Session 12: The Abyssal Requiem

Beneath the Deep

The group kept walking, deeper into the ocean’s embrace, until the sand gave way to a stone structure—a large ruin jutting up from the seabed like a forgotten memory. There was no door, just an open archway leading into silence. Freeya paused, eyes narrowing as she surveyed the space. Glimmers of arcane energy shimmered faintly far above, wrapping the area in a subtle dome. Around lay broken planks of wood, a splintered mast, and a chest half-sunken into the sand. The structure didn’t look like it had fallen here—it was built into the sea floor, ancient and unmoved.

Freeya knelt and whispered magic into the sand, causing a small flower to bloom—a whisper of life in the quiet. The chest didn’t react. Kit, ever the skeptic, threw a dart at it. Still nothing. With a grin, Freeya picked the lock and opened it. Inside: seaworn clothes, a barnacle-encrusted helmet, and a stunning ring that looked like seaweed twisted around a soft pink pearl.

The helmet thrummed with quiet power—enchanted. So was the ring, though it didn’t carry any ominous energy. Freeya passed the ring to Blossom, who slipped it on and found her thoughts able to connect with her friends while underwater. The Pearl of Silent Speech.

Freeya took the helm. As soon as she donned it, she knew she could breathe easily beneath the waves once she was out of this water-tight dome. It also granted protection against being tangled in tentacles—likely useful in the dark places below. 

Once inside the temple, the group moved down a long hallway carved into the stone, its walls marked with symbols none could read. An old fountain, long since dry and filled with silt, waited in the middle. The walls bore carvings that grew more detailed the farther they walked. Freeya inspected them. One was a man—long hair, long beard—surrounded by waves and glyphs. Some images had been defaced, scraped away as if in anger or mourning. Their meaning remained lost to her.

Kit and Blossom drifted toward the fountain. Blossom got distracted by a tall sculpture of a shadowy figure carved into the wall—massive, dark, imposing. Kit focused on the fountain itself, digging gently through the silt. Something gleamed—a large pendant shaped like a curling wave wrapped around a teardrop-shaped gem. Once blue, the gem was now black, as though filled with ink.

The room dimmed. Kit's friends' voices became echoes. In their place: the sound of crashing waves. He was somewhere else entirely.

A woman knelt at the edge of a cliff, holding the same pendant in trembling hands. The gem in hers still glowed blue. “You never answered me,” she whispered to the sea, tears falling freely. A massive shape rose from the ocean’s depths—serpentine, crowned, ancient. He gazed down at her with sorrow.

“I wouldn’t abandon you, Driatha,” he said.

His form stirred a memory—something Kit had seen once in meditation. Veddon. Then Kit blinked, and he was back. The pendant was still in his hands, its gem now dark and cold.

They learned that Driatha had been a high priestess whose village was wiped out by a freak storm. No one came to help. The sea had taken everything.

Freeya called out for Porthos. Her voice echoed across the ruins... but no reply came.

Blossom turned to inspect the sculpture again. Beneath the carving of Veddon, another relief had been buried—its lines older, more graceful. Freeya cast Comprehend Languages and stepped close, letting the magic guide her eyes. One name emerged: Lira’nelle. The Deep Sanctum of the Wellspring.

Above the name, someone had carved a darker title: The Abyssal Requiem.

This had once been a temple to the Wellspring, a sacred place for sea elves and tide priests—older than any could date.

Blossom recalled a song from long ago, one that mentioned Lira’nelle, though only in passing. A name sung in reverence, now nearly forgotten.

Freeya brushed her fingers across another inscription:

“The tide once gave, but now it takes. May those who enter carry light where our god no longer dwells.”

With a spark of defiance, she cast Light on a small rock and walked through the hall, casting a soft glow against the carvings. Near the fountain, something else glimmered—just barely. She knelt, brushed away silt, and found a coin etched with a strange, alien symbol. A jagged spiral, with an eye at its center and thorny tendrils reaching outward.

“I don’t know what this means,” Freeya whispered—and then she, too, was elsewhere.

