RAVEN'S GAMBIT

After the harrowing encounter with the false Acererak, the shattered party limped their way back to the chapel. No one spoke of Kaela, Kael, or Kaelen. Their names hung unspoken in the misty air, too sacred—or too painful—to break the silence.

The golden couch had been discarded. The relics looted. The shattered mace lay forgotten near the ashes of the vanished lich. Tessa had carefully marked the location of the last remaining secret door. But for now, their only priority was rest.

In the gloom of the temple chamber, the pews became makeshift bedding. Bandages were wrapped, salves were spread, and what little healing remained was carefully rationed among the wounded. No one emerged unscathed. Every breath carried the weight of loss.

But in the darkness, humanity remained.

Tessa ‘Quickfingers’ Vell reached out to Bran ‘Brick’ McGraw, her hand brushing his along the pew’s edge. Their eyes met. No words…

Keraptis turned from the chained god, his robes hissing like serpents across the obsidian floor of the prison. The portal pulsed behind him, an ever-watching eye that tracked the dwindling flame of Raven’s champions in the Tomb of Horrors. His back to the god, he whispered incantations, binding chains of light tighter with each pass of his fingers.

Raven sagged slightly in the bindings. They burned, yes—but he had endured worse. The pain wasn’t what weakened him.

It was the silence.

The voice—the divine connection to his chosen—was muted. He could still feel them. Like flickers of candlelight in the far corners of a darkened house. But he could no longer reach them. No longer whisper warnings, no longer lace their dreams with hints or guide their instincts. It was like watching them balance on a blade’s edge, blindfolded and bleeding.

And yet… he smiled.

Keraptis sat in silence, the air around him dense with latent power. His scrying pool rippled with afterimages of fire and shadow. Zahur the Flame-Sworn had been tended to and dismissed, his wounds scabbed by flame and soot. Now, only the crackle of arcane wards and the slow ticking of time remained.

The chamber was not of this world—a fold between reality and the arcane. Glyphs pulsed along every surface. Keraptis stood slowly and approached the blackened altar in the center, placing his hand over an obsidian relic.

"Come, Raven," he whispered. "Let us parley."

The name alone summoned a breeze of divine consequence. Shadows bent. Light flickered. And then he appeared.

Raven materialized in a swirl of violet smoke and moonlight, a figure draped in midnight-blue robes, his eyes like wells of starlight.

The smell of ash and damp rot greeted them at the bottom of the stairs. The last tendrils of conjured mist clung to their boots like frightened children refusing to let go.

They stepped into a chamber dressed in decay.

The crypt was a mausoleum of forgotten opulence. Ancient rotting divans sagged beneath mold and dust, shattered chairs sat like broken bones around the room’s edge, and scraps of once-splendid tapestries clung to stone walls like the shedding skin of something old and angry. In the center, perched with an uncanny pride, was a couch gilded in the thinnest layer of gold leaf, glinting like a false sunrise in the gloom.

And on it… lay a corpse. Wrapped in ornate funerary linens, a gold crown resting askew on its mummified brow. A jade coffer rested reverently at the foot of the couch, as though it were a tribute—or a trap.