The party is invited to a secret meeting at the Lyceum Arcanium, learns a ton of information about the past and future, ignores it all, and decides to jump through a mirror into the Feywild.
.
. |
The party has returned to Highbridge after delivering Alluria’s body to her mausoleum in her Vale. They step into the middle of a raucous evening at the Rusty Spigot in Overtown where they are hailed as heroes and given the best table in the center of the bar.
The musical nemesis of Corliss, the bard extraordinaire Cappen Varra, informs the party that he has a message for them, but refuses to give it unless Corliss agrees to an onstage Battle of the Bards. Corliss agrees, and the crowd eventually chooses his knee-slapping, sing-along, hold-your-lighter-aloft version of Shitty Shitty Poop Stick as the victor over a morose, dissonant, but virtuoso performance by Cappen. Slightly perturbed, Cappen relays the message to the party: “Yancey has been looking for them and has some information.”
The party spends the next hour drinking and making off-color jokes, interrupted only by an interlude where they humiliate and then beat up a burly fellow named Sess that had given their landlord Batilda a black eye while arguing with her about rent.
Yancey, previously known to be part of a secret society that controls The Resistance, has passed on information about the spellbook (Spellbook of the Celestial Spheres) to his superiors and they want to meet. After agreeing, the powerful Mistress Valenna teleports to party to the Lyceum Arcanium tower in Greenmouth and tells them about the mission of their organization.
She says gives some backstory:
The seventh age is ending and a Convergence is coming.
There is some sort of ceremony that will occur that will dictate which elemental power is ascendant during the eighth age.
The Polonians (water) and the Orcs and their allies (fire) have all sorts of knowledge about the what the Convergence is and what it entails. The Lyceum Arcanium has none.
The Polonian invasion of The Riding and the Orcish incursions westward are all associated with the coming Convergence, but what they are seeking is unknown. Only that The Riding is important is apparent.
The Elves should be supporting the elemental power of earth, but they are missing, and the duty of supporting the currently ascendant earth falls to the Lyceum. And perhaps the party if they will join forces.
Their plan:
Having run out of places to look for information in The Riding, the Lyceum Arcanium has identified the Fey Library in the Feywild as a potential source of information.
However, every party they have sent through their magic mirror to the Feywild over the last decade has not returned.
There is one exception: a member of a past expedition named Loomis Erstand returned only days after passing over but thought that he had been gone for years. He claimed to have traded his two amputated fingers and the color blue for a key piece of information that he would not divulge.
Loomis has fled east into Orcish territories.
Given the option to search for Loomis and gain clues about what he learned and how he succeeded in escaping back through the mirror, the party chooses instead to dive through the mirror and into the Feywild.
The party meets an adventurer named Sei that may have been part of a previous expedition. He has spent an unknown amount of time attempting to map the Feywild, but his map makes no sense. He follows the party.
Next, the party meets a Cambion under the influence of three Dryads that force him to play hide-and-seek with them. The party uses its wits - and Rhagal’s potion of flying - to track the three dryads down. The Cambion, in gratitude, offers information about the location of the library. The info: “Walk away from the sun until it is almost dark, then turn right and walk until you reach a lake. The library is on the shore of the lake.”
Finally, the party does battle with a pod of snakes that were living in the remnants of a dead body hanging from a tree. The snakes repeatedly hoist Hurodash into the air and attempt to strangle him, but the party comes to his defense and kills them.