C1 E4 in brief

The party’s missing cleric returns: Pike tracks them down through the mines, carrying a vision from her goddess that maps the road ahead — a lake, an onyx fortress framed in molten rock, a field of glass and bone. From their new ally Clarota they learn the full shape of the war: K’varn is an alien force that has seized the illithid Elder Brain — the hive’s shared mind — and through it enslaved the duergar and the monsters of the deep, and the camp across the chasm is building siege engines to invade Kraghammer above. The party plans a precise assault: blind the light-hating enemy with enchanted beacons while Vax and Scanlan infiltrate to behead their coordination. It works — they fly the lava chasm in stealth, land on the barracks roof, and an invisible Vax assassinates the camp’s mind flayer in two silent strokes before the fight even begins. The room erupts: Grog’s sun-bright helmet sears the duergar, Tiberius crushes three under pillars of stone, and Scanlan ends it bloodlessly by bending the general’s mind into ordering surrender — earning even Clarota’s grudging “well done.” Then triumph nearly turns to disaster: a burrowing bulette erupts from the floor, shakes Scanlan to the brink of death before Pike tears him from its jaws, drops Percy unconscious, and is finally killed by Grog with savage relish — jaws pried open, tongue ripped out, skull torn apart by hand. The camp is taken, the mind flayer dead, the general banished. Unresolved: Kima still unfound somewhere deeper, K’varn untouched with the Elder Brain in its grip, an aboleth lurking in the lake, and an army poised to march on the city above.