A woman in a torn green dress knelt before an altar. Her skin was cracked with salt, her hands bleeding into the waters. Veddon stood over her.

“You offer the Wellspring’s heart,” he said, “and I will give you a kingdom of despair.”

“I give you my voice, beauty, and soul,” she answered. “Let me rule what he abandoned.”

He looked upon her with an eerie stillness.
“Your voice will drown the stars,” Veddon said, “and your song will pull them down.”

And then she was gone. The vision ended. But its weight remained.

Somewhere in the deep, a god was silent. And something darker had answered in his place.

Echoes Beneath the Tide

They moved carefully through the ruins, wary now of what lay dormant in the shadows. The temple gave up no warmth, no welcome—only a growing sense of something ancient and watching.

The first signs came subtly. A few more of those strange, corrupted coins lay half-buried in the silt—etched with spirals, eyes, and thorns, whispering of something cultic and long-forgotten. Kit passed the coins around, each holding them as if trying to weigh meaning into their cursed weight.

Freeya knelt and examined the area around them, brushing away sand until she found the imprint of something inhuman—slithering, winding. And then… hoof prints. Something unnatural had walked these halls.

Then Mello asked the question: “What is this?”

As Kit answered Mellow, she saw his eyes glaze, and when his mouth opened, “Driatha!” he cried, voice torn from another time. Mello blinked and she was somewhere else, an elven village perched on a cliffside. Storm clouds tore across the sky, wind tangling Mello's long dark hair as she looked down at her green dress, trembling. She was no longer herself, but someone else. 

A young elf ran toward her, panicked. “We have to leave!”
But she stood firm, desperate. “We just have to pray harder. He’ll save us.”

He left to gather the villagers. She stayed. And the vision faded like foam on the tide.

Freeya moved on, her steps silent in a long, dark hallway. The hoof prints carried on before her, winding deeper.

Blossom took one of the coins, held it in her palm, and focused. No vision. Nothing but cold metal and unanswered questions. So she knelt. Meditated. The chamber faded around her.

Something brushed her leg. Cold. Slimy. She reached out instinctively—and touched the rubbery surface of a tentacle. It curled around her.

The darkness beneath the waves swallowed her mind. Blood drifted in the water like smoke. Shadows slithered around a massive kraken, bound by arcane chains. Before him hovered a woman—convulsing, cracking. Her skin salted, her nails blackened, her eyes turned milky. She screamed until she wasn’t a woman anymore, but a hag. The birth of something terrible.

Blossom snapped back into the room with a gasp, heart pounding. The vision still echoed behind her eyes.

They hurried now, following Freeya’s path, drawn down the same twisting hallway, hearts hammering. They couldn’t let her face whatever was down there alone.

Freeya, alone, had stepped into a cavern. The ceiling rose high above her, the water held back by the arcane dome. Something drifted in that water—shapes she couldn’t name. Whispers pressed at her thoughts, subtle at first, then urgent. They searched her memories. They clawed at her fears.

She fought to hold herself together.

As Mello, Blossom and Kit entered the room, they saw Freeya standing before a cracked basin crusted with salt, symbols etched into its jagged rim. Chains clinked softly on the walls, rusted and hanging limp. Beyond the basin, a stone altar choked with dried seaweed stood like a monument to despair.

And on it lay a body.

Porthos.

Freeya’s breath caught, and everyone's with it.

This temple had once been devoted to healing, to the Wellspring. Now it was nothing but a husk.

And whatever had taken its place?

It had stolen more than just hope.

The Sea's Whispering Death

Porthos lay there like a broken statue, his body sprawled on the stone altar, cold and unmoving. His head turned away from where everyone stood, his face a frozen mask of terror, caught mid-scream. The dark shapes of seaweed curled around him, twisted into strange, cryptic symbols—symbols that mirrored the unnatural coins we had found earlier. They could feel the air thicken with the weight of something wrong, something ancient.

Freeya whispered his name, over and over—“Porthos… Porthos…”—but he did not stir. His body was battered, his armor ripped open in places, as though something had torn at him. The rest gathered, stepping cautiously toward the altar, their eyes falling on the grisly scene before us.

