Find the Tidefang

Kessara, the de facto leader of the remaining Lizardfolk, was able to translate the Draconic letter the party discovered in session 3. As luck would have it, the letter is to her. It was a message sent from her betrothed from aboard the vessel Tidefang.

Found on the beach south of camp near the corpse of a great sea beast and the mouth of a cave, Kessara knows her warm-scale is likely lost, but she needs closure. She's duty-bound to stay with her tribe and is asking N.O.D.E. to go in her stead: search the sea caves down the southern coast for any sign of the Tidefang or its crew. The caves only open at low tide.

Recap

The fire burned low as N.O.D.E. gathered beneath the evening stars. Gryph played softly — a strange melody called The Collector's Call — and the sand around the flames stirred as though alive, reaching in thin tendrils like the threads of some underground fungus, bursting upward in brief, silent blooms before falling still again.

New faces had found their way to the company. Rory Ashbloom, a halfling druid barely four and a half feet tall, sat cross-legged in boots worn through at the toes, his beard missing its mustache, a fire corgi called Sparky curled warm at his side. Petunia had arrived as well — old and thin and bright as a sunrise in her pink robes and pointed hat, an apron still tied at her waist and a crooked staff leaning against her knee. Her familiar, a translucent wyrm weasel that shimmered like something not entirely of this world, coiled lazily nearby while she passed around a tin of chocolate chip cookies. She'd buried a husband, she said. Decided she wasn't going to sit at home and be a burden to her children. She was going to live.

And then there was Vessel. Thalen had been charting constellations with Shadow when the figure appeared behind him — humanoid, half-elven in proportion, but obscured. A mask covered its face. Black paint covered everything else. "This one is called Vessel," it said flatly. "I was shown to be here by my lady. Here to help." Petunia offered a cookie. Vessel accepted it without pleasure. "This one would require sustenance. Thank you."

The laughter and warmth of the fire dimmed when Kessara approached. The lizardfolk leader carried no physical burden, but her shoulders hung low all the same. She spoke carefully, gratefully, and with visible pain.

"The moon has grown fat and thin again, and S'shar is still gone. I know what is likely, but I must know for certain. You have given so much, and so I am sorry that I must ask for more. I ask you to return to where you found his message. Please find the Tidefang. Please find S'shar. Please rid me of this cruel hope."

Petunia welcomed the task with open arms. Rowan, who had been restless and eager, answered the call as well — tired of sitting on the sidelines while others ventured out. Rory, earnest and stumbling, asked what S'shar looked like. Kessara brushed him off gently and turned to speak with her elders. The halfling went red. Gryph clapped him on the back and told him to shake it off — plenty of fish in the sea, and besides, the lady sounded spoken for. Rory stammered that that wasn't what he'd meant at all. Gryph had already moved on.

Starting off on the right foot

Morning came with the smell of food. Petunia had commandeered every ingredient she could find and was cooking a meal of extraordinary ambition. Rory hovered close, wide-eyed — he'd never had a true meal before, having foraged his whole life, eating whatever the land offered when it offered it. Petunia coached him through it with infectious enthusiasm. The meal left everyone sharp and ready for the day ahead.

Vessel drifted between the others, asking about their dreams. Gryph waved the question off — he didn't need dreams, he was living one. Petunia confessed she'd been too excited to sleep. Vessel offered only that it did not dream, and had spent the night with sleep.

They met Kessara down by the coast before departing. She told them what she could. The Tidefang was a fishing vessel — small, sail-driven, built to hug the coastline and return with salt-packed catches. It had carried five to ten of her kin. Her people were not seafarers by nature; they preferred the heat of deserts and swamps, and even in summer the ocean ran too cold for their blood. Before they left, Thalen came running with a gift — a folding boat, compact enough to carry in one hand. Rory and Rowan stared at it, disbelieving. Rory thought Thalen was joking.

Arrival at the beach

The coastline was familiar to some. The remains of the great sea beast still lay where it had fallen, though the gulls and tides had done their work — nothing remained but bleached bone and cartilage and the hollow shells of crabs scattered across the rocks. The salt wind pulled at their cloaks as the tide retreated, revealing wet stone and dark sand.

