The party begins the session still standing in the aftermath of Behzad’s latest disaster.
His lightning breath cleared the rubbish room of beetles, but also left most of the party singed, covered in soot, and very much on fire. Once again, the group reprimands him for acting recklessly inside a flammable, collapsing ruin beneath Wolford. Behzad insists that he is in control of himself and determined to prove that he is still thinking clearly.
To demonstrate this, he and Malcolm Monsterblade scout ahead.
The next room is a long stairway climbing upward through the ruins. Behzad and Malcolm reach the top, only for an ancient boulder trap to activate. A massive stone comes crashing down the stairs behind them, forcing both men to flee. Behzad tries to dash clear, but trips badly, breaking one of his legs as he tumbles down multiple stories of stairs and lands back in the trash pile below.
Fable reacts quickly, throwing a Bead of Force to slow the rolling boulder long enough for Malcolm to escape without being crushed. Nys then uses a broken scythe from the trash pit to make a splint for Behzad, allowing him to walk again, though only at half speed.
The party presses on and soon finds another dead end. There, they encounter the strange will-o’-wisp from earlier, which seems to have taken a liking to Fable and begins following her through the dungeon.
Returning to the eagle statue, the party tries once again to retrieve the bracelet from its mouth. The will-o’-wisp investigates and attempts to shock the bracelet loose, but misses and shocks Behzad instead. The accident pushes him further into paranoia, another small humiliation twisted into proof that the dungeon, and perhaps the party, are against him.
Eventually, Fable reaches into the eagle’s mouth herself. The trap activates, snapping shut on her arm and forcing Nys to use her +1 crowbar to pry the mouth open.
With the bracelet finally in hand, the party returns to the room of petrified statues. They discover that the bracelet allows its wearer to meld with stone. Using it, Behzad partially unpetrifies the head of the strange creature wearing an ancient headdress of roc feathers. The headdress appears to date back to the earliest age of humanity, likely one of the only surviving artifacts of Tharizdun’s human followers from before the Dawn War.
Behzad also finds a Necklace of Adaptation hidden on a body beneath a crushed boulder.
Using the bracelet, the party phases through a boulder blocking their path and enters a chamber filled with poisonous gas. Inside waits a Gas Spore. Protected by the Necklace of Adaptation, Nys dispatches the creature, then investigates the room with Fable, who can hold her breath indefinitely as an undead.
Then something comes over Behzad.
Standing before a room thick with explosive gas, he feels the urge to use his lightning breath again. This time, the consequences would be catastrophic. The explosion would likely kill the entire party and collapse the temple around them.
Behzad manages to hold himself back.
Vulmer, seeing how close they came to annihilation, demands to know if Behzad is trying to get them all killed. He tells him that he needs to pull himself together. Behzad, injured, humiliated, and increasingly consumed by whatever the Faceless God has planted in him, snaps back that Vulmer does not understand what he is going through.
The party continues deeper into the dungeon, still searching for a way out.
But by now, the question hanging over them is no longer only whether they can survive the ruins beneath Wolford.
It is whether they can survive Behzad.