. The party took the wands rather than leave them. Will-o’-wisps drifted nearby. The trail finally ended in a wall of dead bramble, with a hole at the bottom just wide enough to crawl through.
Inside, under a dome of woven branches lit by two braziers of spectral blue flame, Agatha appeared — a banshee, once an elf, her expression somewhere between bored and furious depending on the moment. She had been undead for over a thousand years and had grown tired of most things, including being annoyed.
She was disturbed by something nearby: a necromancer at Old Owl Well raising zombies, the psychic noise of it reaching her “like a small psychic pin” every time it happened. She asked the party to make him stop.
When Clever gave her the silver comb, she warmed slightly and offered one free question — answers after that would cost life force. Clever asked about her favorite possession and got nothing useful back. Dash traded HP for a book that turned out to be a YA novel. Silenus and Matuk together traded HP for a spellbook called The Cost of Fire, containing Firebolt, Fireball, and Wall of Fire.
Asked about Bowgentle’s spellbook, Agatha said she’d traded it away to a necromancer named Tsernoth, from a city called Iriaebor, over a century ago. She didn’t know what became of it after that.
She told them more, unprompted: she’d once owned a magical mask that changed a person’s appearance, stolen long ago, after which she fortified her lair’s defenses. She’d loved the people of Conyberry, helped them through hard winters, and still grieved that she hadn’t been able to save them when the village burned. And she told them how she’d become what she was — deceived by a maid into reading a corrupted book that promised eternal beauty and gave her this instead. The book is still in Cragmaw Castle, protected by old enchantments that keep the undead out. She asked the party to retrieve it. If the curse breaks, she dies — but she’d rather have that than another thousand years like this.
When they handed over Rithlin’s sealed box, something shifted in her. She recognized the seal immediately. “He’s still around, huh,” she said. “He never stops.” She wouldn’t explain further, but asked the party to deliver the box onward to a mage named Valskar, in Kyneswood, south of Waterdeep.
The party said their goodbyes and turned back toward Conyberry to make camp for the night.