The abandoned chapel reeked of incense and decay. Vespera, a sharp-eyed half-elf ranger with silver arrows and leather armor worn dark from travel, crouched near the rotting threshold. Behind her, Kael—a stocky human cleric of Order with silver-engraved plate armor—whispered prayers through gritted teeth. To their left, Mira, a tiefling rogue with violet skin and twin daggers catching candlelight, tested the floorboards with each careful step. Their newest companion, Thornwick, a broad-shouldered dwarf paladin with a massive warhammer branded with holy runes, swept his torch across crumbling frescoes.
“Something lived here recently,” Vespera said, her ears twitching. The air tasted of copper and smoke. Candles—dozens of them—still burned on the altar in the distance, casting dancing shadows on stone walls marked with hasty chalk symbols. A strange symbol: part divine mandala, part something else. Something hungry.
As they approached, a figure rose from behind the altar. The priest—or what remained of him. His vestments hung in tatters, revealing skin mottled with unnatural sigils that writhed and shifted like living serpents. His eyes burned with sickly violet light. “Seekers of the false god?” His voice came from him and from everywhere at once. “I was like you once. Blind. Faithful. Then my god answered—truly answered.”
Thornwick’s hammer blazed with divine light, and he charged forward. The creature—the corrupted priest—laughed, and the symbols on his flesh erupted outward as tendrils of shadow and whispers. The battle was chaos: Vespera’s arrows passed through shadow-flesh without purchase, Mira danced between the writhing appendages striking for a true form that seemed impossible to find, and Kael invoked wards that weakened the darkness moment by moment.
Then Thornwick struck. True and hard, his warhammer connected—and the tendrils shrieked. The creature collapsed inward, and in that moment of vulnerability, they saw the truth: beneath the corruption, the priest still lived, trapped, screaming silently.
The corruption seized him again. But Thornwick’s holy light persisted, burning away the sigils faster than they could reform. The priest’s eyes cleared for just one moment—and in that moment, there was gratitude. The corruption consumed itself in a final, terrible wreath of violet flame.
What remained was a corpse. Human. Ordinary. Marked with scars of madness, but undeniably, finally, at peace.
Yet on the altar, the chalk symbols glowed faintly. And beneath the ash at the priest’s feet, Mira found something: a letter, mostly burned. On the back, a new address—a merchant’s estate, three days north.
“How many more has this god ‘answered’ for?” Kael whispered, his faith shaken.
Vespera met his eyes. “We find out together.”
💬 What would your party do with that letter? Would you investigate the merchant’s estate—or burn it and leave? 👇