Session 12 — The Singing Pools
Date played: TBD Location: The Feywild — The Singing Pools
An endless party at the edge of a still body of water. Music that never stopped. Glasses that refilled themselves before anyone noticed they’d emptied. The partygoers seemed unable, or unwilling, to leave — and by the end of the night, the party understood why.
Luna went under the water as an octopus, curious about shapes she’d seen moving in the dark below. What she found explained everything: the corpse of a Jabberwock at the mouth of a sunken cavern, being drained steadily into bottles, carried up by creatures too beautiful to be entirely trustworthy. The party was the only group there who understood exactly what they were drinking. They chose not to stop it. Not yet.
Dash spent the evening talking with an elf named Cellach, dressed in silks fine enough to be worth commenting on — which Dash did, at length, with the easy fluency of someone raised around merchants who knew the value of a compliment well placed. The conversation went well enough that Dash mentioned, almost in passing, that they happened to be carrying an invitation to the Masquerade Ball. Cellach went still. Then he smiled, the kind of smile that means a piece has moved on a board somewhere. “Well then,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”
Clever drifted the edges of the party rather than its center — water, on principle, was not for her — and introduced herself to a satyr poet named Averlant as “Bitey,” which delighted the poet enormously and told Clever nothing she actually wanted to know. She watched instead: the mechanical rhythm of the servers, the glasses that never ran dry, the laughter that all sounded a little too similar. She left the conversation with more suspicion than she’d brought into it.
Silenus kept to a quieter stretch of shoreline, watching the revelry with open unease. When Luna accepted a glass of the shimmering wine, something in him recognized the pull immediately — he knew exactly what it cost to lose a fight like that one, because he’d lost it before. He held the line this time, though it cost him something too: standing in a place built entirely out of golden, unchanging twilight, he searched the sky for a moon that would never rise there, and found only silence where he was used to finding comfort. He stayed sober. He stayed lonely doing it.
Matuk refused to go any further into the party than its threshold, suspicious of the whole affair on principle, and found himself sharing that threshold with a small, wizened gnome who stood so still he nearly vanished into the tree roots. Matuk gave him a light nudge with the haft of his axe. The gnome rebuffed it with a flick of his tiny staff, firm but not unfriendly. Neither of them said much after that. They didn’t need to. Two stoic figures, watching the same drunken spectacle with the same patient disapproval, found something like companionship in it.
When the party regrouped, Luna’s discovery and Dash’s knowledge of old stories fit together cleanly: nymphs, drawing partygoers in with more than wine — with the simple, magnetic pull of being near something that beautiful. They decided, for now, to leave the Pools as they were and look for what they needed elsewhere.
The road home didn’t cooperate. The path that should have led back to the crossroads led instead to a vast golden chasm — floating stone islands suspended over a drifting mist, lit from below by jellyfish the size of carriages. There was no way across except to jump.
Clever went first, landing clean. She grew careless on a later leap, slipped, and saved herself only by the kind of luck that doesn’t usually visit twice in one night. Dash and Luna both stumbled mid-crossing and caught themselves at the last possible moment. Silenus, more cautious, tied a rope around his waist before he jumped — a decision that mattered when Matuk missed his own leap entirely and fell into the mist, floating for one long, strange moment beside a jellyfish the size of a wagon before the rope hauled him back to solid stone. He fell again on the next jump and pulled himself up by main strength alone, refusing to be the reason they stopped moving forward.
On the far side waited a structure of impossible beauty, woven into the roots of a massive tree, lanterns drifting like fireflies through vines shaped into arches. A sign above the door, written in Sylvan, read The Court of Echoes. A woman in black robes stitched with starlight stepped out to greet them.
“Welcome, travelers. I am Velistra, the Threshold Archivist. May I take your names… or perhaps your echoes?”