Lost in the Feywild: Episode 07

The Bottom of the Bottomless Well: in which stories teach the prisoner to let go

Featuring: Kaito Min, Edric, Tarek, Ayveen, Txarro
In Taelgar: Oct 06, 1740 DR
On Earth: Tuesday, August 4, 2026
27th Room and Twilight Promontory

The party learns the truth of the prisoner, then tells five stories that persuade the captive to release a hundred souls and return home.

Kaito Min

I think I’m happy for the first time ever, here in the nothingness, in the darkness, with no souls and no dreams.

Ayveen

All these lights come to different people, and they mean so much, and they’re not gone when they’re not there.

Txarro

So as you grasp these souls that you love, you destroy them. But it is not too late.

Audio Highlights

A Hundred Souls Go Home:

Timeline

  • Oct 06, 1740 DR: The party persuades the prisoner to free its captive souls and return home.

Narrative

After escaping the transformed Menestheus, the party carries Aurae into the prison at the center of the 27th House, and enters absolute darkness. Feeling their way forward, they find a small patch of stone surrounded by roots, dead-coral shapes, bone-like growths, and eerie forms resembling faces and hands. Tarek, still carrying the clock from the workroom in the house, studies it by touch and reads the year as 1351, one year before Hulda’s deed was apparently written. Kaito’s Detect Thoughts finds a language-using telepathic creature within thirty feet, but its mind comes with a distant chorus of other thoughts. Txarro calls out to it in Common.

The telepathic voice answers as a child. It once lived contentedly beside a bottomless well, where a patient teacher taught it language, stories, and how to grow houses. When mortal dreamers began to visit, it found their dreams beautiful and kept them. Later visitors bearing cold metal and weapons praised this ability, promised it more dreams, and built a cold playhouse around it so that it could hide the souls they brought. Now, its fungal children sometimes replace the mortals who enter and crawl through a root leading to whatever place and time the prison occupies.

The prisoner explains that Hulda once came here, and followed the root four centuries into the past, where he wrote the deed that would reach his younger self, and died. The prisoner admits that it misses its teacher and home but does not know how to choose or let the dreams go. Tarek describes the small ornate cup he stole from its teacher’s house. Something in the prisoner softens as it listens, and remembers.

To help it let go, each traveler offers a story. Edric prays to the Night Queen and describes birth and death as twin miracles, condemning the theft that denies every soul its promised passage. Kaito speaks privately to the prisoner about his own habit of stealing dreams and souls, admitting that collecting them never made him whole; only here, in darkness and emptiness, has he begun to see himself and feel happy. Tarek recalls discovering that a stolen ring protected him from fire, then surrendering it to a desperate father so the man could enter a burning building and rescue a child. Ayveen sings of stars unseen by day, the sun remembered at night, and the absent moon: lights remain part of memory even when they are no longer present. Finally, Txarro calls upon his ancestors. Speaking through him, they compare their orderly village to a fish weir that sustains life but traps whatever enters, and confess that they had to open their hands and release Txarro before their love destroyed the person they meant to preserve.

The prisoner opens its hands. A hundred captive souls scatter like milkweed seeds toward a home the travelers cannot yet know. Aurae wakes only long enough to falter and become inert as the soul power sustaining it and the prison disappears. The 27th House collapses as the prisoner bursts free in an incomprehensible shape: a seven-story dandelion of darkness, bone, roots, mold, tentacles, and familiar faces. Then it is a child again, seated beside a low stone well. It puts a finger to its lips, descends into the well, and leaves the five travelers on an empty hillside in the Feywild, beneath the first stars of evening.

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