April 16, 2025: Cards and a Cave-In

Ona Kristensen, Tiefling Card Reader, GhostfireGaming.com, 2023.

Jeremiah finds himself still shackled to the basement wall, the cold stone at his back, the smell of brimstone faint but persistent in the air. Somewhere nearby in the dark, the old fortune teller — Bolinda — hangs next to him in a silence that could mean anything.

He strains against the chains. The links hold fast.

His shout echoes up through the floorboards. Upstairs, Wilrick borrows a mace. He brings it back to the cellar swings it at the lock that restrains Jeremiah and Bolinda. The mace bounces back with a noisy, useless clang. The lock barely notices. Jeremiah and Bolinda remain precisely where they have been: chained to a wall, in a cellar that smells of sulfur, at one in the morning.

Some days are harder than others.

⚔

Meanwhile, upstairs, the parlor of the Ship’s Prow has acquired an unexpected visitor.

She is tall. Her skin is a pale, cool red. Horns curve back from her temples, a tail sweeps the floor behind her, and her tall leather boots rise to meet the hem of her dress. She reclines on the sofa as if she owns the place — which, notably, she does not. Jeff does. A deck of fortune-telling cards lies arranged on the table in front of her. They are, unmistakably, the exact cards Bolinda was reading from the night before.

She introduces herself, simply. She is Vael.

Bob is the first to emerge from the cellar. Vael tilts her head in his direction. “Card reading?” she offers pleasantly.

Bob, exercising judgment that could generously be described as cautious, pulls a single card from the deck. He turns it over. The Grim Reaper grins back at him from the face of the DEATH card, and Bob involuntarily shudders. “Great,” he says.

Vael studies the card, unperturbed. “The DEATH card is not always what people think. It simply represents profound change.” She regards him with calm, ancient eyes. “Are you moving?”

Bob shakes his head.

“Changing jobs? Marrying?”

With each of her guesses, Bob tells her no.

Vael considers this. “Well, then,” she declares, with a tone of pleasant finality, “it likely means you will be coming into a great sum of money.”

The grin that rearranges itself on Bob’s face disappears the moment Jayce appears in the doorway. He does not want to give anyone a hint that he is about to be rich.

⚔

Vael pats the sofa cushion beside her as Viktor crests the cellar stairs — arriving just in time to see where Jayce has  just seated himself.

“Choose one,” Viktor hears the woman instruct the paladin.

Jayce accidentally pulls two cards at once from the offered deck. He attempts to hand one back. Vael declines, “It means something if the Fates give you two.” She studies both cards with something that looks dangerously like interest. “Your future is complicated,” she says. “And there are many things in your current life tangled together.”

Neither of them hears the vast, resigned sigh Viktor releases from the top of the cellar stairs.

Vael turns over the first card. “The LOVERS.” A beat. Then, the second: what should read DEVIL instead reads DEMON, stamped across it in heavy, deliberate ink. The figure on the card looks disturbingly like the demon they have just — temporarily — defeated one floor below them.

“Hmm,” she says pleasantly, examining the first card again. “I wonder what that could mean.” She looks at Jayce with an expression of genuine, unhurried curiosity. “Are you in the market for a companion?”

Jayce’s face colors. He looks away. He does not answer.

From the direction of the cellar stairs, a throat is cleared. Loudly.

Jayce glances in that direction then stands abruptly and bolts from the room.

⚔

Viktor arrives just in time to watch him disappear upstairs. He moves to follow. The voice from the sofa catches him before he can.

“You are Viktor, are you not?” Vael tilts her head. “Hello. Have a card.”

In her perfectly manicured, clawed hand, she holds out the TOWER card. Viktor looks at it — the stone edifice struck by lightning, figures tumbling from the battlements — and takes a deliberate step backward.

Vael studies it herself. “I sense a disturbance in your sphere of influence,” she murmurs.

Viktor extricates himself with all the grace he can manage and races upstairs to find Jayce.

⚔

Dante settles onto the cushion only recently vacated by Jayce. Vael spreads the deck and gestures. “Draw one.”

The warforged draws carefully. They turn the card over to show Vael, who reads it aloud: “The WHEEL OF FORTUNE.” She studies Dante’s clockwork face with something that might be professional appreciation. 

“Something may try drawing you away very soon,” she says. “Do you sense it?”

Before Dante can answer, someone knocks at the door.

On the front step of the Ship’s Prow stands a delivery gnome in blue livery and a small peaked cap. He inquires after a Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms or Mx Dante, then produces an envelope that he hands to Dante. One small hand remains extended, palm up, and the gnome’s cap tipped by the other hand.

Dante blinks, then presses an electrum piece on the creature.

The gnome blinks at the coin—a considerable amount—and stuffs it in his pocket. He tips his head six far back to look up at Dante that he nearly unseats his cap. “Why, thank you, sir or madam.” The gnome straightens to his full, modest height and bows with considerable ceremony. “I am Arnold J. Rascal, the Third. If you should ever need anything, you need only ask for Rascal — that’s me!” He clicks his heels, executes a precise spin, and hops down the front steps into the predawn dark.

The letter is from Dante’s wife, Beatrice. It is urgent. It is the kind of letter that does not wait. And the envelope also contains a ticket.

