At two in the morning, Jorin led the party down the cellar stairs of the Gilded Dragon Tavern and into the tunnels beneath Solaris. The passage opened into a common area where commoners sat casually on tables, and Cassira Velthorn emerged from a wooden door etched with an animated face. Jorin apologized. He couldn’t risk the party working for nobility and exposing the underground network. The ambush was swift and merciless. Guards and commoners unleashed poison darts and magical nets, quickly overwhelming Ferinthria, Dravencoles, and Lirielle. Momeline proved far more elusive, dodging dart after dart and weaving through the chaos, toppling furniture and felling guards before the nets finally ensnared her.
The party woke bound in a secret room on the second floor above The Golden Grain, where a fellow prisoner named Tomas Vane greeted them with surprising nonchalance. He claimed he’d been imprisoned for sleeping with Taniel Merris’s daughter. When Jorin visited to apologize, he revealed that Greymoor was indeed part of the underground (as they suspected) and should have known better than to involve outsiders.
Left alone, the party devised a plan. Ferinthria would cast disguise self to impersonate Jorin and trick a guard into unlocking her shackles. Despite misgivings about Tomas’s reliability, the prisoner laughed off their concerns and agreed to help. The deception worked flawlessly. They knocked out the guard, retrieved their gear from the adjacent room, and descended carefully toward escape. Tomas warned them away from a door he claimed was Taniel’s room.
But Momeline noticed the lie. When Tomas contradicted himself about which room was Taniel’s bedroom, she pushed open the door and triggered an explosive trap. In the chaos and destruction, a secret entrance to a treasure room was revealed. Inside, Momeline found unique treasures and a golden feather which, thanks to Dravencoles’s lectures on Elandrian history, she immediately recognized as a symbol of entry to sacred places in the Church of Elandria.
The explosion alerted the safe house residents and the party was forced to flee through the Golden Grain storefront as Taniel watched them escape in shock. Lirielle caught Tomas giving their former captor a knowing wink. Now on the streets of Solaris with nowhere to go, the party faced an uncertain future, wanted by the mysterious underground network, and in possession of an artifact that might hold the key to understanding Dravencoles’ destiny.