AabahranA player took it upon themselves to write this up based on the brave misfit group of adventurers who went and tackled the mountain. This was very fun to do and I'm glad everyone who showed up enjoyed it, to those who were unable to make it hopefully this gives a little insight into what you missed.
The Everbloom Reckoning
A Chronicle of Skyward Abyss
I. The Accent
The sun was going down over the Dragon Teeth mountains when the eight of us gathered at the foot of Skyward Abyss. Warmaster controlled, nobody's territory really, just a peak full of switchback stairs cut into fractured rock and air that got thinner the higher you climbed.
Vanek led, same as always. An ogre with a merchant's mind and a general's temper, flying up ahead while the rest of us followed on foot or hoof or whatever passed for trust that night. Ghregen came next, our elf healer, and by the end of the night his Wailing Cube had been summoned so many times it basically became the group's second heartbeat. Gibble walked at his side, a gnome psion so small people mistook him for carry-on luggage, right up until he wrapped himself in a shimmering pyramid and started turning things to ash with a whispered word. Grivsmir drifted in and out of dragon form, cracking jokes the whole way, something about racist doors and how she wasn't getting sacrificed no matter what anyone said. Nedeval rode his elephant like it was a throne and swung his whip like he meant it. Senrik moved half in shadow, tainted steel landing twice for every once. And Osturm, called the Pious, stuck close to Vanek's shoulder and kept fighting through wounds that should have put him down twice over, only to turn around and flee the very next fight when things got bad enough.
We called the mountain Skyward Abyss because it did both things at once, climbed toward heaven and opened up toward nothing, and by the end none of us could really say which direction we'd actually been traveling.
The early rooms were mostly nerve, not danger. Narrow stairs, quiet chambers, one cavern where every sound got magnified until a whisper came back as a scream. Somewhere in there Ghregen just yelled "Hail" into the dark for no reason anyone could figure. Nothing answered. Not yet, anyway.
II. The Garden That Should Not Bloom
Past the first stretch of climbing, the mountain changed. Stone gave way to vines. Flowers grew that had no business existing, black petals veined in white, tulips that turned to watch you pass, roses that seemed to drip more than bloom. A kobold named Lazrik lived in one of the root chambers, begging us over and over to pick him some "not for nibbling" flowers in exchange for shinies. Same three lines every time, looping like a broken record, because the mountain kept looping us back through his room whether we wanted to go there or not.
That was where the garden first spoke, if you can call it speaking. A voice with no mouth came threading through the vines:
"Cut the knight, claim the petal, call the Everbloom."
None of us understood it at the time. We would.
First knight we hit was Gwen the Rose Knight, standing guard in a trembling glade with a shield of layered black roses. She hit hard enough to send Gibble running more than once that fight (which, by the end of the night, became something of a pattern, the gnome could disintegrate a soul one moment and be halfway down the corridor the next). Between Vanek's draining bite, Ghregen's hurricanes, Grivsmir's fists, and Senrik's blade, she went down and dropped a thorned rose sigil along with a key.
One down.
Laleh the Tulip Knight came next, wings made of flower petals, standing watch in a chamber ringed with statues that never blinked. Same story, different flowers. She dropped a crystal tulip petal.
Then Papilionis the Orchid Knight, moth winged, standing in the muck of the Winding Mire. Grivsmir's phantom dragon technique helped finish that one, tearing through her like the strike had ripped a hole in the room itself. She crumbled into violet glass and left behind a withered orchid.
Last was Lady Serana the Lily Knight, calm and soothing, the kind of monster that makes you want to lie down and sleep forever right before she kills you. We cut her down mid spell. She dropped a pale lily seal.
Four knights. Four petals. And somewhere the whole time, something in the garden was watching us collect them.
III. The Sealed Blossom
Down past the Passage of the Sealed Trunk we found it, a sealed floral cocoon rooted to a dark altar in a room that pulsed like it had a heartbeat of its own. One by one we fed the petals in, the rose sigil, the tulip petal, the orchid, the lily seal, and the cocoon shuddered and glowed brighter each time until it finally split open.
Thessaly the Everbloom Knight stepped out. Silent, wings of flowering veils, moving like she already knew how this was going to end.
"You opened the final bloom," she said. "Now be buried beneath it."
