04/15/2026: Nowhere to Run

The party meets the cloaker in a narrow corridor with nowhere to run. Nesquo throws up a Wall of Fog spell to buy them cover — thick, impenetrable, blinding everyone inside it equally. Frida takes to the air to get above it. The rest fight by sound and instinct.

Krasnyy hurls a dagger into the cloud and connects. The creature screams. That's the only confirmation anyone gets that they're even aiming in the right direction.

Tall Glumbo sends Dog Glumbo in. The hellhound doesn't need eyes. The fog is total — not darkness, exactly, but something worse, a blankness that swallows sound and light both and gives nothing back. Somewhere inside it, the cloaker moves. Tall Glumbo cannot see it. Nobody can. But Dog Glumbo doesn't need to see it.

The hellhound goes in at a word. He finds the creature the way dogs find things — his hot, keen nose drawing him without hesitation by the smell of something alive and wrong. When he he is nearly atop the cloaker, he breathes. The fire blooms inside the cloud, invisible but for a faint, orange glow and a bad smell to everyone watching from outside. And then comes the sound: the shrieking of pain and the crackling of fire. 

Freda’s wing beats clear the fog. The cloaker, wounded and on fire, picks Tick as its target and pounds them hard — hard enough that they are noticeably worse off than they were a moment ago. 

Lynx sees this in slivers; there are too many of his colleagues in the way to get a clear view of the cloaker’s devastating attack on Tick. But the cleric can hear the extent of Tick’s injuries. 

The corridor was not designed for eight people and a hellhound. Lynx decides that the bodies are no longer the obstacle they think they are. He tries to push through the crowd to reach them. Most of his companions yield, squeezing to allow Lynx to pass.

But not Nesquo. For reasons of his own, refuses to move.

Irked, Lynx moves him anyway — he grabs Nesquo, pivots, and deposits him several feet further back down the corridor than he was before. It is not gentle. It is, however, fast, and Lynx is through and at Tick's side before Nesquo has time to object.

Lynx throws himself to his knees, pressing healing magic into the dazed Tick. Bruises fade and wounds close. Freda tosses down a handful of healing goodberries to Tick, who acknowledges them gratefully. They pop them into their mouth. They’'ll live.

The cloaker regroups down the hallway, badly burned.

 Cornelius Mallard, pressed against the wall, is unable to see past the wall of combatants to what they stand against. He calls out to no one in particular, “It must be a very large spider.”

The cloaker, smoking, slithers back toward Lynx, Tick and Freda.