Session 27

Property	Value
Beginning XP
Beginning gold
Ending XP
Ending gold

We find some Lizardfolk scales

Kairos recalls that there’s Lizardfolk in the area. She recalls that Lizardfolk are usually not aggressive, but there have been reports of recent Lizardfolk “altercations” with the local populace. Kairos says to refer to the local Lizardfolk as iruxi - the name they’d use for themselves. She also recalls the Lizardfolk are from ancient empires, even for elves.

She knows a settlement exists somewhere in the Greenbelt and roughly nothing else. No name, no chief, no idea whether they’re migrants (the “simple villages outsiders associate with iruxi”) or something older and mostly underwater.

Djacquess recalls some rumors about the use of osteomancy. Iruxi bone-work isn’t necromancy - it’s ancestor veneration. iruxi build the bones of their dead into the walls of their settlements so the ancestors can keep watching over their kin. Decades of veneration make that primal power pool in the remains, and it can stand up and defend the place when a nesting chamber gets violated or blood is spilled in the halls. Older settlements keep permanent guardians on their nurseries, reliquaries and observatories. The oldest of them are fossilized, with dinosaur bones - frills, horns, spiked tails.

Kairos notes the magic itself is primal or occult, never arcane, so her own study of it only goes so far. The one to talk to is a stargazer - astrology is the iruxi’s main divination and their stargazers are among the most respected members of a settlement, advising on the big decisions. Other clans read differently: wishbone dowsing, entrails, bone dice marked with star pips and moon phases. That last is probably what the “osteomancy” rumor is actually pointing at.

Kairos also brings up that when the elves withdrew from what became the River Kingdoms, the incoming humans ran straight into the lizardfolk, the boggards and the fey. Her people left. The iruxi stayed. Whatever village is out there in the Greenbelt has kept an unbroken record through the whole stretch that elven Golarion was absent - which makes their stargazers the best source on what the Stolen Lands were doing before Nyrissa. She wants to ask, and she knows it means asking politely and then waiting.

Arrival at the iruxi village

We arrive at the island where the local iruxi are housed. It’s no more than a fortified sand bench in the river, about 100 to 150 metres across, ringed with sharpened wooden sticks pointing outward.

Kairos notes the size and the stockade fit a migrant village rather than a true iruxi settlement - the real ones are mostly submerged stone and glass, and outsiders don’t find them at all. A visible palisade on a sandbank is what outsiders are meant to see.

The river separates us. Djacquess uses Bullhorn to contact the iruxi and ask them that we’d like to visit, and ask if we’re welcome.

After asking permission to enter, Djacquess casts Fly twice on the mounts to carry us across the river.

One blue iruxi asks us to wait outside. They introduce themselves as Xiat.

Kairos reads the blue scales as tropical ancestry - and is wrong. Xiat is from the cold regions, which is rarer still; iruxi as a rule keep to tropical and temperate biomes, swamps, coasts and river lands.

And Kairos knows them. Xiat is an old friend from her earlier travels. She hasn’t changed since - she still looks 18-20 and always will - but iruxi keep growing their whole lives, and Xiat is a good deal larger than the last time she saw them.

Kairos greets Xiat formally, and notes the height. Xiat returns something heartfelt at seeing an old friend; the observation about their size is about as emotional as Kairos gets, and Xiat knows it.

The king is possessed

Xiat tells us the king of the iruxi seems possessed - acting oddly, and encouraging the other iruxi to actively hunt humans. Possibly an evil spirit.

Xiat also mentions one of the village’s own mounds that seems to hold an evil spirit. The spirit appears and disappears, and shows itself to the iruxi as a green skull. Xiat doesn’t know whether it’s incorporeal or not.

Importantly: the entity in the mound is separate from whatever has changed the king. Two problems, not one.

The iruxi had decent relations with the local populace up to now - which matches what we’d expect of them, patient and willing to trade and ally, not aggressive without cause. What we’d heard about were increased attacks on local humans, and Xiat confirms it. So the chain runs: the king, then the hunting orders, then the attacks. The village turning hostile is the symptom, not the disease - but the mound is not the disease either.

