The Death of Agatha

Session Summary: 08/04/2024

Ahhhh, ALL debts come DUE eventually! Agatha, that decaying Fey harridan who had haunted the periphery of this investigation since the Cairn of Whispering Shadows, who had sold her ritual knowledge to the highest bidder and then retreated to whatever portion of the Fey realm still tolerated her presence, had run out of places to retreat to. The heroes tracked her through the Glade with the patient thoroughness of investigators who have been following the same trail for long enough to know which turnings it prefers and which it tries to avoid.

They found her in a lair that she had assembled from the accumulated bitterness of her long fall from the Withering Man's favor: surrounded by the artifacts of her original craft, the materials of binding and ritual and dream-work that had once made her valued and now made her a liability to every faction that knew she existed. She had been selling knowledge she should have kept, and the bill for that commerce had arrived with the heroes' faces on it.

She fought with everything she had, which was still considerable even in her diminished state. Decades of accumulated Fey craft went into her offense, the specific nastiness of someone who has been fighting from a position of weakness long enough to have developed expertise in the tactics that weakness demands. She was faster than she looked, more resilient than her decaying appearance suggested, and her knowledge of the heroes' capabilities was better than they had anticipated given that she had been avoiding their company.

It was not enough. They were too many, too capable, and too MOTIVATED by the specific satisfaction of closing a chapter that had been open since Flustern Schatte. The heroes destroyed Agatha thoroughly and stood in the remnants of her lair in the particular quiet that follows a long-pursued conclusion.

Another piece of the Withering Man's network had fallen. He had fewer pieces now than he had started with. The subtraction was not yet decisive, but it was accumulating, and every subtraction brought the heroes closer to the confrontation that this entire journey had been building toward since the Night of the Missing Moment!