03/27/2026: The Fall of Murgaxor

The office is close and warm. The soup on the long table has stopped steaming. Murgaxor sits behind it, watching the Hexmates with flat, unreadable eyes, while the imps attack methodically: hovering, descending, stinging, rising again. Reyna and KFC exchange a look across the room. There is nothing casual in it.

KFC raises her hand and casts Witch Bolt. A crack of lightning jumps the distance to Murgaxor, then lingers in the air between them like a threat. KFC pivots and brings her boot down on the nearest imp. The creature twists to avoid it and reels around to sink its teeth through the leather, and is gone before KFC can recover. 

Reyna lifts the Wand of Wonder. The campus wild magic does what it does here—both casts ripple strangely—but the surge is mild. A pulse of healing energy rolls through the room, touching everyone in it, friend and enemy alike. Two imps look briefly startled. Murgaxor’s expression does not change.

Young Murgaxor’s does. He has been sitting rigid since the confrontation began, and something in him finally gives way. He shoves back from the table and runs for the door.

Behind him, the elder’s voice is a flat blade. “Coward.”

The boy throws the door open and collides directly with Debbie. She is ready.

One efficient motion drops him; she is already pulling things out of her backpack to make room. It is an enormous pack and it takes a moment, during which her hands close on two glass vials she has been carrying for a long time. Inside each one, something presses against the glass—dense, shifting, hot to the touch.

She tucks young Murgaxor inside, secures the pack, and whispers to the vials. “Get Murgaxor.” She tosses both globes through the open door into the room.

Simultaneously, Murgaxor releases an Incendiary Cloud.

The smashing of glass is lost under it: a deep, concussive whump as an enormous roiling mass of burning vapor fills the office. Two imps simply cease to exist. Reyna and Titania are scorched badly. And one of the fire elementals that pour from the broken vials hits the Incendiary Cloud and begins to feed on it. It grows visibly—larger, hotter, pressing against the walls and ceiling, scorching the floor black where it moves.

Murgaxor’s expression changes for the first time.

He looks at what his own spell has done. He looks at the expanding elemental. He looks at Titania.

Titania drops her form. The lion that takes her place fills the corner of the room. 

Murgaxor screams—genuine, unguarded terror—and scrambles for the hole Reyna had earlier blown through the back wall of the Biblioplex.

The heat pulls out of the room as the elemental compresses to follow him through the hole. The remaining imps scatter. One bolts through the door Debbie left open.

Hester is still in the hallway. She has no voice—the wild magic of the campus took it during the surge, taking her beak and leaving her silent. She shapes Rime’s Binding Ice carefully, threading it around the fire elementals and her hexmates, and lets it go. Two imps crystallize mid-flight and fall. They hit the stone floor and shatter, leaving small dark stains.

Outside, the air is cooler, which makes the elemental’s heat more noticeable. It has caught Murgaxor. KFC maintains Witch Bolt, the arc of lightning striking the bullywug again. Reyna fires Tasha’s Mind Whip but Murgaxor’s mental defenses repel it.

The elemental is enormous now—chest-height, then taller, the boundary of its body expanding. It attacks.

Murgaxor bellows in anger. Then the bellow becomes something else, something frantic. And then it stops.

When the elemental withdraws, there is no body. There is a shallow crater near the base of the damaged wall, and at the bottom of it, a twitching mass: black, wet, faintly iridescent. Nothing else.

KFC peers in. There is something in the goo—something that reads, to her, as sadness.

Titania has released the lion form. She looks at the crater for a moment. Then she casts Silvery Barbs on what remains. “That was for my son, you ass.”

A fire elemental steps forward, covers the mass, and vanishes.

The three of them stand in the quiet for a moment. Murgaxor has pursued them for three years. 

Reyna, KFC and Titania acknowledge that their actions may have timeline implications. The killing of Murgaxor now may have created a loop in their future, playing out a revenge sequence as Young Murgaxor learns the truth. They discuss shielding the boy from the truth, breaking the cycle of abuse by mentoring him—perhaps through therapy—to prevent future violence.

Only time will tell.

⚔

Inside Debbie’s backpack, young Murgaxor struggles. He pleads first—let him out, his father needs him—and then, when that fails, threatens: “My dad will ban you from Strixhaven forever!”

Hester joins Debbie. One eyebrow rises over her newly restored beak. The expression requires no translation.

Hester briefs Debbie quickly on what Locate Creature has found: Squid is below. They move across campus toward the underground entrance, young Murgaxor muffled but persistent inside the pack. As they walk, his tone shifts again. He has recognized the direction they’re moving.

“If you’re trying to get to my father’s fairy servant, don’t bother.” His voice is matter-of-fact, the anger briefly subsumed by something like contempt. “The creature is untamable. It found some of what father needed, but then it escaped—took the Crown of Winter’s Last Dream, and it hasn’t been recovered. Father recaptured it and had to confine it until it becomes more cooperative.”

The cage is cold iron.

It sits in a tunnel chamber below campus, small, low-ceilinged. There is nothing decorative about it. Cold iron is not a punitive choice for humans; for fey, it is a particular cruelty, and whoever built this cage knew that.

Inside it is Squid.

They are almost unrecognizable. The green of their skin has faded toward gray-white. Every rib is visible. Violet bruises sit beneath their closed eyes—not from impact, but from weeks without sleep. They moan when Debbie and Hester pull them free of the cage, a small, reflexive sound. Their lips move to gasp out a whisper: “They didn’t know me.”

They bring Squid back to the group. Titania takes them, and something complicated crosses her face. Squid clings to her, shaking.

“You didn’t know me. I took the Crown to you, and you just kept playing cards.”

Titania casts Healing Word. Color returns slowly to Squid’s face.

What comes out of them, haltingly, is the shape of the past weeks: enslaved to recover the ritual items. Escaping with the Crown to the Feywild, to Oberon’s court. Finding Titania there—still Queen, still present—but not yet the Titania who knew them. Squid had watched her play cards with the Crown, to lose, and lose, and lose again. They had not known how to stop it. They blame themselves. The money lost weighs on them—too much responsibility for a child.

The group turns, eventually, to the question of young Murgaxor. What do they tell him? Does the truth help him, or does it start the cycle over? They think through it: if Murgaxor learns what they’ve done here, does grief and rage become the thing that eventually sends him to hunt the Hexmates down, forty years from now?

Debbie cuts through it. “That’s an issue for past us. Future us gets to be happy.”

Whether that’s true remains to be seen.