Worth keeping in mind:

• Xiat couldn’t say whether it’s incorporeal. Kairos keeps both options open, but her read is that it’s not undead at all - it’s probably in the same family as the will-o’-wisp. That fits everything we have: a wisp is naturally invisible and only visible by its own coloured glow, and it can Go Dark at will to snuff out entirely. “Appears and disappears” is exactly what a wisp does. The green skull is the shape of the light.
• We already know wisps are local. Elga warned that Candlemere is full of them (Session-15), and we watched them drifting over the swamps in Session-26. Kairos called them then: aberrations, common in the River Kingdoms.
• If it is a wisp, most of our magic is useless. A will-o’-wisp is immune to every spell except force barrage, quandary and revealing light. Kairos’s whole kit is off the table. Steel and force, not spells.
• They feed on fear - they heal when something within 15 feet is frightened or dying, and a wisp that has gone dark reignites when it feeds. A village living under a king who’s ordering them to hunt is a permanent meal.
• Which is Kairos’s actual point: the spirit showing up and the king’s possession are related. What she can’t say is which way round. Two readings, both live:
  • King first. Something possesses the king, the king sets the village hunting, the fear that generates draws a wisp in to feed. The spirit is a scavenger on someone else’s crisis.
  • Spirit first. The entity in the mound is what took the king, and the wisp resemblance is a family likeness rather than a plain wisp - a textbook will-o’-wisp feeds on fear, it doesn’t ride people. That would make it something related but nastier.
  • Either way the two are connected, and either way we still don’t know what possessed the king. Kairos won’t commit until we’ve seen one of them.
• We’ve seen this shape before. The Sootscale kobolds were driven hostile by the Old Sharptooth curse while Tartuk worked them from the inside. That “curse” had a person behind it.
• Nyrissa was backing Hargulka. A second leader in the region being pushed into a war with us is a pattern, not a coincidence.

Xiat is telling outsiders this, which means they’ve already decided the king is the problem. That’s a risk they’re taking.

Djacquess starts building a raft, so we can get back to the village more easily next time. We return to the shore, while Fly lasts, take a long rest to the next morning, and build a raft from vines and local wood.

Sneaking into the village

The next morning we row over in silence, staying stealthy so the king doesn’t notice us. Xiat welcomes us back without a word and sneaks us into the village.

So we’re inside, but not as guests - Xiat is smuggling humans past a king who has told the village to hunt humans. If we’re caught, the diplomatic route closes and Xiat is the one left standing in it. Worth remembering that the palisade points outward and we’re now on the wrong side of it.

Also live now that we’re actually inside: the walls. Ancestral bone is worked into iruxi settlements and it can animate to defend the place when blood is spilled in the halls or a nesting chamber is violated. Don’t touch anything.

Inside the mound

The mound has a deserted look to it. The air inside is cold and dry. It’s decorated with war and violence against humans and elves, with a regal iruxi directing the armies to great victories.

What Kairos makes of it:

• The air is wrong. Cold and dry, inside an earthen mound, on a sand island, in a river, in a marsh. That is not what this place should feel like and something is maintaining it. Cold and dry also happens to be what preserves bone.
• Cold is hostile to iruxi specifically. They’re at home in warm water and warm mud. A mound their own ancestors are in that has gone cold is a mound they would stop visiting - which may be the whole reason it looks deserted, rather than any decision to abandon it.
• Except Xiat. They’re cold-touched and inclined to cold, which is why they can stand to be in here at all. That likely explains why Xiat is the one who knows about the spirit: the rest of the village physically can’t spend time in the mound, so Xiat is effectively the only pair of eyes it has in here. The village hasn’t been ignoring this. It’s been unable to look.
• The carvings are the archive. Iruxi keep their history in epic poems and evocative carvings, not in books. This isn’t decoration, it’s the record - the thing Kairos came to this village hoping to read.
• And the record is a war record. A regal iruxi leading armies to victory over humans and elves. Whoever is in this mound was a conqueror, and the current king has suddenly started ordering exactly that kind of war. A neglected war-king in the walls and a monarch abruptly reviving his policy is not a comfortable coincidence.
• Kairos still won’t call the direction. But she notes the elves in those carvings are on the losing side, and that she asked to see what these people remembered - and this is it.

Kairos instructs the party not to touch the walls. Ancestral bone is worked into iruxi settlements and it can animate to defend the place; this is not a room to go running our hands over.

Fight in the mound

An angry green wisp appears - visible, not hiding. It makes the images of the regal king move. We attack immediately. Djacquess opens with Courageous Anthem, Leonardo strikes.

Tactical notes:

• It’s showing its glow, which means it hasn’t Gone Dark. The moment it winks out it’s invisible, not gone. Keep track of where it was.
• If it’s a true will-o’-wisp, Kairos should not spend spells on it - immune to everything except force barrage, quandary and revealing light. Spellstrike would waste the slot and only land the weapon damage. Just Strike, or force barrage if she has it.
• Don’t let anyone go down within 15 feet of it. It heals 2d4 off an enemy that’s frightened or dying that close, and feeding relights a wisp that has gone dark. A downed party member is a healing potion for it.
• The moving carvings are not standard wisp behaviour. Either this is the nastier family member Kairos suspected, or something else in the mound is waking - and we are now spilling blood inside an iruxi ancestral chamber, which is precisely the trigger for the bone in these walls to stand up. This could become two fights.

