09/11/2026: Everyone’s Favorite Crown

The party descends beneath Mt. Strix, chasing another piece in the ritual Alister and Titania need to separate. What they find first in the duergar ruin isn't a monster. It's a coffin.

Twin bridges span lake of lava, depositing the party at the foot of several short, steep flights of stairs that rise into the dark. A balcony juts from above, and atop it is a stone sarcophagus. There, sits a tomb presiding above the grand staircase, elegantly carved and coated in a thick, ashy dust. 

“I’m NOT gonna touch that,” Diro tells them in disgust.

KFC, standing at Diro’s side, crows. “I’ll touch it!!! I will touch it—what are we touching?” She peers around in confusion. Diro points to the tomb.

Debbie translates for them: ‘Queen Elara,’ her name carved in Old Dwarvish, undisturbed for longer than anyone in the room has been alive. 

”Great! A Queen! That’s very convenient!” KFC approaches the elaborately carved sarcophagus. Diro digs in his pack, passing KFC a pumice stone, and she knocks politely, as if the dead appreciate courtesy. The dead, it turns out, do not answer — but something makes noise close by. 

⚔️

Flanking the vast entryway as if standing sentry for the dead queen are a quartet of massive stone statues, two on each side. They soar 40 feet tall, enormous axes at the ready.  

KFC shoves at the tomb lid.

A rumble, subtle at first, begins.

Dust sifts down from the stalactite-covered cavern roof high above. This is followed by the sharp crack of stone.

The tomb's guardians are awakening: the two legs of one of the statues shimmer, becoming human-shaped. A pair of enormous stone creatures step free of their carvings. Stone golems, built for protecting their queen, move toward those they perceive as intruders. 

They swing their gigantic stone axes up on their shoulders and approach the group surrounding the sepulcher. 

Confident, KFC elbows the artificer, who is looking very pale.

”Diro! Ask them if we can rub their queen’s feet!”

The guardians have now moved menacingly close to the group flanking the coffin. They tower over KFC and Diro. Diro gulps, but responds by stepping toward them — not with a blade, but with a straight face and an outrageous cover story. He explains, in his very mediocre Ignan and with complete sincerity, that the party has come to bless a pumice stone against their queen's own foot. Purely cosmetic. Purely respectful. Pretty please?

The golems consider this, motionless for an endless moment.

The golems lower their weapons and move back to their wall. 

Perspiring, Diro swears, quietly, that he is never doing anything like that again. “You people are trying to get me killed,” he mutters, and no one in the party contradicts him.

⚔️

As they slide the lid to one side, a flurry of what looks like icy flakes swirls up and settles on them. The inside of the coffin is revealed: the duergar skeleton clad in silken robes, bones feet golden sandals. Atop a thick rope of copper braids sits the Crown of Winter’s Last Snow: 

“It’s about time!” Squaws an aggrieved voice from within the coffin.

KFC snaps backward, recognizing the grating voice. ‘The Crown?”

From behind her, Hester, “Oh, good. Everyone’s favorite crown.”

Diro, mystified, believes he is talking to the corpse—maybe believing it to be a spirit. He asks, plaintively, “Have you been trapped in this coffin?” 

“Oh, yes! Thank the Gods you’ve come along to rescue me! I’ve been wrongfully imprisoned in this terrible, smelly box for who knows how long…” the Crown continues.

“Of course you may come with us!” continues Diro, reaching to sit the bones of the dead queen upright.

”No,” object KFC and Hester, “not a good idea!”

”But we can’t just LEAVE her here!!” cries, Diro, indignantly. He is convinced that it is the skeletal remains of Queen Elara that is speaking.

He leans into the tomb, trying to determine the best way to remove the bones of the Queen. The artificer continues, sympathetically, “We can take you out of here!” Under his hand, the silk robes begin crumbling; hair and teeth are falling away to the bottom of the sarcophagus.

In a booming voice, the Crown bellows, “Leave those mouldering old bones alone. Pick me up! Take!” The spell Command nearly grips hold of Diro, who reaches for the Crown before shaking it off.

”Hey!” he says indignantly, “You’re trying to control me!” 

Nodding with vigor, Alister tells him, “That’s what we’re trying to tell you! It’s a sentient crown! It speaks!”

”And it’s annoying,” mutters Hester.

”I am not!” the Crown objects, “and how would you know, anyway?”

Alister snorts, derisively, “Oh, we know, alright!”

”I’ve not ever seen you before, elf! You lie!”

”We know you!” cries Reyna, “Close the lid, Diro!”

”I can’t believe that you tried to control me,” Diro shakes his head, unable to comprehend this near miss after attempting a rescue.

”I couldn’t! I wouldn’t! Well, I did, a little bit! But I didn’t. It didn’t work, did it? So then it doesn’t count!! Take me with you! Please, I want out of here!” The Crown goes from offended to wheedling in heartbeats.

”Close the lid!” With the clamor from his hexmates ringing throughout the cavernous space, Diro and his Stand begin to slide the lid of the sarcophagus back into place. From within, the Crown shrieks, “No, please, wait! Stop! TAKE!” Again, the Crown casts Command, and again Diro resists. 

Diro looks wounded. “See? You did it again. This isn’t going to work.”He and his stand slide the lid back into place, cutting off the Crown’s begging him not to.

Then, from beneath the stone slab, the group can hear the muffled swearing and shouting of the re-entombed Crown begin. All of it is aimed at Diro.

⚔️

Alister, already moving on, demands, “KFC, did you get what we needed?”

Holding up the very dusty piece of pumice, the chicken barbarian nods.

”Right, then we just need two more items,” The drow says this as if they are at a market to buy parts for dinner. “We have the salamander sweat and the pumice stone. We need ash and obsidian. Where do you suppose we might find those things?”

Someone points out that they just left a room full of ash, back at the forge.

”But isn’t that part of Debbie’s kid?” someone asks.

The group agree to let this be a challenge for their future selves, when they are on their way out of these caves.

They regard the towering, carved basalt door a head of them. To get to these doors, they will need to cross a narrow stone bridge. Below it is a sluggish flow of lava. It is far but not far enough. Alister gets only a few steps out onto the bridge before beginning to howl from the burns he receives.

The bridge ahead radiates enough heat to cook them alive.

He hops back to the safety of the group, painfully, on blistered feet.

”We’re gonna have to use the Crown, aren’t we?” a despondent Hester says to no one in particular. 

Everyone in the party does some sort of head shake, eye roll or low moan as they march back to the sepulcher.  

“I knew you’d come crawling back!” gloats the Crown.

⚔️

The crown offers them a deal: it is granted freedom from the tomb in exchange for the party's safe passage across the bridge.

"Are you sure, Alister?"KFC asks Alistir.

"It's perfectly safe," he tells the group, and puts the Crown upon his head.

His hair goes gray on contact, and frost spreads outward from him like the winter is simply happening now. It works. The party huddles close and crosses the bridge without immolating.

The crown, for its part, seems to enjoy being useful again. It natters on about the queen it once kept company — playing chess and cards with Queen Elara, sharing its sage wisdom with her over the quiet centuries . The Crown insists it was sealed away not for anything it did, but because the dwarves found a talking crown and a dead queen unsettling.

All of this enrages KFC, who glowers at the front of the group.

⚔️

Beyond the bridge: a corridor lit by lava, an entire abandoned city. It is empty and strange. That it is built for people three quarters of their size does nothing to make the empty city seem more inviting. No enemies. No traps. Just silence, and the sense that the crown is still listening.

”Now what?” Reyna asks.

”Cards, anyone?” sings the Crown from atop Alister’s head.

”No! NO!!” The entire party calls in unison.