Session 08 — Sister Garaele and the Necromancer
Date played: Unknown — early campaign Location: Phandalin → Old Owl Well → Defiance Draw (ridge only)
The road to Old Owl Well had its own small chaos first. A grayish puddle turned out to be an ooze, and Matuk struck before anyone else had finished deciding whether to be cautious. Later, a bear crossed their path and lost a fight it should never have started; Matuk won it, and then felt bad enough about winning it that he forced a healing potion down the animal’s throat before it bolted back into the trees. Somewhere in between, he and Clever got into a rock fight over a berry bush that ended in more laughter than injury.
An anonymous complaint had pointed the party toward a necromancer disturbing the dead near the ruins. Old Owl Well itself sat in rugged country south of the Triboar Trail — the ruins of an old bridge once spanning two towers, a wide road running between them and down into a valley beyond. As they crested the ridge, a campsite came into view: a firepit, work tables, two tents, and a man stepping out of one of them holding a staff in one hand and a severed head by the hair in the other, entirely unbothered, as if this were simply how his morning went.
His name, they would learn, was Haman Kostyk. The moment they moved against him, he summoned three shambling dead and tried, with real desperation, to talk his way out of the fight he was already losing. “You’re not the same group,” he shouted, backing toward his tent. “Who hired you — the Council?” He offered to pay them more than whoever “they” were. No one answered him, because no one knew what he meant.
He never got the chance to find out if it would have worked. A shape appeared at his back — silent, fast, final — and killed him in a single motion before stealing his staff and vanishing the way it had come. The same figure had appeared once before, at a campfire ambush, and done exactly the same thing to exactly the same result. Nobody knows who they are.
What they found in the camp told its own quiet story. In his sleeping tent: a journal and a map, which Dash claimed, and a pearl worth more than it had any business being worth, which Clever did not mention finding until much later. In his workshop tent: a Potion of Healing, a Scroll of Darkness in a bone tube that Silenus took, and a small jeweled box holding a Ring of Protection that found its way into Clever’s pocket without much ceremony. And a book — an old one, on the history of the land called Defiance Draw. Dash read it aloud: a border station between two empires, a war, a miscast spell, an aquifer torn open beneath the earth, and a flood that swallowed an entire valley along with whatever had once been called Wave Echo Cave.
Kostyk’s journal told a more complicated story than his campsite suggested. He had started as a grieving younger brother, lost his sibling to an undiagnosed illness, and spent thirty years trying to find a cure through increasingly unorthodox methods. By the end he had rationalized his way into something darker, but the grief underneath it was real. He was close to something when he died — something in Defiance Draw he believed was significant enough that he wouldn’t even write it down, for fear of jinxing it.
A wagon stood nearby with six bodies wrapped in sackcloth and four horses tethered beside it. Luna unloaded the dead without flinching and helped Matuk ready the wagon for the road home.
From the ridge above Old Owl Well, they looked out over Defiance Draw for the first time: a lake where a valley should have been, islands scattered across its surface, and at its heart, the drowned shape of the very structure the book had described. The road continued on, climbing into mountains wrapped permanently in cloud. They noted it. They moved on. The flute pulled them into the Feywild shortly after, and they never went back.
Defiance Draw is still there.
Items acquired: Potion of Healing, Scroll of Darkness, Ring of Protection, a pearl, assorted coin. Kostyk’s journal — in the party’s possession.