Operation Oasis

A nearby oasis was spotted from Grit's perch on the mountain. Anyone want to assemble a party and go investigate in the desert?

Recap

The oasis had been visible from Grit's mountain perch for some time now — a shimmering jewel of turquoise set into the bleached expanse of the desert. And where there was an oasis, there were answers. Answers about the hag who haunted these sands, who had marked Helena with her gaze and bound the hermit Grit in a bargain he could barely speak of. Four set out that day: Aldric Vaun, the vengeance-sworn paladin; Kouzlo, the high elf wizard; Thalen "Quick" Quickburrow, the harengon rogue; and Madam Helena the Mystic, the trickery cleric who already knew that Auntie Dirtha Bonebender was watching.

The Ascent to Grit's Camp

The party climbed first to the mountain camp, hoping to find Grit before venturing into the desert below. Thalen — wearing shoes, an unusual concession for a harengon — found himself plagued almost immediately. Sand crept into the folds of his pockets and cape as if guided by unseen hands, filling the fabric and pressing against his throat until the others stopped to help him clear it. Once free, Thalen invoked a blessing of aid and distributed what he cheerfully called "protein bars" to the group, bolstering them for the journey ahead.

Grit's camp was empty. The ornate tent anchored impossibly high on the mountainside sat quiet and undisturbed, the great cauldron that Dirtha had once drawn from now dry and cold. While Thalen called the hermit's name into the wind with typical harengon subtlety, Kouzlo examined the alchemical stores with a practiced eye. Among the ingredients he found candied rose stems — dipped and powdered in something arcane. A closer study of the plants revealed their nature: anyone who consumed one would find their voice turned to razors, each spoken word drawing blood from their own throat for the better part of an hour. Kouzlo pocketed several. Aldric took one as well.

Thalen, meanwhile, had found something far more practical tucked away in a small wooden box — a folding boat, compact enough to carry and large enough to sail.

Helena stood at the edge of the overlook and gazed out across the desert. Dust devils sprouted at her feet like restless children. Far out at the oasis, something massive broke the surface of the water in a tremendous splash. The desert was alive with movement, with things making themselves seen. She tried to read the feeling — whether she was truly being watched or merely uneasy — but could only say that it felt different this time. The last expedition had discovered Dirtha and drawn her attention. Helena was walking into the hag's domain now, and Dirtha knew she was coming.

Aldric laid a hand on Helena's shoulder and spoke the words of a warding prayer, shielding her from the touch of fey and fiend alike. Then they descended into the sand.

The Mirage

The desert floor was brutally hot. Aldric took point, his armor catching the sun as the party marched toward the distant oasis. But something was wrong. He could feel it before he could articulate it — they had been walking long enough that the oasis should have grown larger on the horizon, yet it remained fixed, unchanged, as if painted on the sky.

Kouzlo noticed it too, though from a different angle. He had been using the distant wizard's tower as a reference point, tracking their progress. The tower was drifting past them as they walked. They were covering ground. But the oasis was not getting closer — because it was not real.

Thalen nocked an arrow and let it fly toward the shimmering water. The shaft arced across the desert and struck something solid — something that was decidedly not water. In the same moment, the wind tore upward around them. Sand whirled into a column, and the mirage peeled away to reveal a towering dust elemental, a creature of spinning grit and fury that had been weaving the illusion of the oasis, luring the party deeper and deeper into the open desert.

Thalen's arrow jutted from what might have been an eye.

The creature had barely formed when Thalen loosed two more arrows in rapid succession. Both struck true, and the elemental came apart in a roar of collapsing sand, its body scattering across the dunes and vanishing into the desert floor.

With the creature's death, the illusion shattered entirely. The real oasis emerged from the haze — smaller, perhaps, than the mirage had promised, but unmistakably real. Helena heard a familiar voice carried on the dying wind, faint and sing-song, and understood. Dirtha's creature. Dirtha's magic. And destroying it had hurt the hag in some small way.

"Send my regards to Dirtha," Helena murmured to the settling sand.

The Oasis

The true oasis was a wide turquoise pool ringed by palm trees, with a scattering of canvas tents and the sounds of people — talking, singing, splashing in the water. Over the rise, the party found them: two dozen or so figures dressed in rough togas woven from natural fibers, barefoot and unbothered by the arrival of four armed strangers.

They did not look quite right.

Kouzlo began a ritual of identification over the oasis water while Helena traced a circle of warding magic in the sand. The water, Kouzlo would eventually determine, was simply water — but the entire area hummed with magic, the pool serving as a conduit for power flowing somewhere deeper.

Three of the oasis dwellers stood out from the rest.

Oula sat near the water's edge — a human woman with dark skin and long, tightly-bound braids past her waist. She hummed a low, continuous note and swirled one hand through the water with slow, languid grace. She did not blink. When Thalen approached her with his usual cheerful familiarity, and Aldric attempted the courtly charms of his former life, she answered in a dreamy monotone. She had been here forever, she said. She had everything she needed. Plenty to eat.

Aldric felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

Fenn was a jumpy young man sprawled on the ground, staring at nothing. Helena reached out to him through her Amulet of Whispering Stars, pressing a thought into his mind. He leapt to his feet in alarm — "Danger! Who this? How in head?" — then locked eyes with Helena and tilted his head with birdlike curiosity. He could be won, he said, for a price. "Food? Give Fenn food? Food then Fenn friend." Helena floated a morsel to him with an invisible mage hand. He snatched it from the air with his mouth.

