The party finally reunites with Fern on the far side of the temple, but not gracefully.
As they round a corner, a wooden ball flies through the hallway and strikes Behzad directly in the face, breaking his nose and adding one more indignity to an already miserable expedition. Peering around the corner, they discover Fern casually using his quarterstaff like a bat, knocking the ball around the corridor in an effort to disarm an ancient trap. The ball ricochets from the wall and drops neatly into a circular alcove, disabling the mechanism.
Fern greets everyone as though nothing unusual has happened.
Behzad pulls himself up and immediately chastises him for his recklessness. Fern begins whispering with Fable about Behzad seeming “off,” but Behzad overhears them. His paranoia deepens, and for the first time since entering the temple, he hangs back while Fern and Fable take the lead.
The hallway opens into a disturbing chamber filled with taxidermied tigers and petrified werejaguars. Each corpse has been partially eaten, as though the Faceless God fed upon them during its long slumber. Three doors branch out from the chamber, and the party pauses to decide what to do.
That discussion nearly becomes a mutiny.
Most of the party wants to escape. They entered the ruins unprepared, have already suffered severe injuries, and now understand that the temple is not merely dangerous, it is failing as a prison. Behzad refuses to leave. As acting Lord Regent of Wolford, he promised to scout the entire complex, and he insists that every chamber must be cleared.
Malcolm Monsterblade, Captain of Wolford, declares that he will follow Behzad’s command. With Malcolm’s shotgun cocked and the dungeon’s air still dangerously flammable, the rest of the party fears that refusing Behzad outright may provoke a confrontation.
Behzad notices that one of the petrified creatures is missing its heart. Looking directly at Fable, he muses aloud about what kind of monster would be cruel enough to consume the hearts of living beings.
Fable warns him to watch himself.
Nearby, Vulmer quietly tells Nys that he fears the party is about to murder one another.
They press onward.
At the end of a long hall, the party opens a door and finds the Faceless God standing with its back to them. Fable and Fern immediately close the doors and retreat, only to find the entity waiting on the opposite side of the chamber.
Fable looks into the emptiness beneath its hood.
The creature changes.
It takes Behzad’s form, repeating his insults and accusations about her vampirism. Fable and Fern turn away again, taking the others down a different passage. Nys remains behind for a moment, watching the entity.
It shows her how she died.
Before the Raven Queen returned her as a shadar-kai, Nys served as a guard in Charmed Cove, the capital of the Sapest. On a dark and stormy night, she followed a trail of blood through the streets, pursuing a cloaked rogue into an alley. There, she was struck from behind by a curved scythe, the same type depicted upon Tharizdun’s sarcophagus.
Nys never saw her killer’s face.
Now the entity supplies one.
As she hits the wet cobblestones, she looks up and sees Behzad beneath the assassin’s hood. Then the vision disappears, leaving Nys staring into an empty room.
Elsewhere, the rest of the party discovers a chamber filled with rubble from the recent explosions. Dozens of members of the Golden Rat Syndicate are buried beneath the wreckage. This appears to be where they tunneled upward from the Underdark. While their bugbear fighters went into the mines to loot, the noncombatants: women, children, laborers, and tradespeople, remained behind.
Now they have been consumed by the same madness affecting Behzad.
The chamber has become a slaughterhouse. Fathers crush their sons’ skulls with stones. Friends scream accusations while kicking and shoving one another. The room is filled with bodies and the sound of terrified people mistaking loved ones for enemies.
Fable tries to subdue them without killing them, but the crowd is moving too violently for her to land a clean nonlethal blow.
Behzad begins striking goblins down with his maul.
Malcolm follows his lead and unloads his shotgun into the civilians.
The madness ends in gunfire.
Nys interrogates the only survivor and discovers that his mind is almost completely scrambled. He is the same goblin Alyviel interrogated outside Crackjaw during their first descent. He believes the goblins he killed were members of the party, while mistaking the actual adventurers for his friends. He even identifies Behzad as Big Ears, returned to lead him.
Behzad orders the goblin to follow them.
The next chamber contains a Dead Rot Tree, a plant Fable remembers from her father’s castle. Such trees only grow in desecrated soil. Around its roots sits a pool of black water, unholy oil prized by necromancers for its ability to heal the undead.
Its presence confirms that the temple’s restraints are deteriorating. The sacred protections still active in the temple’s other half have already failed here.
Fable collects several jars of the oil before the passage loops back into the tiger chamber.
Only one door remains.
Behzad insists they must clear it. Nys begs him to leave. She confronts him over the goblin civilians and the brutality of what happened in the previous room.
Behzad claims he did not know Malcolm would open fire. He insists that he was merely trying to push the goblins apart and stop the fighting.
When the party continues objecting, Behzad slams his maul against the stone floor.
He tells them that if they are afraid, they may leave, but he will not fail the city that entrusted him with its protection.
Nys warns him:
“Pride goeth before the fall.”
Silence fills the chamber.
