09/15/2026: The Vampire's Shrine of Berez

The fight continues in the subterranean room beneath the ruins of the Burgomaster of Berez's home. In front of the demonic shrine, the enormous, rubbery bulk of the moralith turns, its eye pits fixing on Shifty. The thing begins to speak without a mouth, straight into the kobold's mind. It offers strange gifts of insects and worse. Shifty refuses the offering. The moralith does not take refusal well.The Vampire's Shrine of Berez 

Its tentacle lashes out, gripping Shifty like a thick, tightening wet rope. The kobold is drawn in toward mouthparts that snap and slaver. Shifty pushes against the moist, iron-hard arm that holds him fast, but to no avail.

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The four remaining ghasts step over their fallen comrade, already still and forgotten in the corner, and the rest of the pack closes in. They bite and claw, and it is Crystal who bears the worst of it, teeth sinking in again and again until the dragonborn staggers. Zilk, also slashed by filthy talons, goes rigid. He is poisoned. Paralyzed, he drops to the floor, senseless while the melee churns around him.

But the tide turns fast and ugly. Crystal's Cone of Cold rolls out across the room in a wave of killing frost, catching ghast after ghast, as well as the moralith. The aberration flinches back, wounded and furious. Shifty, still fighting free of that tentacled grip, lands a strike so unlikely and so precise that the moralith simply lets go.

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Then Soulfire spreads her hands and commands, "Eyes closed!" at her comrades. A shimmering hypnotic pattern blooms across the cellar — one ghast freezes mid-snarl, a second goes glassy-eyed, a third drops to its knees before her, seemingly besotted with the caster.

Soulfire's spell takes hold of neither the moralith nor the last ghast. It's Zilk who ends the ghast. He regains his senses quickly but feigns unconsciousness at the foul creature's feet— then explodes from the floor in one motion, drawing steel. In a single terrible arc, Zilk opens the last standing horror from ankle to throat. The thing does not fall so much as detonate, folding in on itself. Crystal takes an involuntary step back, alarmed by the violence of the bugbear's strike.

The moralith, for its part, does not wait to see what's next — it conjures magical darkness down over itself. Within the inky depths, Shifty feels the air shift: the moralith has vanished. When he dispells the Darkness incantation, only a long, glistening trail of slime remains behind, like something dragged from the bottom of a well. But the trail ends abruptly: where did the moralith go?

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Upstairs, the destruction has been of an equally noisy sort. Biblo and Nike have reduced the manor's pipe organ to splinters and dented metal. Out of the wreckage rises the aggrieved ghost of the Burgomaster, Lazlo Ulrich. He wears a wounded expression as he surveys the destruction of his former library. "May I ask what it is you're doing to my organ?" he demands.

"The voice — under the floor —," sputters Biblo. The barbarian informs the ghost, who rebuts this: "There is nothing beneath the floor other than the cellar!"

Nike retorts, "What do you keep in the cellar?"

Answering defensively, the ghost tells her, "While I lived, my kennel, my wine cellar, a well and a passage to the barn."

The ghost leads them to the hole torn through the floor by the moralith when it dragged Zilk into the cellar. Below them, they can see Shifty magically healing himself. He is standing by a fountain that once ran with what looks like blood.  Above its basin, a gem-eyed, horned statuary that glitters evilly. Whatever red liquid filled it, it is now frozen from what was likely Crystal's Cone of Cold. A rime of frost coats everything.

Nike and Biblo carefully lower themselves into the cel

lar. The ghost of Burgomaster Lazlo Ulrich remains above, peering sadly down upon them.

They move around the frozen ghasts, caught forever mid-battle by Soulfire's hypnotic pattern. To Nike, this place has the unmistakable shape of a vampire's shrine.

"Could this be a shrine to Vampyr?" she asks, in a small voice.

Crystal, taking no chances, seals the basin and its coffins behind a wall of fire, ignoring every protest from the party members who'd rather have explored the fountain.

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Soulfire, chasing the last of the moralith's trail, blinks after it into the Ethereal Plane — a dimension that lies atop and behind this world. She finds the same room, empty and but undamaged, lit by low, dull flames instead of the roaring fires in the statues' mouths. She can see the very faint shadows of what is happening in the Material Plane: her friends stand vigilant in the ruined ritual room, flanked by captivated ghasts.

But Soulfire is not alone for long in the Ethereal Plane's version of the ritual room. A pair of night hags enter from a door on the eastern wall. They are as surprised to see Soulfire as she is to see them. They are unknown to the demon.

"Why are you here, my dear?" croaks the taller of the two. "Here to pray? Yes, I see that you are. Join hands with my sister and me, and we will worship together."

Wary but curious, Soulfire nods, first accepting a thimble of silvery liquid from a black bottle drawn from a bag that was, unmistakably, once a living pig. "To your health," the hag says, watching intently as the demon tosses it into her mouth. It is, of course, a trick — the last thing Soulfire feels is a foul-smelling sack drawn down over her head before the dark takes her entirely.

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When the Blink spell unravels a short time later, Soulfire flickers back to the Material Plane to her concerned comrades. This is no triumphant return. Soulfire lies limp and paper-white, lips gone blue, a pulse that Crystal can barely find. Shifty's Cure Wounds spell fizzles. No one has any other ideas.

Whatever has happened to Soulfire, it isn't done working yet. The group remains unaware of the hags, who don't yet exist on this plane — and as the party scrambles for an answer that isn't coming, the cellar falls quiet around them, waiting to see what happens.