The seaweed seemed almost ritualistic, arranged with deliberate care around Porthos, along with broken trinkets—more of those cursed coins, tarnished pendants, and shattered scales, placed meticulously in a circle. In the center of Porthos’s chest was a jagged puncture wound, and though he wasn’t breathing, something else was wrong. His throat and the wound were clogged with barnacles, and it looked as though they were alive, pulsing.

They all stood still, trying to piece together what had happened, but none of them could quite make sense of it. Kit, usually the first to pick up on clues, was too shaken to focus—his gaze locked on his fallen friend.

Freeya and Mello, though, were the ones who finally put it together. They realized that the symbols etched into the walls and the seaweed around Porthos matched the cursed imagery of thorns, eyes, and spirals—markings that linked to the darkness they had been investigating. The realization hit like a wave crashing against rocks.

“I have to break this,” Freeya said, voice tight, as she began to move the trinkets and symbols around the altar, trying to disrupt the circle.

It was then that Mello, who had been silent for a while, began to speak of her own vision—the village by the sea, the man calling for her to believe in the Wellspring’s salvation, his desperate cry for them to have faith. It was clear now that whatever had happened to Porthos, it was linked to this forsaken place, to the sea, to powers that were not meant to be.

Freeya, deep in meditation, was the next to see something—a vision, not of the village, but of a woman in green robes standing amidst a storm-swept sea.

“He has turned from you, child,” the woman’s voice came, dripping with coldness. “But I have not.”

Freeya felt the pull of her words, the lure of something deeper, darker. The woman beckoned her, “The Wellspring leaves you to drown, but I offer breath in the dark. Follow me, and the waters will know you once again. Not as servant, but as queen.” The sea hag’s twisted grin flashed before Freeya, her voice a rasping whisper, urging her to follow.

But Freeya… she had already made her choice. “No thanks, man. Hard pass,” she replied, her resolve as firm as the ground beneath her feet. “I’m good.”

But the vision didn’t end. The sea hag’s form twisted, and her face morphed into something far more terrifying. “You see how the Wellspring recedes,” she hissed, “but Veddon offers power. Follow him. Follow him. Follow him…”

The vision shattered, leaving Freeya breathless and shaken. She had been offered a power, yes—but at a steep price.

Kit, who had been watching the events unfold, now took the pendant they had found earlier and passed it to Blossom, trying to reach out to the Wellspring with a prayer, her heart heavy with doubt. She reached for the blue water droplet, hoping for some connection, some response from her god.

But the whisper she heard chilled her to the bone.

“Your god is dead.”

Blossom’s heart pounded as the room seemed to tilt, as if the walls themselves were closing in. Her vision blurred, and when she opened her eyes, she lifted them towards the sounds of the whispers. The dead floated far above her, their hollow eyes fixed upon her, whispering the same refrain over and over.

“Your god is dead.”

The weight of those words hung in the air, like the crushing weight of the ocean’s depths.

---

The Inner Sanctum

They all carried Porthos’ lifeless body through the exit of the chamber, the steps heavy with the weight of their loss. The shadows seemed to close in tighter as they moved deeper into the heart of the sunken ruins. Around them, the ocean whispered its secrets—secrets held in the skeletons that clung to the remnants of a half-drowned ship. A broken temple, its pillars shattered and crumbled, loomed like the hollow shell of a forgotten god, while a massive carving of a Kraken stared down at us from the stone wall. It seemed to watch, its eyes cold and judging, as if the very sea itself had a stake in our fate.

They had no choice but to walk through the wreckage, the ghostly remnants of a ship long claimed by the sea. As they trudged forward, Mello’s keen eyes caught something half-buried in the sand: a mace, crafted from bone, with strange symbols etched into the handle—the teardrop and the eye, sacred marks of the Wellspring. Nearby, she found a shield, worn and weathered, its surface crafted from petrified coral. And then, there was a harpoon, crackling with arcane energy, its steel gleaming eerily in the dim light.

