Lost in the Feywild: Episode 02

The party emerges in the Twilight Kingdom, enters Lord Endless Ending’s manor, and learns that a naming contest bound the house in a party endlessly ending.

Audio Highlights

The story of Lord Endless Ending:

Timeline

• Oct 05, 1740 DR, evening: The party reaches Lord Endless Ending’s manor in the Twilight Kingdom and learns the likely bargain behind Hulda’s errand.

Narrative

We begin as the party crawls through the narrow tunnel, debating what they can still trust the contract, Hulda, or even the premise of the job. Suddenly, the wood surrounding them gives way to bones – as if they crawled through the center of an enormous hollow root-bone. The party climbs up and out through a ruined house made of the same root-bone material and finds themselves under pale blue twilight twenty minutes after sunset. A river wends quietly through rolling grassy hills under the first unfamiliar stars of twilight, and they take the path forward from this ruined, skeletal echo of Dandelion House onto a road passing through hill and hollow to an estate in the distance.

Txarro finds the first body just off the roadside: human, shot from behind by three beautifully-made green-feathered arrows, its head smashed into nothingness after it hit the ground. Tracks show it was running toward the echo-house, its killers wore heavy boots and the hoof-prints of elk. Tarek searches the pockets, finds a writing kit, and spell components – keeping a mouse skull for himself. Farther down the road, the party smells smoke and finds human bones in a burned pyre, then farther on, another arrow-shot corpse missing its head entirely.

The mood turns from treasure-hungry excitement to fear. Kaito, suddenly sincere, asks Edric to call on the Night Queen and the Wanderer for a way out. Txarro pauses to ask the ancestors whether approaching the manor, introducing themselves, and asking the Lord about the treaty is wise. The omen comes back as both weal and woe.

As they near the manor, the road runs beside a high hedge and the sounds of a party grow clearer: voices, glasses, and string music from beyond the grounds. The party considers sending Tarek in under invisibility, but decides first on safer reconnaissance: Txarro summons an owl familiar. Through its eyes, he sees an open silver gate through the hedge, broad lawns, gardens, patios, guests, musicians, and a tall lithe figure at the manor door who looks directly at the owl before withdrawing.

The guards at the gate seem caught between old men acting like dogs and dogs acting like elderly, wrinkled men. The guard sniff the party, and greet them in heavily accented Common: “well met and welcome, mortals.” They say the party is just in time because the party is ending, but they also make clear that they belong to the road rather than to the celebration inside.

Their answers are strange but useful. The bodies on the road did not come from this house, but from farther along the road, where travelers sometimes pick up a contagious bad smell that must be kept from spreading. They identify the realm as the Twilight Kingdom, a place of a dozen dozen houses with the sun fixed just below the horizon, and say the Lord of this house instructed them to let in any mortal who wanted entrance. Instead of a conventional gift, the guards accept stories of dreams: Txarro’s bittern and snake, Edric’s grave and six-pointed crown, and Kaito’s single long elven dream.

Past the gate, the manor grounds are all sloping lawns, open doors, low lanterns, empty glasses, and the coolness of an evening already lost. The party gradually realizes the ending is not simply lasting a long time: the same rowboat farewell keeps failing to depart, the musicians keep calling for one more, and the moment repeats in endlessly different but always similar variations.

Txarro heads toward two halflings on the lawn; Kaito and Ayveen approach the tired string trio, whose leader politely refuses Kaito’s offer to play because they have only one more piece before the set is done: the party is ending.

The two half-drunk halflings argue cheerfully with each other on the lawn, and they are astonished that Txarro is an actual lizardfolk from Taelgar rather than a fey in lizard shape. They come from near Chardon, speak as if Chardon is still an imperial frontier, and laugh in confusion at the question of which empire they mean – which means that when they woke up this morning, the year was likely somewhere in the seventh century of the Drankorian Empire. They do not understand references to later history, and the party cannot place some of theirs.

The halflings speak of their journey thorugh the Feywild: arriving in the morning, riding a rabbit the size of a pony, “liberating” a boat and coming down river, arriving at the party in full swing. Kaito joins with a flask to coax more from them, and they describe the Lord of the Manor as serious, sad, prone to brain teasers, not someone to hug, and perhaps afraid of neighbors he claims only to respect. Txarro concludes they may have been here for centuries and tries to guide them toward wine while looking for another mortal.

Inside the manor, Ayveen and Edric find one obvious mortal sleeping behind a couch, and on the back porch find another: a massive tiger-man in a waistcoat and smoking jacket, enjoying a quiet pipe on the now-empty porch. Alert, sober, and sharp in a way the other party guests are not, he invites them to sit and says he has pieced together why the party is ending. His first price is a month and a day in Ayveen’s home in Tollen, but she hesitates long enough to negotiate him down to three keys chosen from Tarek’s collection.

The Rakshasa, having long ago become obsessed with the stories that can only be learned in gloaming, travelled the Twilight Kingdom until he came to this house. He then tells the tale of Lord Endlessly Ending. He explains that, at the height of the party, the neighbors, led by a human wizard, came to Lord Revel Beginning (as the master of the house was then called) and asked him to send mortal guests to their house. Gifts and stories failed, so a wizard who led the delegation beat Revel in a contest of poetry and naming – in doing so, transforming the house from a party beginning to one ending, and changing Lord Revel Beginning into Lord Endlessly Ending.

Ayveen asks whether the Rakshasa needs to leave before the grandfather clock chimes again, but he says he has time because other mortals remain. When the party explains that Hulda sent them, he recognizes Hulda as the angry man who tried to bully the Lord in his own manor and says, freely, that shouting does not work. Edric studies him and reads no friendship in him, but no lie either: the Rakshasa keeps his own counsel, acts for his own purposes, but speaks true.

Ayveen then names the working theory. The wizard’s contest created an agreement, bargain, treaty, or truce that forces Lord Endless Ending to withdraw protection and send mortals away, perhaps against his own desire. The Rakshasa confirms it is the only bargain he knows and suggests that a lord tricked into such an agreement might be receptive to ending it. Then Edric goes looking for another human, the grandfather clock strikes zero, and across the ballroom Lord Endless Ending whispers to a human who hurries out the door. The Lord locks eyes with Edric and beckons him closer, while Txarro sends his owl after the departing human.

Cast of Characters

• Lord Endless Ending (they/them, fae): tall masked figure seen through the owl’s eyes.
• Pandel (he/him, halfling): drunken halfling guest.
• Rakshasa (he/him, tiger-headed mortal): tiger-headed mortal guest.

Places

• Dandelion House (manor house in the Varrow Forest, the Duchy of Telham): old manor whose subcellar contains the hidden root passage to the Twilight Kingdom. Session context includes: subcellar, hidden door, and root tunnel.
• Twilight Kingdom (extraplanar domain in the Feywild, Multiverse): Feywild realm of fixed sunset, many distant houses, and roads between them. Session context includes: ruined root house, twilight road, high hedgerow, and silver gate to Lord Endless Ending’s manor.
• Lord Endless Ending’s Manor (fey manor in the Twilight Kingdom, the Feywild): fey manor caught in the repeated ending of a party hosted by Lord Endless Ending. Session context includes: silver gate, sloping lawns, patios, bar room, library, back porch, and ballroom.