03/06/2026: Lunch With the Murgaxors

The cold iron key hangs on the wall like a wound, and Alister stands near it, close enough that the proximity registers as a low, persistent ache — the particular cruelty of iron against fey skin. Murgaxor has arranged this deliberately, of course. A punishment for rifling through his desk, and reminder of who holds power in this room, thinks Alister.

Then, with the smooth graciousness of a host who has forgotten nothing and forgiven nothing, Murgaxor gestures to the table. “Come, sit. The soup will get cold.”

Alister, shivering, crosses the room and takes a seat — placing themselves between the two Murgaxors, old and young, with careful deliberateness.

The soup steams. It smells of herbs and something darker underneath, or perhaps that is only suspicion.

Reyna examines the salt cellar. She turns it in her hands. It looks like salt. It is, as far as she can tell, salt. She uses it very sparingly. The soup tastes like soup. She keeps her expression pleasant.

Across the table, Murgaxor’s yellow eyes settle on Debbie. “You aren’t eating.”

Debbie, still bound by her oath of truth, sorts quickly through her available words. “Allergies,” she says.

A beat. Murgaxor regards her, then Debbie sputters, “I want steak. Raw. Frozen.”

Murgaxor signals to the orc servant, who departs without a word. When she returns, she sets an enormous frozen steak in front of Debbie — solid, ice-rimed, trailing cold vapor — and then wheels forward the pepper mill. Reyna accepts a few turns. Neither Murgaxor nor Alister wants any. Debbie takes some. KFC takes some, and then makes a small additional request: the jar of mealworms stored beneath the cart. The servant obliges.

It is, all things considered, lunch.

Then KFC’s head dips beneath her wing.

Reyna, drowsy, throws off the sleep potion, and Debbie, being elven, is immune But KFC was not, and now she nods gently into the comfortable dark of her own feathers.

Then Titania moves.

There is no warning, no escalation of tone. One moment they are seated. The next, they are across the table, a steak knife pressed to the throat of Young Murgaxor, tnow knocked to the flor. The blade catches the lamplight.

“Where,” Titania snarls, “is my child?”

It is not quite a question.

The elder Murgaxor sets down his spoon. “I have looked,” he says, with the patience of someone accustomed to being misunderstood, “across multiple timelines. In every single one except ours, Squid dies. Before they grow up. Before they have the chance to become anything.” He lets that settle. “I am keeping the child safe.”

“You’re keeping them a slave.” Titania’s voice cracks on the last word. The knife presses deeper. “I spoke to Sigurd. He told me what you did to him. What you made of him.”

Murgaxor’s expression does not change, but something behind his eyes shifts — calculating, reassessing. He moves on.

He tells them about a possible timeline. Reyna: becoming a food podcaster, then a five-star restaurant, then an international incident involving a foreign president in accidental poisoning. Debbie: killed by an obsessive fan of a former drummer, a fate so specific it sounds like prophecy. Titania: inheritor of Oberon’s kingdom, murdered by their own sister.

“And Squid,” he continues, almost pleasantly, “falls. Gets eaten by a T-rex. Tumbles through a dimensional rift. It doesn’t matter how many times I run the numbers. It always ends the same way.”

Titania presses the knife in harder, and the younger Murgaxor whimpers.

Abruptly, Murgaxor casts Shatter.

The sound hits like a wall of compressed air, and Titania staggers — but does not let go. Their grip on the blade holds. Their grip on Young Murgaxor holds. The young bullywug struggles beneath them, wide-eyed, breathing fast, bleeding from his bulbous eyes.

Across the table, Reyna has the Wand of Wonder leveled at Murgaxor. Her voice is steady. “I will use this.”

Murgaxor laughs. It is a specific kind of laugh — the laugh of someone who is not afraid of the thing being threatened, and wants you to know it. “You’ll hurt someone with that. Give it to me,” he says. “Now.”

Reyna flicks the Wand.

The room floods with pale red light, igniting from everywhere and nowhere at once — and then Reyna goes very still.

She sees.

The dark corners of the room are not empty. They have never been empty. Dozens of small shapes crouch in the shadows, on the rafters, pressed against the walls. Imps. Their wings fold tight against their bodies. Their eyes catch the red light like embers.

No one else can see them. Reyna keeps her face very still.

KFC, newly woken by the noise of the Shatter spell— or perhaps never fully under — crosses to where Young Murgaxor is pinned beneath Titania. She has taken the cold iron key from the wall. She holds it carefully, examining the room for any lock, any door, any place it might belong. There is nothing here. She kneels.

“Your ‘father,’” she says, gently, to the young bullywug struggling beneath the fey’s grip, “is not the man you think he is.”

Young Murgaxor stares up at her. He is afraid. He might be listening. He utters a single word, “No!” but KFC cannot tell what it means. 

Reyna conjures the draconic spirit.

The moonstone dragon manifests in the center of the room all at once — enormous, luminous, its opalescent scales catching the oil lamp and throwing pearl-blue light across the walls. Emerald-green fur runs the length of its chin and chest and down its tail. Its green eyes find Murgaxor immediately, ancient and cold with something that might be judgment. The wizard narrows his eyes…he has no familiarity with this species of dragon.

Murgaxor crooks one finger.

The imps descend on the dragon — invisible to everyone but Reyna, a swarm of small wings and stinging tails. The dragon bellows, a sound that rattles the dishes on the table, and then opens its jaws wide.

The cone of cold dragon breath takes out the wall behind Murgaxor. Stone and plaster and frozen air. Murgaxor takes the full damage of it and does not fall.

He sends back a Finger of Death.

The moonstone dragon has an inborn resistance to necrotizing energy— the spell deals reduced damage, but it lands. Then the wild magic surges — unpredictable, indiscriminate — and health floods back into everyone in the room, friend, enemy and dragon alike. Murgaxor does not look grateful for it.

The imps are still swarming. Titania cannot see them. The small bodies press in from all sides, attacking easily, and the fey takes blow after blow from assailants they cannot locate.

Young Murgaxor seizes the opening. He casts Thunderwave hoping to move Titania from his chest.

The force of it throws Titania across the room, and they land hard in the space the moonstone dragon had only recently occupied — the dragon Murgaxor has now dispatched. The room is smaller without it. Pale sunlight pours in from the hole in the classroom wall.

Down the hall, Hester hears the sound of the fight and moves toward it. She finds Debbie in the corridor and makes her decision quickly. She casts Locate Creature, searching for Squid.

The spell finds something.

And then the wild magic takes her mouth.

It is not painful, exactly. One moment she has a beak, a tongue, the ordinary architecture of speech. The next, there is only smooth scale-flesh where her face used to open. She reaches up to touch it. Nothing moves. No sound comes out.

She knows where Squid is.

She cannot tell anyone.

Hester stands in the hallway with this knowledge sitting inside her like a stone, and watches the battle through the doorway, and hopes that whatever has happened to her face is not permanent.

The imps continue to attack. Some are invisible. Some are not. The distinction depends entirely on who you are.

The battle rages on…