Session 7 (Part 3): Hunger in the Shallows
Zyla’s Contact
Back aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, Morrigan checked in with Moray first — you’re already in trouble, and no, we’re not adding to it — and then went down into the hold to find Zyla Vane.
A high Persuasion roll, delivered at close range with considerable charismatic pressure, produced the following: the name and location of Zyla’s underground market contact in The Drift.
Tessa Rook, owner of the Crow’s Roost pawn shop and salvage broker in the outer ring, near Wreck Row. If the crate of refined Clarion still existed and was still moving, Tessa Rook would know.
Zyla gave nothing else. He did, at some point during the exchange, press a small shell into Morrigan’s hand — something he’d picked up at a gift stall weeks ago, kept in his coat pocket, and never thrown away. She took it. It does nothing. It is from him.
The party moved toward the outer ring.
The Siphon-Eel
They were crossing the outer docks — planking growing thin, water visible through the gaps below, the city getting seedier with every step — when Morrigan felt it. Not saw. Felt.
The core pulsed against her back. Her Ley-Line perception registered a disturbance she hadn’t catalogued before: something in the water beneath the dock, something other than the ambient hum she’d grown used to. Then the school of fish scattered in that directionless panic that means something large has just moved.
She didn’t manage to contain her reaction. Longstride saw her flinch.
Darkness in the Shallows
Briony acted first, driving her concentration into Faerie Fire and targeting the water beneath the planking — a twenty-foot cube of violet light that outlined dock supports, startled fish, and one massive eel glowing purple-bright against the dark water. Blue-tinged. Its outline not quite solid.
Longstride took position on a nearby shack roof, longbow already drawn, and fired on the outlined target without hesitation. First combat. First arrow. It struck. The eel was already furious at being exposed, and it surged.
The creature vaulted from the water onto the planking and went straight for Morrigan — a claw-and-fang strike that landed with brutal impact. It drove a psychic pulse outward through a fifteen-foot radius. Both Longstride and Morrigan felt the hammer-blow of it in their skulls; Briony alone stepped through the wave untouched.
Morrigan, kept standing only by her False Life buffer, used her reaction: Hellish Rebuke at third level. Green fire wrapped the eel in a column and the damage was brutal — twenty-one points of fire, the creature reeling backward, chunks of it already gone.
Briony drew on her acid-slick claws and drove them into the eel’s skull with Primal Savagery, finishing the job. The eel collapsed on the dock.
In the ringing silence, Longstride called down from the rooftop: “Well. I suppose we caught dinner.”
A Ticking Clock
As the salt-spray of The Drift settled over them and the adrenaline of the fight began to ebb, the party turned their backs on the dead eel and walked on. The alliance with Longstride was a fragile thing, built on mutual survival and the shared scent of expensive cologne, but it was what they had.
The detail that lingered: the eel had targeted only the two party members carrying Clarion-adjacent substances. Longstride it had ignored entirely.
“Notice the only two people it attacked were the two people with the substance on them. Didn’t care about that guy.”
The core is attracting things. Whatever charge it is accumulating, something in the water of The Drift can already taste it. In her pack, Morrigan felt the core pulse again — rhythmic, insistent, a reminder that time was no longer a resource they could spend freely.
Every minute navigating the rotting outer docks of Wreck Row was a minute closer to Atlas finding the crate. It is filling. She can feel it. She isn’t sure, yet, what she’s going to do about that.
See also - Part 1 and Part 2, and continue in Session 08: The Scent of Raw Eel and The Blue Goose