Witchlight Part 16: Hag Fight the Third

Having performed a play and won an audience with Endelyn Moongrave, the party was gearing up for a fight.

Date: September 12, 2026

Characters present

• Farvex Dusk: human warlock
• Lionidas: leonin monk
• Philomena Gainsborough: centaur wizard
• Eiri: spiritling barbarian

Character level: 6

The Hag’s Library and Stuff

With Boris and Kirian safely out of the way, the party was just about to follow Stagefright the goblin to Endelyn’s chambers. But first, they needed to get hold of a solar eclipse. Eiri was, somehow, disguised as a sun, and hidden in her armor. Shadow had brought the three-foot moon model, which was glowing and made of glass¹. Philomena wrapped it in her cloak, which she had never worn because it was garish as hell. When anyone asked, she’d say it was a gift for Endelyn in the form of a reading lamp.

The group found Stagefright in the theater, where another group of actors were rehearsing yet another nasty play. Stagefright was stressed and kept checking his watch, which had no less than eight hands moving at different speeds. Judging by his expression, it was the party he’d been looking for. With a sigh of relief, he dragged them along through a door the group hadn’t noticed before. It led to Endelyn’s library of prophecies, Stagefright explained, and was filled with thousands of black, nameless books. Three hooded kobold halfling librarians were working there, and one of them looked miserable and had no shadow². The party quietly reassured her that things would get better soon.

Philomena managed to convince a stressed Stagefright to let them stay and look through the library for a few minutes. Lionidas looked for a book about lions, but couldn’t find any. Instead, he discovered a book with a frog clinging to its spine, much like the ones they’d found in Skabatha’s library. He gave the frog a kiss, and the frog revealed that the book was called Tales from the Gloaming Court, Volume Three. Skabatha had several other volumes in her library, but not this one. When Lionidas³ opened it, a small vial fell out, which he caught. It contained some kind of dust.

Having no working eyes, except the dubious one on his shoulder, Lionidas asked Vex to take a look at it. Vex cast a spell to detect if it was magical, which took a few minutes. While working on the spell, he said “Hey, Lionidas. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. In that shadow puppet theater, we saw you hunting with your dad. Only, you were both regular lions instead of lion people. And your family portraits showed a bunch of lions too. What’s up with that?”

“Oh, that’s not how I remember it,” said Lionidas. “I’ve always been like this.”

Something didn’t add up. But while Vex was thinking about it, the casting completed, and he found himself able to see the auras of magic nearby. The dust in the vial lit up with the dark glow of necromancy. What was more surprising was Lionidas, glowing with an aura of transmutation. All the evidence pointed to him being a regular lion transformed into a leonin. But Lionidas denied any knowledge of any such event, and so the discussion moved on, with Lionidas and Vex coming up with a plan to throw the strange vial at Endelyn to see if it would hurt her.

Meanwhile, Philomena looked through some of the books of prophecy written by Bavlorna. She had an awful lot of books about predicting her own death. She seemed almost obsessed with stopping it. But one passage in one of the countless identical books stood out to Philomena:

All I’ve wrought shall come undone
When the moon blots out the sun.
The sweet treachery we three have wrought-
Would Iggwilv forgive us? Ha! I think not.
Time was our ally, standing beside us.
Giving us that which Mummy denied us.
But now I feel its hands turn cold
And see its second sight unfold:
The hourglass broken, the sisters three
Meeting our hellish destiny.
Bav and Skab will never know
That Time has always been our foe.

She showed it to the rest of the party, and they discussed what it could mean. Had the hags betrayed Iggwilv, or Tasha, as she was also known? Could she be their mother? And what was all this about time? They’d frozen Zybilna out of time. Could that be related somehow?

Eventually, Stagefright’s patience ran out and he hurried the party along up a spiral staircase. On the upper floor, they wandered through the cold stone corridors past Endelyn’s Orrery of Tragedies that she used to create her prophecies⁴. It was a massive golden orrery that the group never really got a good look at. You know what an orrery is, right? Good. Five points for you.

The Creepiest of the Hags

Stagefright took them past the orrery into a hallway. The light from the orrery room didn’t quite reach the wooden double door at the end of it. Approaching, the party felt the air grow cold. The doors opened with a creak. Countless marionettes hung from the ceiling of the dim stone chamber beyond. They heard the sound of pouring sand from hundreds of hourglasses mounted on one of the walls, attached with a mechanism that turned them whenever they ran out. In the center of the room stood Endelyn⁵, thin and pale as a skeleton, dressed in an elaborate but heavily aged dress.

“Well?” she said. “Here you are.”

Stagefright bowed and stepped out, closing the door behind him. The party didn’t know what to say, and if they had, they wouldn’t dare say it.

After a few moments of silence, Vex spoke. “We’ve, uhm, come to negotiate.”

“Well, go ahead, make me an offer,” said Endelyn. “Just remember, you’re bargaining for your lives.”

Vex looked at the rest of the group with a look that said “it’s about to go down.” Then he gathered up his courage and said, “Alright, here’s our offer: go ahead and pack your bags, Endelyn, because you just won an all-expenses-paid trip to your grave.”

Jumping into action, Philomena lobbed off a fireball. Several marionettes fell burning to the ground, but when the cloud of fire dissipated, Endelyn looked unharmed.