Rory's sharp eyes caught a glint near the cave mouth. Several, in fact — reflections off cookware lashed to a fishing net along with bone and other hard pieces, all tied together with clear intention. Rowan found the far end of the net staked to the ground with a broken spear, pulled taut on both sides like a tripwire strung across the entrance. A warning system. Someone had wanted to know if anything came in.

Gryph picked up a pot lid and struck it. The sound echoed into the dark and came back empty. Nothing answered.

They entered the cave.

Entering the cave

Rory produced a flame in his palm and held it behind him so Petunia could see. The ground sloped downward. Seawater pooled at their feet, trapped by the retreating tide, and their boots found uncertain footing on slick stone. The air thickened with brine and something faintly organic. Then, as their eyes adjusted, they saw it — a shape on the far side of the pool. Low in the water, rocking gently. A vessel. Small and sturdy-looking, sitting where the cave floor dipped deepest.

A crab the size of a dog lunged at Rory from the shallows. He pulled his foot back just in time. The cave erupted into motion — a second crab, a spider dropping from the ceiling on a thread of silk.

Petunia cast a bonfire beneath the first crab with a flourish that looked like something out of another age — components and materials scattered everywhere, the spell woven the way it had been done eighty years ago. The crab cooked where it stood. Gryph hurled mockery at the second, his words biting deeper than any blade. The spider sank its fangs into Rowan — a vicious strike that drove poison deep — but the party rallied. Petunia lulled both spider and crab to sleep with a wave of her hand. Gryph's whispered taunts — coward, coward, coward — manifested physically, sand spiraling from his pouch like a drill beneath the water, grinding the fleeing crab's shell to nothing. And when the spider woke thrashing and furious, it was Vessel who ended it. Sound itself seemed to rush toward the masked figure, gathering like a held breath, then crashed outward into the spider with the force of a wave breaking against stone. The creature burst apart. The cavern went silent.

Rory knelt beside Rowan and pressed healing magic into the wound, once and then again, until color returned to the rogue's face. Petunia offered one of her treats. Rory asked Vessel what had just happened. "That was not me," Vessel said. "That was Sleep's will."

The remnants of a camp

The Tidefang sat half-afloat in the shallows beyond — a humble, working boat, built for function. Her sails hung frayed from a mast that still stood but had seen better days. Nearby, the ashes of a cold fire and the splintered remains of broken furniture marked a camp long abandoned.

Rowan climbed aboard and found the deck mostly bare. Five bedrolls, stacked neatly. A door in the floor. A locked door beneath the rear deck. Gryph doubled back toward the cave's entrance and found a chair facing outward, a bottle of water, and fishbones scattered on the ground — a watch post. Someone had sat there through long nights, pacing to stay awake.

Rowan picked the lock on the captain's quarters — barely, the tumblers yielding only after Gryph's encouragement tipped the balance. Inside: a desk, a chair, an unlit lantern, and a logbook written in Draconic.

The log told a grim story. Fair winds at the start. A shape in the deep water, long as the ship, that never surfaced. Then a storm that drove them into this cave. And then the disappearances. Mira-skin, gone from her watch — her spear still leaning where she'd stood, her bedroll untouched. No tracks, no blood, no struggle. Then K'tha, taken the same way. The alarm they'd rigged across the entrance never sounded. Whatever took them did not come from outside.

The whispers in my head are quieter deeper in the cave, S'shar had written. Whatever calls at us, the stone dulls it somehow.

The final entry spoke of cairns built for those they'd lost — no bodies, only names — and a plan to retreat to the deepest chamber and sail out with the next high tide.

They never made it.

Gryph found the cairns behind the boat. Two bedrolls laid side by side against the far wall, smoothed flat and arranged with care. Rocks stacked deliberately on top. Carved bone trinkets placed before them like offerings. Names scratched into the stone above in angular Draconic script, drawn by the charred end of a spent piece of firewood. No mounds. No wrapped bodies. Just names, and the quiet certainty that whoever had lain there was gone.