That fight was the hardest one of the whole night, no question. Gibble fled the room twice, Vanek had to rescue him at least once just to keep him in the fight. At one point Thessaly blew a cloud of black pollen across the whole room and blinded every one of us at once, and for a stretch there times its as if it is just "someone hits someone" over and over because nobody could tell friend from enemy anymore. She summoned smaller blooms to back her up whenever she got low, a veilclaw stalker, a pale blossom sentinel, a moonpetal handmaiden. It took everything we had, Ghregen burning through artifact after artifact just to keep people standing, Nedeval's insect swarms wearing her down bit by bit, everyone trading blows with a knight who barely seemed to notice we were hitting her at all.
When she finally staggered, petals tearing loose from her armor in a storm of dying color, she didn't rage or curse us. She just said, quiet:
"The garden... remembers..."
Then she was gone, collapsed into black petals, and something small and thorned clattered onto the floor where she'd stood. An everbloom key.
IV. The Broken Arbiter
That key opened a door that hadn't existed a minute earlier, a hidden passage spiraling down past a beating obsidian heart buried in the mountain's core, into the Throne of the Hollow Heart.
Eldrell, the Broken Arbiter, sat waiting. Used to be an elf, from the look of him, now something else entirely, bark for skin, runes crawling under it like veins, eyes that blinked independently and never closed together. He carried the Hymn of the Reaper, a scythe that fought less like a weapon and more like something that had its own opinions about who deserved to die, including, more than once, its own wielder.
The fight got ugly fast. His fire shield burned anyone who touched him. His disruption tore through Vanek's Bodyguard until the poor construct was fighting on stubbornness alone. Twice the Hymn itself turned mid swing and opened Eldrell's own throat, like it had already picked its next owner and gotten impatient waiting around.
When he finally went down, he didn't curse us either. If anything he sounded almost respectful:
"You have succeeded where I did not believe it to be possible. Perhaps you will yet cleanse this place of its corruption. There is so much more that you do not yet understand. Seek the truth beyond the throne."
A glowing shard drifted out of his ruined body toward Nedeval. Left behind on the floor was a small fortune, a crown of withered roses, greaves of silver moon, a satchel of warped hide, and the Hymn itself, which Osturm picked up and wielded for the rest of the run, curse and all.
V. The Pale Eclipse
Through the whole thing, someone had been watching. Fading in and out, offering advice in a voice too calm for everything happening around it. Selavyth, the Pale Eclipse, Harbinger of the Starless Tide. Not a mortal adventurer, not by a long shot, something the mountain itself seemed to bow to a little.
She was the one who warned us early that the petals wouldn't keep long, that a cut bloom only remembers its root for so long, and pushed us to move fast between knights before our prizes rotted away to nothing. She was the one watching when we opened the final cocoon, the one who seemed to know it might be too soon, and she was right within minutes. When the last fight ended and Eldrell's throne room went quiet, she finally stepped in among us and said her piece:
"I have marked each of you as First Slayer, beneath moonlight, rot, and returning silence. The Everbloom has fallen, and the garden will remember who first to cut its final flower."
She had something like old grief in her voice talking about the Hymn of the Reaper, said she remembered that blade, that it was older even than her. She turned down Grivsmir and Nedeval's half joking offer to sacrifice each other in her honor, which, given how punch drunk everyone was by that point, was probably the right call. Whatever Selavyth actually is, she's clearly watched a lot of things older than this mountain rise and fall, and she seemed, if not moved by what we'd done, at least satisfied with it.
VI. The Long Walk Home
There's no clean ending to a night like that, just the long sore walk back down a mountain that tried to kill us about eleven different ways. Gibble leveled up somewhere in the mess and immediately fell asleep on his charger mid stride, cracked his skull on the saddle for it. Grivsmir spent the whole walk complaining she didn't have a single recall potion left and half seriously demanded someone carry her home. Vanek kept grabbing loot he had no room left to carry, pure merchant instinct even mid disaster. Senrik quietly asked if anyone remembered where Lady Serana's earring had landed. Nobody did.
By the time we stumbled out through the Golden Egg Bank and down the Path of Gold into Maelbrim, dawn had come and gone twice over. Ghregen bought a round at the Gold Dragon Inn. Somebody drank straight out of a fountain shaped like an illithid. And somewhere behind us, deep in a mountain that was probably already growing new thorns to replace the ones we'd cut down, the Everbloom's memory settled back into whatever passes for sleep, waiting on the next fool dumb enough to reach for its flowers.
Party of the Reckoning:
Vanek the Master of War, Ghregen Marlot, Gibble Bramblestock, Grivsmir Silvershade, Osturm Vraeldon, Nedeval, Senrik Taeson, and Vanek's loyal Bodyguard, who took more hits than anyone and complained the least.
Witnessed and sealed by Selavyth, the Pale Eclipse, Harbinger of the Starless Tide.