Disturbed, Dante holds it. “A ticket,” Vael observes, “is an invitation to leave — but only if one chooses to take it.”

Dante tucks both items away and says nothing and wanders upstairs.

⚔

 Sean enters next. He has just freed Jeremiah and Bolinda from their shackles in the cellar.

Vael extends her hand with what appears to be genuine warmth. They have something in common, she tells him — “a large, tall, red, angry fellow.” Sean makes every effort to suggest that he has no idea what she is talking about.

Vael smiles. Her teeth are very white, and very fanged. “I think it is very touching,” she says quietly, for his ears only, “that you believe you can deceive me.”

“Let me pull a card for you anyway,” she says, and her hand moves slowly over the spread deck. After a moment’s deliberation, she draws one out and flips it without ceremony.

The card reads SLUG.

It does, in fact, bear the image of a wrinkled black slug making its slow way across a hellish landscape.

“Your missing friend,” she says, her voice dropping into something that sounds almost like sympathy, “is suffering. The Sixth Level of the Abyss, I believe. The Stygian reaches — a cold section set aside for liars and cheats and thieves.”

She pauses, letting the weight of that settle.

“If I could arrange for him to return — a reprieve, a week or two — would you accept him back?”

The party’s reaction is decisive, if divided. Vael takes it in stride. She has, presumably, seen worse disagreements.

⚔

Interlude: The Abyss, the Freezer Section

Somewhere cold and dark and very far away, a no-longer-among-the- living individual — frozen, miserable, bits of him snapping off and refreezing in temperatures that have no name in any living language — receives a visitor.

A shadow in a very tall boots regards him with something that falls short of pity.

“Your friends above would very much like you back,” she says. “At least for a few weeks. Would you like to go — or would you prefer to stay and suffer?”

Through chattering teeth and lips the color of a bruise, Jeff sputters that he’d prefer to go, please. If it’s all the same.

“As you wish,” she says, and snaps her very long, very red fingers.

He is dropped back into the world. He lands somewhere near the others, bewildered, cold, and overwhelmingly grateful to be standing on anything at all. He has been freed from Hell, and Vael directs him to bring the companions to the Cassalanter Mansion.

Jeremiah, it should be noted, arrives from the cellar too late for a card reading. Vael has already left. Nobody is entirely clear on when.

⚔

The group makes their next move: the Cassalanter estate. It is three in the morning. The devil’s hour. The streets of Waterdeep are quiet, almost as if waiting for something.

They arrive at an iron gate, entrance to the property with the Cassalanter mansion at far end of a brick drive that stretches toward a distant glow. Light from the manor?  No building visible yet. 

Standing at the foot of a wall twelve feet high, they begin to take stock. The wall is smooth with no obvious handholds. No guards are visible. A small bell hangs beside the gate, patient and unrung.

They take no chances and move down the block just a bit.

Jayce uses his Divine Sense and almost immediately is overcome.

He collapses into Viktor’s arms, incapacitated — but for the next ten minutes, he knows the precise location of every celestial, undead, and fiend within sixty feet. Viktor sits him up, alarmed by the pallor of his friend’s face.

Jayce finally opens his eyes.

“Good morning,” he says, not entirely certain what just occurred.

“Jayce. You can’t just do that.”

The paladin recovers himself and pulls Viktor aside to deliver his report in a low voice. “There are fiends and undead — a lot of them. About fifty feet below us.”

The party absorbs this. Somewhere down there, beneath the cobblestones and the gardens of the quiet, respectable Cassalanter Estate in Waterdeep, something evil is waiting. Several somethings.

A block or two away, the City Watch moves on its rounds. They are not yet approaching. They are not yet a problem.

But the proximity is enough to prompt Bob to exhale his breath weapon directly into the ground.

The cone misses the party, but spatters them with sleet from the concentrated cold that fractures the earth. Dante, Sean, Viktor, Wilrick, and Jeremiah scramble for purchase as cobblestones and pavement fall away from beneath them. Several of the companions fail to find their footing — boots skidding on shards — and scramble desperately for handholds. Wilrick and Jeff, less fortunate than the rest, tumble into  yawning hole that has opened. 

They drop thirty feet into a chamber below.

As the dust clears, the pair can see that the chamber is full of animated skeletons. They turn, with slow and jerky purpose, toward these new arrivals.

Above, the rest of the group cling to the edges of the opening. Someone calls out, asking if anyone has rope. The answer, sadly, is no.

Jayce jumps in.  He lands in time to bring his warhammer down with a satisfying crunch on a skeleton that crumbles. A mere sixteen others remain.

Bashing, it appears, is exceptionally effective against undead. Jayce announces this discovery to his comrades above, in what he considers a helpful tone.

At the lip of the hole, Viktor surveys the chaos. The necromancer has no rope, but he has line of sight. He creeps to the edge and casts Sleep on a cluster of skeletons; four slump into sudden, inert silence.

Twelve remain.

And from somewhere in the dark ahead — deeper in the chamber, beyond the reach of the dim light — a voice drifts up through the bones and the dust:

“Are you food? Or are you a trainer?”

Something else is down here. Something large.