Behzad’s Maul of Warning, vibrating from the impact, solemnly declares:
“Something bad is going to happen today.”
Behzad opens the final door.
Beyond it, Tharizdun sits upon a throne of bones, staring into a well filled with will-o’-wisps. As the party approaches, Fable’s strange will-o’-wisp companion blocks her path, seemingly warning her away from the dark artifact.
Tharizdun does not speak in complete sentences, but the meaning is clear. The toll has already been paid. Around the well, Behzad sees the souls of the slaughtered goblins drifting like motes of light.
The Faceless God offers him a chance to Gaze Beyond the Veil.
Behzad accepts.
He asks for the truth of the Dawn War, the truth about the gods and the nature of the world.
To the rest of the party, Behzad’s face is submerged for only seconds. To Behzad, thousands of years of history tear through his mind. He witnesses the hidden structure of creation and learns what he believes to be the truth behind everything.
In madness, he finds clarity.
When he pulls his head from the well, Fable and Fern tell him he has gone too far—that he has lost his mind.
Behzad laughs. He says he expected no better from followers of the Dawn War. He begins speaking of J-On, a name none of them has ever heard, and of J-On’s rings of light, leaving the party reeling from the sudden, incomprehensible revelation.
As Behzad speaks, Tharizdun rises behind him like his shadow and rests a hand upon his shoulder.
Behzad tells the entity that he will not free it from the prison, but thanks it for revealing the truth. He asks what it desires.
Tharizdun answers:
“Requiem.”
Then it asks Behzad to become its Puppet Master.
To Fern’s horror, Behzad begins to kneel and accept the Faceless God’s blessing as its Champion of Chaos.
A playing card cuts through the room.
Vulmer throws the last card in his hand, striking Behzad with a critical blow and slamming him into the temple wall. Behzad falls unconscious.
Vulmer slides into the chamber and orders Fable to get Behzad out. Whatever else Behzad has become, Vulmer insists he remains the rebellion’s best chance.
Fable tells Vulmer that he had better be directly behind her.
Fern and Vulmer try to coordinate their escape. But as Vulmer turns to leave, a hand tears out from the void beneath Tharizdun’s hood and catches him.
The rest of the god’s body collapses into that arm, becoming momentum behind a single impossible strike. The fist drives through Vulmer’s skull and vanishes into his mind.
Vulmer collapses, screaming and convulsing.
Fable drops Behzad into Nys’s arms and cradles Vulmer as he thrashes. He calls her Francis, mistaking her for their long-dead friend, and begs to leave. He does not want to be here.
With his last moments of clarity, Vulmer asks Fern for his bag.
Inside, Fern finds a Deck of Many Things.
Vulmer draws a single card.
Donjon.
He vanishes into an extradimensional prison, taking Tharizdun with him.
Fable freezes in shock and grief. Fern grabs her and begins dragging her from the chamber while Nys pulls Behzad behind them.
Then Vulmer’s magic fades.
The playing card still lodged in Behzad’s neck disappears, and the wound it had been holding closed tears open across his jugular. Nys tries to stop the bleeding, but the injury is too deep. Fern fey steps to Behzad’s side and presses his hands against the wound.
In Behzad’s final moments, madness twists what he sees.
Fern appears in a celebratory cloud of Feywild flowers, as though arriving to rejoice in Behzad’s defeat and finish the murder he and Fable had supposedly planned throughout the dungeon.
Behzad dies in Fern’s arms.
The final sound he hears is his maul striking the stone floor and whispering:
“I warned you.”
The party carries Behzad’s body through the mines and back to the Church of Wolford. The clerics empty the city’s diamond reserves to resurrect their fallen regent.
But on the other side of death, Behzad stands within the Donjon beside Vulmer.
Vulmer is no longer himself.
Now fully serving as Tharizdun’s puppet, he stands among the ruins of the Lattice of Heaven, staring through an empty portal. He tells Behzad that his time will come soon. The Faceless God will escape its prison, all in due time.
Behzad returns to life.
But not unchanged.
His piety has been left behind in the Donjon. In its place remains Pride.
He tells Nys that his mind is now as clear as a peaceful river. He knows the truths of the world, but they no longer control him. Yet in the same breath, he insists the others could never understand what he now knows. They remain misguided followers of the Dawn War.
Fable confronts him. She tells him that his recklessness cost them Vulmer and demands to know whether he cares at all.
Behzad coldly replies that Vulmer’s loss is unfortunate, but that he should have known better than to interfere in forces he did not understand. His fate, Behzad argues, was the result of the party’s continued plotting against him.
Nys asks whether Behzad intends to betray them.
He says he currently has no current plans to harm them. Even if they did intentionally kill him, he will not hold it against them. They simply did not know any better.
Fable explodes.
She declares that she hates him and tells him that if he wants a duel, she will be waiting outside.
Then she storms to the far side of the chapel, leaving the resurrected Lord Regent behind.
Behzad has returned from death.
Vulmer is gone.
And Pride has found them both.