Sacrifices to Kath’uhlza

Session Summary: 08/25/2024

Ahhhh, ANCIENT hungers awaken in the deep places of the Glade! The heroes discovered a prepared site in one of the Glade's most remote clearings: altars of dark basalt arranged in a configuration they recognized from Charles's research as a summoning configuration for entities that existed in the spaces between thought, those cosmic presences that occupied the silences where consciousness had not yet extended. Kath'uhlza: the Silence in the Abyss. An entity so ancient and so alien that even Geist, who had lived in the borderlands of the Fey for longer than most mortal civilizations had existed, described it in a low voice and refused to say its name a second time.

Living creatures were bound to the altars: Fey beings of various kinds, their gossamer being drawn from them in deliberate measured currents that fed into channels carved in the stone and from there outward and upward toward something that existed above the perceivable range of the heroes' extended dream-sight. The ritual was ongoing but not yet at the stage of irreversibility. They had arrived with time to spare, which was unusual and felt like a trap and turned out to be neither: simply fortunate timing in an investigation that had not always been so generous with it.

The sacrificial guardians emerged from the tree-line in formation, the Withering Man's direct servants conducting this particular ceremony with a seriousness that suggested what was being summoned was not merely a threat to the heroes but something that the Withering Man himself expected to control. The battle was urgent: every moment of combat was a moment in which the ritual continued and the thing being called drew fractionally CLOSER.

They destroyed the guardians and broke the ritual simultaneously, the latter requiring Diana's specific knowledge of spiritual disruption and Charles's capacity to consecrate the channels that the gossamer was flowing through. The freed captives were released and attended to. The clearing was left silent and cold, the potential of what had almost been called into it dissipating into the Glade's ambient magic like breath in winter air. Charles made a note in his research journal about Kath'uhlza that was considerably more alarmed than his usual scholarly prose!