Sinistar was a vast subterranean citadel built suspended over a huge natural lava flow. The Urthon Aedar and the heroes teleported to it and immediately began fighting dark elves and demons. The Dayslayer itself was guarded by a half-fiendish deep dragon that the PCs managed to best in a titanic struggle. The Architect, it turns out, was a Galchutt agent (a mind flayer) who had been manipulating the dark elves. Canabulum turned him to stone. The heroes destroyed the Dayslayer and returned to Dreta Phantas carrying the petrified Architect.
After much celebration, the Hexamon told the heroes that the only way to restore the city to the surface—which certainly would stave off the Night of Dissolution, at least for a time—would be to recover the stolen Dreaming Stone and the Cask of Frozen Dreams. This cask held every dream ever dreamed, both waking and not; the stone represented every dream still to be dreamt. Moreover, the cask and stone, they learned, could restore the memories of Aliya’s cousin Calista, who seemed to possess important but unattainable knowledge—at least that’s what the group learned in the Seventh Jewel of Parnaith.
The cask and stone were stolen when the city itself was wrenched into the underworld by a demonic creature who seemed to be behind the event in the first place. This figure was not unknown to the Runewardens—it was the arcanaloth Savan. All was coming to pass just as Mara had seen in a dream long before. Savan was the Dreamer, she was the Dreamspeaker, and Sokalahn the half-fiend lich was somehow the Dreamwalker.
But there were schemes within schemes afoot. An object in the possession of the petrified Architect activated when it was brought into Dreta Phantas, calling upon carefully structured contingencies. It opened a portal through the city’s defenses straight into the heart of Dreta Phantas, where the statuelike mind flayer stood. Kython came through first, and then a traitorous Urthon Aedar named Kohath the Betrayer, who had turned against his people long ago. Kohath called through the gate to usher in a creature called a shoggoth. Finally, an entity known only as the Crawling Chaos stepped through, announcing that the stars were right, the dark prophecies had come to pass, and that he—the harbinger of the awakening Galchutt—was there to bring about the Night of Dissolution.
Next Time: A sacrifice foretold in a dream. One final trip to the Dark Reliquary.