On the ship's bookshelves they found a waterproof scroll case and a necklace bearing a bone charm. Petunia and Rowan worked together to decipher them — scrolls of water walking, augury, water breathing, and climbing, along with the necklace: a token of courage, blessed by the tribe's shaman. A single chance to shake off the grip of fear or enchantment. One use, then spent.

A whisper threaded through all their minds at once — not heard, but felt. Vessel, who knew the tongue of the deep, translated what the others could only sense as dread.

I seeeeeee youuuuuuu.

Rowan recognized the feeling. The same cold intrusion they'd encountered at the coral reef. The touch of an aboleth.

The deep chamber

The cave narrowed, then opened again, and all sound fell away. The crash of distant waves, the drip of water, even the echo of their own footsteps — swallowed into nothing. What little daylight had followed them this far mingled with a pale, cold glow. Bioluminescent moss clung to the walls and ceiling, casting the chamber in shifting hues of blue and green. A wide pool of black water covered the floor, its surface still as glass, reflecting the glow above like a dark mirror.

Then they saw the bodies.

Four lizardfolk lay on the shore to either side. A fifth drifted face-down in the water. Petunia knelt beside the fallen and examined their wounds — massive crushing injuries, and swollen, pus-filled nodules rising from their flesh. Three of the four wore thin leather straps around their necks, each holding a bone token like the one found on the ship — but shattered. Whatever courage the shaman's blessing had offered, it had not been enough.

Vessel stepped into the water. It had dreamed of this place, it said — or something like dreaming.

The surface erupted. A chuul — massive, crustacean, reeking of the deep — lunged from the black water with claws spread wide.

The company met it head-on. Rowan hurled a crackling orb of lightning that struck true. Rory, no longer hesitant, blessed his companions and called Sparky into being — the fire corgi appeared hovering above the water's surface, hurling flame into the creature's face. Vessel marked the beast with a dark curse, speaking to it in its own tongue — your rest approaches — and drove bolts of force into its shell. The chuul seized Vessel in one massive claw, crushing down, but frost erupted from Vessel's warded skin and bit into the creature's grip. Gryph's magic broke through next — a spell of maddening laughter that brought the beast low, incapacitated and thrashing. Petunia's bloom of thorny magic cracked its shell further. Rowan's arrow found its mark from the shadows.

Then Sparky blazed with teleporting fire, pulling Rory and Vessel free of the creature's reach in a flash of heat and light. But Vessel did not stay away. It walked back toward the chuul on its own terms. A flash of rage — uncharacteristic, almost frightening — crossed the masked figure's body as it drove its blade through the creature's skull.

"I told you," Vessel said. "This one belongs to Sleep."

Gathering the fallen

In the silence that followed, they searched. The fifth body was pulled from the water — another shattered token around its neck. Rory noticed the strange quiet of the chamber was not magical, exactly, but something about the stone itself. Petunia found the reason: ribbons of a shimmering mineral threaded through the cave floor and walls. It was soft to the touch, oily, and extraordinarily dense. Galena — rich in lead. Whatever psychic call had haunted the Tidefang's crew, the lead-laced stone of this deep chamber had dulled it. A refuge that became a tomb.

Rory harvested what he could from the chuul — a servant of the aboleth, Gryph had realized, a thrall bred to guard and to kill. Then the druid asked the question no one else had spoken aloud.

What do we do with them?

The answer came without argument. They wrapped each body in a bedroll. They gathered the cairn stones, the offerings, the shattered tokens, and the scrolls. They carried everything aboard the Tidefang, raised what sail still held, and guided the old fishing vessel back along the coast toward camp.

S'shar had written that he would come home when the moon grew fat. The moon had waxed and waned without him. But the Tidefang was coming home at last — bearing no fish, no salt, no triumphant crew. Only the quiet truth Kessara had asked them to find, wrapped carefully in cloth, carried with the dignity the fallen deserved.

The cruel hope could rest now. The waiting was over.