“You think you can just walk into my own home and attack me?” Endelyn was fuming with anger, and also with smoke from the fireball.

“I actually think we can, yes,” said Lionidas.

Eiri floated out of her suit of armor and picked up the glass moon that Philomena had been carrying, and threw off the garish cloak. She held it up to Endelyn. An eclipse.

Endelyn scoffed, but her eyes betrayed the faintest hint of fear. “I see you’ve discovered my least-well-kept secret. Not exactly impressive.” She raised her hands up to the ceiling, and two marionettes lowered down to the floor. They were no ordinary puppets, but rather the strung-up corpses of Bavlorna and Skabatha. They moved with sudden, jerking motions and their heads hung down to the side with empty eyes.

Eiri’s armor and Lionidas ran up to Endelyn and whaled on her with sword and fists. Vex threw some cards and disappeared into the ethereal realm before the hag or her puppets could retaliate. Philomena, shaking with fear, fired off as many fireballs as she could. As Eiri’s armor swung her sword with incredible force, Endelyn swung one of her puppets in front of her to take the blow. Then, she stretched out her hand toward Philomena, and sent puppet strings flying toward her, but missed. Vex reappeared, and Lionidas told him to throw the vial of dust. He did, and Endelyn began coughing and choking on it, but so did Lionidas and Eiri’s armor. Another blow from Eiri cut Endelyn in half. As she screamed her last scream, the puppets collapsed to the floor.

Wait, No, This One Is Creepier

The party breathed out. But it seemed the fight wasn’t over yet. The puppets slowly began to move again, crawling toward the corpse of Endelyn, merging into one massive blob of hag-flesh and rising up from the ground.⁶

And with that, the battle continued. The amal-hag-mation radiated an aura of death that sapped the strength from Eiri and Lionidas, while the Bavlorna part of the creature unexpectedly stretched its body a great distance, and swallowed Vex whole. Fortunately, Eiri cut the creature in half again, and the battle was over.

Anyway, Here’s Some Weird Stuff About Lionidas

Recovering from the strange and rather frightful event, the party looked around the room. There was a closet at the far end that Lionidas found himself drawn to. Inside, he found a necklace with a lion locket. Putting it on, he felt a flood of lost memories return to him. Memories before his first visit to the Witchlight Carnival. Memories he thought he’d known, but remembered wrong. He remembered that he used to be a lion⁷. And with that, his form changed, and he was a regular four-legged lion once more. And he now realized why he kept getting his own name wrong: he hadn’t been able to pronounce it in his humanoid form. His name required a proper lion roar to pronounce—LiROARidas.

“Lionidas, I don’t know how to tell you this,” said Vex, “but you’ve got no hands.”

With his new magical locket, LiROARidas was able to transform back and forth between his old humanoid lion form, and his new (or technically older) leonine lion form. But before he did so, he introduced himself to the others with his proper name. He’d be getting it right from now on, as long as he was in his lion form.

All of that had been pretty weird, but not really enough to faze the party at this point. Next, they decided to break Endelyn’s evil orrery. Philomena cast a bunch of Thunderwaves at it until the whole structure collapsed. No more evil prophecies!

With a hint from the DM, the group suddenly remembered that they were supposed to rescue Glister, Gleam’s sister, from her prison in Motherhorn. Since that just so happened to be where they were, they went right ahead and did it. But in their way was a stone door with no visible handle or other way to open it. When they approached, the center of the door began to reshape itself into a skeletal face. When it opened its mouth to tell them to piss off, it opened a gap in the door, letting the group see through to the other side. Vex, Philomena, and LiROARidas all had teleportation spells, and so they disappeared from where they stood and reappeared inside the prison. Eiri grabbed two halberds and stuck them into the door’s mouth the next time it spoke, and stepped through as well.

The prison had four cells, three of which were empty. The fourth held Glister, who looked much like Gleam did (which I’ve forgotten) except with a sun mask instead of a moon one. She seemed alright in her cell, and wasn’t in much of a hurry to be rescued. She had books and wine and blankets. But when the group mentioned that her sister had sent them, she got up at once. The party let her out and sent her off to her sister, and continued exploring the dead hag’s residence.

Their first stop of the guideless tour was a room where they found Trinket and Bauble, the two darklings who had sold them a bunch of useless crap in Hither. They had set up shop on Motherhorn. This time, they were selling three things: a hat that always fits, an ink portrait, and a duskmallow pie. Eiri immediately bought the pie. When she opened the box, there was only a quarter of a pie in it. I have no memory of what she paid with.

The group decided to buy a hat for Shadow, because he didn’t have one. The group paid together by agreeing that their next public performance would be crap. The hat was a pillbox hat. While it was intended for Shadow, it had motives of its own, and decided to hop onto Philomena’s head, knocking her magical book-eating hat creature thing right off. Did I mention that hat before? Anyway, Philomena remembered that the thing she’d bought from Bauble and Trinket the last time, the box with scratching noises coming from inside it, had been sitting in her pack this whole time because she was too scared to open it. But now seemed like a good time, so open it she did.

Out of the box slithered a tiny snake. It went up Philomena’s arm, past her shoulder, and into her ear, where it started singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” really loud. Everyone danced except Philomena, who was rolling on the ground, screaming.

Eiri’s player thought it was the best ending to a session ever.