Kairos casts Force Barrage - the one spell that gets through a wisp’s immunity, and she’d called it before the fight started. Djacquess finishes the wisp off with Horde of Underlings, summoning iruxi.

+106 XP

The wisp is dead. What that leaves us:

• The king is still possessed, and we still don’t know by what. Killing the thing in the mound doesn’t answer that.
• We never learned which came first. If the wisp was only feeding on the fear the king created, nothing about the king has changed. If it was the cause, we’ll know shortly - he should improve.
• The regal iruxi settles back into being a wall carving. The movement was an illusion by the wisp-like creature. So the mound itself never woke - the walls are not hostile and the ancestors stayed where they were.

That last part is worth chewing on. A textbook will-o’-wisp doesn’t do illusions, which puts this back in Kairos’s “same family, not the same creature” bracket. Two things follow:

• We may never have seen its real shape. If it could throw an illusion of a king’s war record, the green skull the iruxi kept seeing could just as easily have been one.
• A thing that projects convincing images is exactly the sort of thing that could work on a king without ever touching him. Xiat says the two problems are separate, and Kairos isn’t overruling them - but “possessed” and “shown things by an illusionist” look identical from the outside. If the king doesn’t recover now, that theory dies with it.

Vesket walks in

An iruxi named Vesket walks in and asks what the commotion is, what the noise was, and who we are.

The position we’re in: we were smuggled in by Xiat precisely so the king wouldn’t notice us, and we’ve just made a great deal of noise in an ancestral chamber and left a corpse in it. Anything we say lands on Xiat too.

• Vesket is the king. The possessed one. The one who ordered his people to hunt humans, and the one we were smuggled in to avoid.
• And he asked. He didn’t call the guard and he didn’t attack on sight, with three armed humans standing in his ancestors’ chamber over a fresh kill. Either the hunting orders were never as absolute as they sounded, or something in him has already shifted - which is the test we were waiting to run.
• We do have the truth on our side for once: we came in and killed the thing that was haunting their mound, and the walls are untouched. That’s a gift to the village if it’s believed.
• Kairos is the wrong mouth for this. Djacquess talks.

Djacquess talks, and rolls Intimidate. It works: the remains of the wisp convince Vesket. He accepts what happened in his mound - and then asks us to leave immediately, so he can fix his mistakes in the village.

+44 XP

Kairos isn’t wholly convinced, and says so afterwards:

• He was convinced under intimidation. A king who concedes because he’s been leaned on in front of his own ancestors has been given a reason to resent us later, and we’ve handed anyone who wants this village hostile a very good story: humans came in uninvited and threatened the king in his own mound.
• ”Fix his mistakes” is the right sentence and we have no way to check it. It could mean calling off the hunts. It could mean tidying up who knew.
• We’re being removed from the village at exactly the moment we’d be able to verify any of it. That may be a king who wants privacy to do the right thing. It may not be.

So Kairos asks Xiat to keep in contact with her, and to tell her if the king backslides. Which means asking Xiat to keep taking the risk after we’ve gone.

After

Djacquess wants to spread rumours that the king was fooled by a simple illusion and banished us out of embarrassment. Kairos asks him to wait a bit.

The next morning Xiat finds us with more. Vesket had been getting steadily more aggressive, more hostile and more fearful over a long period - and it started after he began spending time in the mound. Before that he was a good king.

Which answers the question we thought we’d lost the chance to answer:

• The order is settled. The mound first, then the king. The creature didn’t move in on an existing crisis - it made one.
• And it didn’t possess him. It fed on him. A thing that lives on fear got a king alone in a cold room and spent months making him frightened, and a frightened king turns his people outward and starts hunting. It was farming him, and the hunts were the harvest.
• So “possessed” was always the village’s word for it, and Xiat’s read that the two problems were separate was the one thing they had wrong - understandably, since from the inside it looks like a king who changed and a haunt that appeared.
• It also means Vesket should genuinely recover, and that “let me fix my mistakes” was probably sincere. He was a good king before something got its teeth into him.

Which is why Kairos wanted the rumours held. The story Djacquess was about to spread - proud fool taken in by a cheap trick - is now simply false, and it would be aimed at a victim we want as a neighbour. Kairos says we’ll come back in a month or so and build proper diplomatic relations instead.

Loot

• Bloodseeker Beak (talisman, 20 gp) - affix to a weapon. Free action when you hit an off-guard creature with it: +1d4 precision damage. Consumable, one use.
• Feather Token (tree) (38 gp) - activate on an unoccupied patch of earth or soil and it becomes a 60-foot oak with a 5-foot trunk, which keeps living and growing if conditions suit. Consumable.