1.9.1 - Hannah Part Two

You let her choose. No one ever let her choose.

She clawed her way through the corruption one more time at the start of the session. Barely. You could see what it cost her: the veins around her face pulling tight, the words coming out in the wrong order, the seconds ticking against her. I can feel the door closing. There's a way to end this. But you have to let me. Then the veins snapped shut and the monster was back, angrier for having been interrupted, and it told you she was closed and gone.

She was not gone. She had spent everything she could spare to give you one more moment.

As she bled, the room escalated. Stone dust sifted down from the vaulted roof and the floor began to tell you where the next collapse was coming before it fell: shadows appearing in squares, one round of warning before the weight dropped. Root-veins spread further, claiming ground, making the room smaller.

Then she flew.

It was the first time she had used the wings in either session and nobody was ready for it. She crossed the full width of the sanctum in one action and brought the tail down on Riven from a reach he had not expected, and the hit found him. Riven answered by doing the thing he has always done when the room gives him distance: he used it. One action to activate Tyr's Measure and drop the Stillness of Tyr's Judgement into a thirty-foot radius on the floor. She was inside it. Moving to get outside it, Riven failed his check. He was inside it too. He burned the grey scale on the back of his wrist, the Tyr's Mark he had carried since the Sacrifice, and the blessing spent itself to put him past the boundary.

One use. One chance. It mattered.

Brawn had already found her while she was airborne. He had taken a new feat between sessions, and what it gave him was the ability to commit his whole body to a single moment: leap, close the distance, and land or miss entirely. He critted. She was Grabbed and Tripped inside the circle Riven had laid down, and she could not break it. Not the grapple. Not the trip. Not any of the attempts she made to reset her position and get back to the air.

The room became two things. Inside the circle: Hannah, grounded, root-veins spreading from where she was pinned. Outside it, just past the radius of her aura: the party, at range, unloading. Gunnar and Riven worked the angles. Hanzt kept who needed keeping alive. Every round a player took a Blood Mark she had left on them and wiped it clean before it could become anything worse. Both sessions, every mark, every time. She never reached inside any of your heads.

The HP fell. When it fell far enough, everything stopped.

The corruption pulled back a third time, and this time it was Hannah and she looked the way you look when you have spent everything and you are still standing because there is one thing left to do. She was Heimdall's daughter, and she had made a bargain five hundred years ago, and she could unmake it from the inside, turn herself into the thing that breaks it, if you would let her. It would cost her life. The Forsaken, and what was left of her: both gone. Done properly.

She looked at each of you. And she asked.

The answer was immediate. One voice after another, before she had finished looking: yes. The table did not need to discuss it.

The last stretch was its own thing. Gunnar made the Recall Knowledge check he had failed every time for two sessions, and it finally gave him something: Weakness 10 to holy, Physical Resistance bypassable. He hit her. One action, twenty points of damage the resistance could not touch, and you felt the maths of it before the number landed, felt what had been missing since the door opened.

Hannah's voice came through one last time. A fragment of it, between bursts, while she was fighting the monster from inside: It is done.

Then the Forsaken dropped, and Hannah Half-Elven died, and what left the body was briefly, faintly, the colour of dawn.

Heimdall was there. None of you saw him arrive. He stood at the edge of the ruin and said nothing, and acknowledged nothing, and watched. That is what he is. When there was nothing left to witness, he was simply gone.

The corruption went with them. The root-veins greyed and cracked and went to ash across the sanctum floor. The temple of Osgilliath began to come down. You retreated through the elven tombs with the sound of stone settling behind you.

Then torchlight above. Voices. Steel.

The survivors of the Pact walked into the ruin of the sanctum: Harald, Orgrim, Balder. For one full minute, Hammerfall had won.

Then Yennen stepped forward. Sweating. Glancing back at his own soldiers as if counting them for the first time.

There was no scroll. Somehow that was worse.

Hammerfall, he said, passes into Guild administration, effective tonight. The Pact was four chairs. Three of them were ash. He was sorry. The instruction about the party was emphatic: alive, all of them. He would not say whose instruction.

Steel came out on both sides. The Guild's soldiers moved fast with nets and clubs, nonlethal and professional. It was over quickly.

Yennen's voice came from somewhere behind you, in the dark: "Nobody do anything... expensive."

A guild coin slipped from his pocket. It clattered across the sanctum floor and spun on the stone for a moment and was still.

END OF ACT 1.

Remember For Next Time

• Hannah is gone. She asked to choose how this ended. You let her.
• The grey-scale mark Riven has carried since Tyr's temple is spent. So is what his bow could do once today. Brawn still has his.
• The Pact is ash. Yennen said it plainly: four chairs, three of them gone.
• You are alive, in the dark, in Guild custody. Someone wanted it that way. Yennen would not say who.

Where We Are

Act 1 is over. You are in the dark, hands bound, alive by instruction. Somewhere above you, a coin is being counted.