Session 5 - The Restoration of Gray Beacon

The battle had already burned itself out when we picked back up — the monsters scattered like waves against a cliff, blood and brine foaming in their wake. The Gray Beacon stood silent above them, stone bones reassembled but heart still dark.

Enter Rue Vespera: half-shadar-kai, half-tiefling, whole mess of trauma and discipline. Daughter of paladins from The Watchers at Dusk, an order so secret most folks wouldn’t know them from the local knitting circle. As a child, she was taught a strange lullaby called the The Keeper’s Song - Song of the Beacon No explanation. No context. Just another bedtime lesson. Then the cave-in happened — rubble, screams, gone. Rue crawled out alive, scarred, parents buried with the rest. She never sang the song again.

Until now.

The journal of the lighthouse keepers laid out the truth: the song was no lullaby — it was the ignition key for the beacon itself. Trouble was, Rue couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles. Years of martial discipline and miner-rescuing don’t leave much room for vocal lessons.

Luckily, Vex Maravo knew his way around a performance, thanks to too many nights drinking with gnomish bards. With Rue feeding him the words, Cassandra shaping the arcane flow, and Vex belting it out like a half-drunk troubadour, the ritual snapped together. The beacon flared. The air stilled. The tide-corrupted gulls scattered in panicked flocks, fleeing the pulse of holy light.

For the first time in hours, silence.

The Aftermath

Lira, sharp-eyed as ever, noted the tide was wrong — the Mermaid’s Lament couldn’t sail until morning. Best to stay put. Camp here.

The debate began.

• Cassandra, Lady of House Vexmoor, insisted the lighthouse was safer.
• The others, predictably, pounced. “Of course the noble prefers the tower. Don’t trip on your servants as they fluff your tent pillows.”
• Cassandra bristled. “I’ve camped in the woods before.”
• “Once? Did you bring a butler?”

Laughter. Teasing. The kind that tastes like salt and smoke after a hard fight.

But the humor soured as twilight deepened. Behind the beacon’s flashing light, a pulse thrummed — psychic, steady, like a heartbeat under stone. Shyk muttered about the mines. Lira compared it to the leeches. Cassandra backpedaled, suggesting maybe the woods weren’t so bad after all.

That’s when Shyk snapped:

The tower’s good. The psychic energy’s good. It’s keeping the monsters away. We’re safer here.

The words hung in the air.
No one pressed him.
No one argued.

The group just nodded, quiet now, and fell into watch rotations as night swallowed the island.

Dreams in the Tower

The Gray Beacon’s light still pulsed when the party finally laid down to rest, the psychic beat of it thrumming like a second heartbeat behind the walls. They told themselves it was fine. Safe. A little psychic hum never hurt anybody, right? Right.

Night came, and with it, the dreams.

Hunter

Hunter dreamed of fire and flood, the ruins of his people burning even as rain hissed against the timbers. Corpses shifted like tides. A sulfur stench clawed at his lungs.

Through the storm, a vision: the Crimson Sanctum, hovering impossibly on the horizon. Its glow was a lie—slick, oily, scales flickering beneath its light. The voice whispered: Take it. Yours. Always yours.

And then an eye—colossal, draconic, chained, staring right through him. Not flame in its mouth, but darkness. A promise black as the deep. Hunter woke shaken, but he had resisted the lure. Barely.

Vex

Vex did not resist.

His dream was softer. Kinder. A marketplace alive with light and laughter, his cart heavy with silk and coin. For a moment, he had everything: profit, legacy, parents smiling back at him from the water’s reflection.

Then the cracks. Rain. Shadows. Coins dissolving into pearls, teeth, lies. And always the eye, curious, watching, amused. A voice cooed: This is yours. You’ve earned this. Keep it.

He awoke clutching only absence.

Elia

Elia didn’t dream like the others. She was claimed.

The shadow she poured into the tower had bought her a patron—whether she wanted it or not. A storm rose in her vision, violet light curdling to black, a vast voice from the deep calling her down, down, down. Mine.

But before it could take her, another voice thundered. A dragon vast and endless, eyes like eclipsed suns. No. This one is mine.

Shadows wrapped her like a cloak. The dragon’s storm of darkness lifted her instead of drowning her. Its words carved into her bones: Serve me, and you will never be bound again. You will bind others.

And Elia—perhaps—smiled.

Shyk

Shyk’s dream wasn’t an offer. It was a threat.

The sea opened, hands offering tools of ritual and blood. A voice below promised old power, old rites. But something else broke through—older, angrier. A dragon’s eye cracked the dream wide open.

Images spilled: dwarves forging under Moradin’s flame, shadar-kai sentinels at their side. Then screams. Cultists in skull masks. Shadow dragons tearing through the faithful.

