The road east from Solaris stretched four long days through open country toward Last Light, but it was the second night that shook the party most. As they slept, a shared nightmare pulled them under. Dravencoles saw his father hanging from the porch of his childhood home as flames consumed it. Lirielle watched her parents’ bakery burn. An army of sandwalkers marched through desert ruins. And then they saw the woman they thought they had killed in Lusteris, alive and laughing, torturing Ferinthria’s parents with gleeful cruelty. Landor recognized her face. It was his mother, Thalara Vess.
They pressed on to Last Light and found the Lion’s Pride Inn, where the innkeeper Farley seemed to be expecting them. He spoke with them in the basement. On the way, they spotted Tomas working in the kitchen. Farley told them everything they needed would be waiting in a room upstairs. There they found a book, The Founding of Solara - Saint Calros’s Vision, and a coin resting on its cover.
The party made their way to the Last Light Church and found the priest inside. Something was deeply wrong with him. His eyes were hollow and his manner flat and soulless. Dravencoles cast Dispel Magic, and the man gasped as though surfacing from deep water. “Thank Vael—” he caught himself, “—I mean Elandria.” The party pressed him, and he revealed a secret room behind the altar before fleeing. Momeline examined the tithe box near the altar and dropped the coin inside. The wall behind the altar ground open.
Below the church, a dark cave wound deeper into the earth, lined with stone gargoyles that watched from the shadows, and then attacked. The party dealt with them quickly. In a chamber of statues, Dravencoles sensed dark concealing magic radiating from one of them and dispelled it, but could not identify what it was designed to hide. Deeper still, they found a robed cultist sacrificing a man on a black altar, flanked by a Deathstalker. Lirielle reacted instantly, banishing the Deathstalker just as she had in the cathedral. The party cut through the remaining cultists, and a dying priest urged them onward, to free the Tether.
In the final chamber, they found it: a floating, brain-like mass with pale tentacles, a Tether, surrounded by glowing candles. Lirielle recognized the candles as magical bindings. The party worked to remove them one by one while the Tether lashed out, its psychic attacks hammering against their minds. When the last candle was snuffed, the creature stilled.
Then it reached for Momeline. Tentacles wrapped around her, and visions flooded her mind. She saw faces and places she had never seen, rushing past too fast to comprehend. A voice pressed into her thoughts: “Unbound one. Could it be you? Destined to find the artifact? You may leave this place. There will be other tests.”