Fenn approached the group afterward, hopping as he walked, but he circled wide around the pool. He would not touch the water. Thalen watched the others with fresh eyes: Oula basking in the sun, barely moving; Basra, a stout woman at the date stand, eating whole dates and moving with agonizing slowness. The realization dawned on them all at once.

Oula moved like a lizard. Basra like a tortoise. And Fenn —

"Kouzlo," Thalen said quietly, "I think this guy's a bird."

Fenn's head tilted again. "Fenn used to be bird," he said simply. "Desert lady changed him."

Helena asked if he would like to be a bird again. He said yes. She lured him toward the magic circle with another piece of food, and when he hesitated at its edge, she explained that the circle would free him from the desert lady's magic. Fenn reached one hand past the barrier — and watched as feathers erupted along his fingers, the transformation beginning to reverse before he pulled back in wonder.

But Fenn had something to offer in return. "Water deep," he said, his voice dropping. "Very deep. Desert lady go down water. Things in water. Fenn see it from above."

Basra was harder to read. She ran the date stand with the deliberate patience of a creature built for endurance, eating whole dates — pits and all — and speaking in long, slow sentences. Her skin was dry and olive-toned, not old but worn. She had been human for a very long time. She knew Grit — said he loved dates too, pits and all, like her. She had known him before the desert lady changed her form. "Grit wasn't," she said slowly. "Then Grit was. Grit brought balance. As Fenn would say — a friend."

Dirtha, Basra explained, could always be here. She traveled on the wind and in the water. As if to underscore the point, something glinted in the darkness beneath the surface, followed by a sudden splash. The party realized that the splashes they had seen from the mountain — Dirtha had been there then, too, but had departed before their arrival.

Two of Dirtha's favorite creatures waited below. Eels, Basra said. Lots of teeth.

The Descent

Kouzlo spoke the words of water breathing over the party, and one by one they slipped beneath the surface of the oasis. Aldric, wearing the Mariner's Armor he had acquired early in the Wildermarch expeditions, was surprised by how effortlessly it carried him through the water. Helena — who had no love for sun, sand, or swimming — sank reluctantly into the dark.

The pool was no pool at all. It dropped away into a deep vertical shaft, a well plunging into blackness beneath the desert. Helena cast a veil of magical silence over the party and drank one of Grit's teas, her eyes flaring amber as darkvision took hold. The group drifted downward like ghosts.

They saw the first eel before it saw them — a hundred feet of sinuous muscle and teeth gliding past in the dark, so close they could have touched its flank. It passed without noticing.

Thalen led them deeper, the party rolling and weaving past a second eel before the creatures became aware of intruders. Above them, one eel called down to the other: "Stitches — I think we have intruders."

"Snitches, you're always telling fibs."

The two began bickering and snapping at each other, and Thalen felt a bolt of light arc through the water toward them — Dirtha's attention, arriving too late. The water above darkened as the surface world closed behind them, but ahead, the shaft began to brighten. The water grew clearer, and a rushing sound built in their ears.

They emerged from the bottom of the well into open air — a waterfall, plunging into a vast underground lake. The party held formation, rode the cascade down, and surfaced on a rocky shore.

Auntie Dirtha Bonebender

The cavern was enormous. Stalagmites and stalactites of brown desert stone framed an underground lake fed by the thundering waterfall. The air had an ambient glow — not light, exactly, but something that softened the darkness enough to see. And there on the far bank, past a dune of sand, sat a small shack adorned with animal bones and a bubbling cauldron.

Auntie Dirtha Bonebender sat in front of it, talking to herself in a sing-song voice.

"One truth for one thing freely given. You choose I give, a deal's a deal."

She did not look up as they approached. "Oh, you found me. They always find me eventually. I do so love the ones who think it was their idea." A long, knowing pause. "Well, are you coming over then?"

The stew in her cauldron produced perhaps the worst smell any of them had ever encountered — a marriage of durian, dirty socks, and burning refuse. Dirtha gestured at the waterfall and snapped her fingers. It stopped. The water simply ceased to fall, leaving the cavern in silence.

"I'm your only option," she said.

She proposed a game. Questions traded, one for one. She invited them to go first.

Aldric, ever the courtier, offered Dirtha the first question instead. She smiled at his generosity and produced a deck of bone cards, shuffling them with long, crooked fingers.

She turned a card for Helena. The Tower, inverted. "The locust," she said. "Ruin that was uninvited." The sand behind Helena erupted as a giant scorpion burst forth, pincers clacking.

A card for Aldric. The Hanged Man. "Drowned king. He who would not give, so everything was taken." The wall of the shack groaned, and a sarcophagus cracked open. Cloth-wrapped hands pulled a mummified figure upright.

Then Dirtha drew a third card and studied it. Judgment. Her voice shifted — lower, older. "The Empty Throne. I was waiting. I was always waiting. Lucky for you, they sent a herald."

A wave of primal terror crashed over the party. Helena and Aldric felt it seize their hearts — a dread beyond reason, beyond courage, the certainty that they stood before something ancient and patient and utterly without mercy.

Dirtha tucked the card away. "That one's not for today."

She rose and stepped toward the shack. "If you need me," she said, already dissolving into a wisp of desert wind, "I'll be below."

She was gone. And the wind that followed her departure began to strip the sand from the cavern floor, grain by grain, revealing what had been buried beneath them all along.

The shack did not sit on stone. It sat on the apex of a pyramid — vast, ancient, and descending into the earth. The entrance lay through the shack itself, into the dark below.

Behind them, the scorpion's pincers snapped. The mummy's wrappings rustled as it took its first step.

The expedition was far from over.