The dragon’s voice pressed against his skull: They defied me. They hid. You carry their blood. When I wake, I will finish what they began—and you with it.

And then, like a knife in the ribs, a memory: his parents clutching his hands, hissing Never speak His name. We are Moradin’s, nothing more. Shyk woke cold, with truth heavy on his chest.

Rue

Rue’s dream was a song turned sour.

The Gray Beacon, her parents’ voices singing the familiar lullaby. A staircase of dripping brine leading her up, up, up. Their smiles waiting at the top. But the harmony was wrong. Hollow. Their faces flickered into alien masks, voices twisting: Sing with us. Forever.

Behind them, the beacon warped into tendrils, its light a pulsing eye. Rue tore free, heart pounding, certainty burning in her: family was not promise, it was chain.

The Tower’s Secrets

Between dreams, Shyk and Cassandra both felt it—the tower was not empty. Something hid in its stones, veiled behind wards or shadows. They searched, hands scraping over stone and dust. Nothing. But nothing found doesn’t mean nothing there.

The lighthouse kept its secrets. The party kept watch. And above them all, the beacon burned, a psychic pulse against the night.

Storms and Shadows

Morning broke sharp and uneasy. Some woke rested, others hollow-eyed, but all carried the echo of their dreams like scars behind the eyes.

First Mate Lira , ever the pragmatist, reminded them that dreams aren’t just nightmares — they’re currency. To the right buyer, visions are coin purses spilling gold. “The captain’ll know the names,” she said, and the implication was clear: what haunted them in the night might be for sale.

Eggs and Profits

The party retraced their path through the seagull nests, now emptied by the beacon’s pulse. The eggs remained, slick and strange.

• Shyk eyed one, curious, thinking of its worth.
• Cassandra offered her mage hand, careful, cautious — no one quite knew what that slime might do.
• Vex, of course, thought bigger. Profit. He packed a dozen eggs into sand and cloth, already imagining Fizz’s glee (and the coin purse that would follow). How many would survive the trip? That was a problem for later.

Storms Over Leylon

The island’s storm had cleared, but on the horizon, dark clouds roiled above Leylon.

Lira rowed them back to the Mermaid’s Lament. Crew scrambled, tying sail and rope, hungry for speed. Captain Tidevein offered Cassandra the spyglass — “for the Vexmoor among us.”

Through the lens, she saw the truth: Sahuagin shamans pulling lightning from the sky, House Vexmoor guards fighting tooth and nail at the shoreline. Then Thalindra Vexx — a woman Cassandra was meant to study under — walked calmly onto the field, raised her hands, and summoned a spectral orca that devoured a shaman in a single horrifying moment. Cassandra’s heart skipped: terror, awe, ambition.

But choice hung over them.

• Leylon, under siege.
• Nyelath’s Grace, sea elf allies waiting.

Go back and drown in a war? Or go forward and risk coming too late?

The Raiding Party

The decision was interrupted.

A sahuagin raiding party surged from the waves: dozens in total, but seven closed on the heroes. Warriors. Priests. And one scarred champion.

Steel met claw. Spells cracked. Blood stained the deck. Several nearly fell. Cassandra conjured her own phantasmal orca — a savage mimicry of Thalindra’s killer — and broke the champion’s resolve. She also cast Comprehend Languages, and for the first time, the party understood the screams:

The champion, Sek-Koloth, the Blood-Tide — Blood-Tide in their tongue — fled, roaring oaths of vengeance, leaving his priests and warriors to die.

Nyelath’s Grace

The ship pressed on, sails snapping in the wind. As they neared Nyelath's Grace , Lira pulled Cassandra aside. Gently, pointedly, she observed Cassandra’s lack of teeth in battle-magic. Then she offered her spellbook. Cassandra scrawled Magic Missile by lamplight, ink smearing as the colony rose from the sea.

They were greeted by Shellsinger Nyrae , who knew Shyk’s parents before marriage — a shock that cut through the salt and exhaustion. She welcomed them, ushering the party into the coral heart of the sea elf colony, where mythal magic made air and sea indistinguishable.

They dined. They shared stories. Vex traded trinkets with Thalorae Nemeris, forging an early bond. For a heartbeat, it felt like peace.

The Arrest

Then the Pearlguard stormed in. Dozens of sea elf soldiers, armor glittering like nacre, demanded the party’s manacles.

The heroes didn’t resist. Thalorae demanded answers.

A single guard gave them their answer.

The words dropped like stone into water, spreading ripples of dread.

Though hailed as a triumph, Cassian and Shyk both felt the strain in the ritual. The Beacon’s light did not close the wound beneath Leilon—it only slowed the bleeding. Something vast was already pushing through.

And the session ended.