Session 12

Heroes (lvl 5): Bastion, Thrum, Aibell, Emile

The heroes finally reach the ruins of Bodach, the long-dead city at the edge of the world. Silent streets and shattered ziggurats stretch beneath the crimson sky, haunted by wandering undead and the echoes of forgotten catastrophe. Yet even the dead seem insignificant beside the sight looming in the distance.

A vast, coruscating light advances across Athas. Slowly. Inevitably. Where the light touches, the world simply ceases to exist.

At the center temple of Bodach stands Virex the Harmonizer, servant of the Triune Concord and witness to the end of worlds. Calm and utterly without malice, Virex explains the truth the heroes have struggled to grasp: Athas is being “cut” from the Great Wheel itself, erased so that the multiverse may be remade into something purer and more harmonious.

To Virex, this is not destruction. It is mercy.

Deep within Bodach, among an immense library of ceramic tablets and crumbling records, the heroes finally find The Wanderer. The old chronicler already knows what is happening. He has remained behind to witness the final moments of his dying world. Only after long discussion do the heroes convince him to abandon Athas and carry its memory elsewhere.

There is little time left. The coruscating light advances ever closer. Virex acts.

Its form fractures into four armored manifestations of geometric force and impossible symmetry, while hordes of undead descend upon the heroes through the collapsing ruins. Battle erupts across the temple as reality itself begins to fail around them. Walls disappear into blank nothingness. The sky flickers. Entire streets vanish behind the advancing light.

The heroes destroy Virex’s divided forms one by one, but even in defeat the fragments begin slowly reforming, drawn back together by some higher order beyond mortal understanding.

And still the light approaches. 

At the very brink of annihilation, reality tears open.

A great rift appears in the air, its edges shimmering like iridescent dragon scales. Beyond it waits Sharnak, the dragonborn agent who first sent the heroes to Athas. Behind him stretches the silver void of the Astral Plane.

The heroes flee through the rupture together with the Wanderer as the light finally consumes Bodach.

Then the mountains vanish. The sky vanishes. The crimson sun goes dark.

And Athas is no more.

LEVEL UP!