Witchlight Part 10: Goat Limbo

During their informative discussion with Lamorna the unicorn, an assassin jumped out of the bushes.

Date: July 18, 2026

Characters present

• Farvex Dusk: human warlock
• Lionidas: leonin monk
• Shadow Claw: tabaxi cleric
• Philomena Gainsborough: centaur wizard
• Eiri: some kind of fey barbarian

Character level: 4

The League of Incompetence

The assassin dashed with great speed toward Lamorna. His small figure looked like a cross between a halfling and an orc. Before the party could react, just as he was about to plunge his daggers into the unicorn, Lamorna disappeared into thin air. The assassin stumbled as his daggers struck nothing. Then he just stood there, confused.

“I didn’t know they could do that,” he said. “Could we, erm, maybe talk about this?”

“Let me guess,” said Vex. “You’re working for Granny Nightshade.”

“No, not at all! I’m with the League of Malevolence.”

“Well, that sounds even worse.”

As he said this, Philomena cast a spell to read the assassin’s mind. He was imagining a conversation with a human man, dressed as a wizard, who was very angry with him for failing to kill the unicorn.

Vex looked at the rest of the party. He shrugged with a look that said “my hands are tied” before throwing one of his spectral cards at the half-orc, half-halfling. (Orcling?)

The assassin shouted something about how unfair that was, since he only tried to kill the unicorn and not the party, and drank a potion that turned him invisible. Now everyone knew how Lionidas felt.

The party fired spells and arrows wildly while running after the invisible orcling. They missed most of them. Eiri figured she couldn’t run fast enough to keep up, so she decided to ignore the life-and-death battle going on around her. She sat down on the lakeshore and poked the water with a stick.

But the assassin wasn’t getting away—Lionidas was fast enough to keep up, and so was Vex if he teleported. Shadow and Philomena weren’t as fast, but did their best to not fall behind.

Suddenly, the assassin became visible again as he summoned a Cloud of Daggers, slicing and injuring Vex and Lionidas badly. This didn’t stop them however, and Vex had a plan. He charged forward, teleporting to keep up with the fleeing assassin, and threw the deck of cards Nib had made for him. The cards shifted around the assassin and grew into a house, trapping him inside¹. The doors and windows in the magic house of cards could only be opened by Vex, and the assassin would have to break down the walls to escape. But he didn’t know that, and desperately tried to pull the door open. When Vex finally opened it, Lionidas was standing ready with his bow and arrow, and missed his shot. Philomena had caught up and tried to use her mind magic to reveal more about the assassin, but he made the saving throw.

Vex, after getting slightly stabbed by the house’s angry prisoner, teleported inside and paralyzed the assassin with a spell. Shadow attacked with a brain damage spell, and Eiri, having realized that she could actually do something, caught up and stabbed the assassin to death.

The Truth About Lionidas (That We Already Knew, and the One We Wish We’d Never Learned)

With the threat vanquished, Eiri skewered the dead body with her sword and carried it out, dumping it in the woods. Vex cleaned up the blood with Prestidigitation, and Lamorna returned. She told the group what she knew about the League of Malevolence. Apparently, they were an evil adventuring party led by a wizard named Kelek. The assassin was one called Sarak. He had most likely attacked Lamorna to steal her unicorn horn, which he, Kelek, and the rest of their party would use to get to the Palace of Heart’s Desire. They wanted to take control of Prismeer for their own nefarious purposes. She thanked the party for helping, and went back to the lake where she would be safe.

In the house of cards, the group had a long chat about all sorts of things. Lionidas raised his suspicions of Shadow after his shoulder-mounted eye tentacle, with a will of its own and the attention span of an ocean sunfish², briefly thought he was dangerous.

Vex pointed out that Shadow was actually the most trustworthy and reliable person in the party. Especially seeing as Eiri had now twice given up on a battle in the middle of it, leaving the others to fend for themselves, and how Philomena’s tended to become a pacifist the moment a battle broke out. After a brief discussion, the party agreed to have each other’s backs in the future.

Philomena, having figured out that Lionidas was blind, decided to probe his mind to find evidence of this. But Lionidas was aware, and did his best not to think about it. Eventually, Philomena just asked him:

“Lionidas, can you see?”

“Of course I can!” he responded. “I can see just fine.”

Vex placed his top hat on Lionidas’ shoulder-eye-tentacle-thing and asked, “how many fingers am I holding up?”

“Uh… six?” said Lionidas.

And so the cat (or, I suppose, lion) was out of the bag, and no one was in the least bit surprised. In fact, they were glad, because now Lionidas didn’t have to walk into trouble all the time by pretending he could see.

The rest of the evening’s conversation was a much more light-hearted discussion³ and, even though Eiri was still something of a brick wall to talk to, they managed to get a few details out of her as well. She originally came from the Summer Court in the Feywild, and her neighbor made the best pies she’d ever had.