The artifacts felt wrong—ancient relics of power twisted by the sea, but they could not ignore their potential. The mace, imbued with power, granted Mello the ability to control the very water around her once a day. The shield, strong and steadfast, protected against psychic damage and could summon a magical barrier at will. The harpoon, wicked and deadly, returned to its wielder’s hand after striking—its sharp steel laced with the ability to do more than just pierce flesh.

With the relics in hand, they emerged from the wreckage only to find themselves face-to-face with the creature they feared most: the Sea Hag, Driatha. Her form loomed like a nightmare given flesh, the sea’s wrath embodied in her twisted, gnarled shape. She stood there, her presence a sickening blend of malice and ancient power, and they had no choice but to confront her.

She wasted no time, reaching out with watery tendrils to wrap Kit in a vise of liquid death, but her magic faltered. Mello was the first to act, casting Tasha's Caustic Brew, and a sizzling stream of acidic liquid struck Porthos’ corpse—though his body was long gone, a shadow of him still fought, now under Driatha’s control. The acid seared through him, but he failed to resist it, the burning spreading across his undead form.

Freeya, ever the strategist, summoned a giant rat from her bag of tricks. The rodent’s sharp teeth sank into Driatha’s foul flesh, a brief but satisfying bite before the hag’s attention turned toward her. Porthos, now an unwilling pawn in this twisted game, took a vicious strike at Blossom, but she retaliated with her katana, slashing through the dark air.

Kit, his heart racing, moved closer to Driatha and, with a flicker of hope, raised the amulet of the Wellspring, half-mockingly invoking its power. “The power of the Wellspring compels you?” he quipped, firing his crossbow at her. The bolt struck, but Driatha barely flinched. With a twisted smile, she simply pulled it from her body, unaffected by the puny attack.

Her response was swift—an icy cone of water surged toward Kit. He dodged just in time, his reflexes barely keeping him out of its deadly grip.

Blossom’s turn came next, and she swung with deadly intent, striking Porthos with her jazz sword, but missing her second strike. But before she could recover, the lair’s energy shifted—the room began to flood with dark, shadowy water, pulling at their legs and dragging at their resolve. Time was running out.

Driatha surged toward Kit, but the rat that Freeya summoned took an opportunity attack, sinking its teeth into the hag's watery form. Meanwhile, Driatha’s claws raked across Kit’s flesh, a mixture of slashing damage and necrotic decay leaving him weakened.

In retaliation, Mello whipped out her “Shot Glass” revolver, a weapon she had long kept in reserve. The blast of bottled breath blasted through the air, hitting Driatha with devastating force. A deafening crack echoed as the explosion sent her staggering back.

But Driatha wasn’t finished. In a final, wrathful move, she conjured a sphere of spectral, drowned limbs and tentacles that rose from the ground, threatening to ensnare Mello. She fought back, managing to break free with a successful strength save, but the water’s weight was becoming unbearable.

Freeya’s rat attacked once more, though it missed, and Freeya quickly used her bag of tricks again, summoning a badger to the battlefield. But Porthos, the man we had known, was now a weapon of the hag’s will. His attack on Blossom struck true.

Kit, determined not to lose anyone else, advanced again, striking Driatha with his short sword. His blade bit into her, but it wasn’t enough. He then offered himself up in exchange for the safety of his friends, hoping against hope that the hag would take pity on him. But Driatha only laughed, the cruel joy evident in her eyes.

Blossom attacked once more, her sword biting into Driatha’s form, but then her attention flickered to Porthos, who was still a threat. She missed with her next strike, frustration mounting.

It was then that Driatha’s hands lowered, and her eyes glowed with an otherworldly light—a sickly deep-sea green swirling within them. Kit, ever the desperate hero, tossed the compass to Freeya, and in that instant, a surge of tentacles erupted around him and the hag.

“These are the words I’ve waited to hear,” Driatha’s voice rasped, and her grin twisted in satisfaction. “The pearl was never a gift, it was the key.”

The arcane dome above shattered with a resounding crack, and the very foundations of the lair began to shake as the power of the sea threatened to pull them under.