In other news, the group learned a few more things about each other: Vex and Philomena knew of a pie place in Waterdeep of most questionable quality, but the location was great. Lionidas wished they’d done some pie throwing at the carnival. Vex was in a relationship with someone in Waterdeep. Philomena said it had to be a guy because Vex was “wearing too much purple to be straight.” They didn’t learn more about this, because Lionidas revealed that his mother was a human and his father was a lion, which greatly disturbed the party. He claimed they’d been working together at the Witchlight carnival under slave-like conditions, and the reason he’d snuck in there eight years ago was to free them. Now they performed at another carnival as consultants, whatever that meant in the carnival world.

With that disturbing fact out of the way, the group decided to get some sleep. After all, the Getaway Gang would be waiting for them, ready to strike at Granny Nightshade’s home in Loomlurch.

In the night, Eiri was visited by a fairy dragon who told her that some goblins are nice goblins.

What We Did to Those Goats

Heading off into the woods the next morning, the party stumbled upon another mushroom ring. Lionidas suggested Vex do a speech for them just like last time, but Vex wasn’t interested in being followed by an army of nihilistic mushrooms again. So Lionidas himself tried to convince the awakened toadstools to change allegiance and that life was more than just standing in a circle and taking orders from a witch. He did so poorly that one of the mushrooms killed itself.

Nearby was an old, dying tree with little pixie houses in it. On the ground before it stood three goats next to three sickles in the grass. The pixies explained that the goats were actually three nasty redcaps—bloodthirsty gnomish creatures just like Bloodtoe—and the pixies had turned them into goats. But the spell was about to wear off, and they needed the party’s help to deal with them before it did.

Vex and Shadow picked up one of the goats and carried it to the mushroom ring, placing it inside. Eiri and Lionidas followed with the other two. Philomena tried to convince the mushrooms to let them use the ring’s teleportation powers, but they were still depressed and unwilling to listen to anyone but Granny Nightshade. And so Vex magically disguised himself as Skabatha—or at least what he imagined she looked like—and the mushrooms weren’t anywhere near intelligent enough to see through it.

As per “Skabatha’s” request, the mushrooms allowed Eiri to use the magic of the ring, teleporting herself and the three goats to a random plane of existence. They arrived in the plane of Limbo, where everything was chaos all the time. Eiri saw pieces of rocks and landscape floating in an endless void. She herself floated in the air, as did the three goats who quickly turned back into three very confused redcaps. Having drifted away, Eiri floated over to the mushroom ring she’d arrived through, and teleported right back to the Feywild, leaving the redcaps behind.

With that dealt with, the group continued onward through the woods. They came across an old centaur who told them to go back to their own realm, because Prismeer was falling apart. The party, as usual, said they were going to fix it and that they already killed one of the hags. The centaur wasn’t so sure Bavlorna was truly dead. The party had little more to say.

The Plan®

Finally meeting up with Little Oak and the Getaway Gang a few miles from Loomlurch, they told the kids about their encounter with the unicorn and the assassin. The kids gave them some more details about the location and layout of the giant tree trunk Skabatha Nightshade resided in. They talked about Nightshade’s weakness—the fact that she couldn’t see or remember the first person she sees when she wakes up—and how to best take advantage of it. Of course, it would be best if that creature could be a member of the party. One invisible creature would greatly help them in the battle. But surely, Granny Nightshade would be aware of this vulnerability and do her best to negate it. Vex suggested she might have a frog or something in her bedroom that she looks at every morning. If she wakes up one day and is able to see the frog, that would mean someone has snuck into her room, and that she saw them, making them invisible to her and making her forget all about them. The group spent a lot of time discussing how to deal with this hypothetical frog.

One of the kids had actually been inside Nightshade’s bedroom once, and said she hadn’t seen any frog. She had, however, seen a bunch of moths under a glass dome on her table. This was even more clever than a frog, Vex thought. She could count the moths every morning and determine if one of them was invisible to her or not. Anyone who tried to take advantage of her weakness by sneaking into her room and being there when she’d wake up would also have to remove one moth from the dome, which would be difficult to do without setting them all free.

One of the children said that Skabatha probably wasn’t that smart. The group realized they were overthinking it. Eventually, they agreed to do something along the lines of the following:

Shadow would put his old burglar skills to use and sneak into Skabatha’s bedroom through her balcony while she slept. He’d be there when she woke up, and hopefully she wouldn’t count how many moths she could see in her glass dome. Then, the party would announce to the goblins outside that they’d captured Will, and were there for their reward. They’d choose the reward to bring back a creature from the dead so that Philomena could get her rabbit back. Meanwhile, the children would make an awful racket outside by triggering Skabatha’s scarecrow alarm system, distracting all of Skabatha’s minions while the party killed her.

How wrong will it go? Find out in the next part.