The Greenfall Revel ceremony began; the crowd pressed along the canal, green-tinged flames burning in iron braziers down the length of the docks. The party moved into position.

They handed the dragon firework and the Whisker Do's and Whisker Don'ts off to a group of children near the festival edge with loose instructions about when to light them. The children, delighted, proceeded immediately. The sky above the Sump erupted — enormous dragon shapes spiraling outward in bursts of color. The crowd turned toward the sky.

The plan: Gemma and Forge disguised as Cindersworn guards using their remaining Disguise Self scrolls, Anton and Willa played prisoners — festival revelers who had a little too much to drink and got loose with their tongues about Spider Lily. Arms behind their backs, shuffled along like troublemakers.

The two exterior guards, completely distracted by the fireworks overhead, didn't even glance at them. The party walked straight in.

Inside, the Sump's intake room was deliberately quiet — muffled from the noise of the revel, lit by wall-mounted lanterns, and staffed by a single watch officer at a long intake desk: a stern, humorless half-elf named Bram who was visibly irritated to be the only one working tonight. Gemma, disguised as Dorian, attempted to book the "prisoners" with breezy confidence. Bram asked for names, asked which level they're going to, and noticed that Dorian doesn't normally wear a robe. A round of group Deception checks later, the party scraped through. Bram spun the logbook around and exited, convinced to peek at the fireworks and grab a drink before returning to the desk. It was the launch of the Greenfall Revel after all.

Before heading down, Forge scanned the office and clocked a blueprint map of the prison on the wall. Four levels in total: the intake room at ground level, a guard common room and supply area below that, then two prison levels descending further into the earth — the lowest of which was where Forge's Locate Person spell confirmed Aztlan Tuckoron was being held. The party barred the door behind them with a chair from the office and headed down.

The staircase opened into a low, practical room that smelled of torch oil and old boots — two round tables with half-eaten meals, playing cards, an open logbook, a small kitchen stove, and a ring of keys hanging on a hook by the far wall. Two guards looked up as the party entered: one alert, wearing the ash-streaked Cindersworn sash; one nursing a bottle and barely interested in anything.

The alert guard stood and told them to sign in the second logbook. Gemma, still in character as Dorian, talked their way past it. The guard, Tommin, pushed for more details, but the other watch guard piped in, telling him to relax. With an eye roll, he let them through, pointing to the hanging keys on the wall as they moved downstairs.

The upper prison level was torchlit and grim. Water could be heard moving somewhere behind the walls. Approaching the cells, the party could smell blood — especially Willa, the blood hunter lycanthrope.

A Cindersworn pyromancer stood in an open torture chamber, a sending stone in one hand, leaning over a human man restrained and unconscious on an iron rack. Around the corner, a dwarf was chained to the floor, barely conscious, clearly tortured.

The party debated briefly — Forge wanted to push straight to the lower level for Aztlan. The others weren’t willing to walk past someone being stretched on a rack. They made their choice.

Gemma stepped into the chamber and subtly cast Suggestion on the pyromancer — a wild magic surge flaring but maintaining control. She suggested he enter one of the torture devices. The suggestion landed with a disturbing result: the pyromancer, who had spent years inflicting pain on others, found himself suddenly and disturbingly curious about what it might feel like on the other side. He lay down into the machine himself. Anton slammed it shut.

Then, the spell breaking, staring at the man trapped in the device he'd willingly climbed into, bleeding from the mechanism's short blades — the group faced an uncomfortable reality. Anton stepped to the head of the rack and, with his knife, ended it quickly.

The Moonblade flared with hot pain and Anton went to one knee. He'd broken his Oath of Redemption and the tenet of Peace. The pyromancer was incapacitated, not a threat. His Channel Divinity was gone, stripped until he could atone. He stayed on one knee for a moment, hand on the ground, and said quietly that his old instincts got the better of him. The party didn't linger on it long. There was work to do.

Forge healed the chained dwarf named Grimdanem and the two prisoners in the chamber were put into the Mirror of Life Trapping for safekeeping. The Cindersworn sending stone was knocked from the pyromancer's hand.

Two imprisoned Cindersworn were left in their cells, jailed a couple days for disrespect amongst their ranks. A gruff human smuggler serving two more years for selling illegal poisons was also left. But a lizardfolk prisoner, a reptilian humanoid with green scales and a gold-yellow plume, was a different story. Taken from his home in the marshlands four years ago, sold as a slave in Rat's Market, arrested for killing the man selling him, and imprisoned ever since. He wanted nothing more than to return to his tribe. Excelsior. He went into the mirror.

The stairs to the final level grew smaller and colder with every step. At the bottom, the floor was gone — replaced by ankle-deep water seeping through the walls from the canal above. A single torch burned at the front end of the flooded passage. One Cindersworn stood on the stairs, facing the darkness. Another sat partially submerged in a chair around the corner.

The party splashed in, still in their robes, still carrying the keys. The guard on the stairs turned, saw two figures in Cindersworn red, and waved them through. If they made it this far, they had permission.

Gemma asked if all the prisoners could be moved into one cell: Bram’s orders. The Cindersworn opened the closest cell and told them to move the prisoners within.

Forge, moving ahead through the flooded corridor, sensed Tuck ahead. As the water deepened around his legs, he reached the end of the passage and found a door heavier than the others, slick with moisture, the wall beside it audibly leaking canal water through cracked joints.

He knocked and a face appeared at the viewport — immediately, as if it's been pressed to the slot for some time. One eye glowed with a bright pink light, a magical orb replacing what was lost. He had a busted lip and dark circles around his. But focused.

He exhaled hard. “Took you long enough.”

Gemma threw the keys to Forge, and he reached down and found them. The two guards drew their swords.

Gemma immediately twin-cast Hold Person on the cult members, but a wild magic surge erupted through her simultaneously, a line of fire racing across the surface of the water and wreathing her in uncontrolled flame. A Fire Shield blazed to life around her, the surge too powerful to contain. One guard is held. The other is not. Anton and Willa, caught in the ten-foot radius, took fire damage. The held guard failed his save and went rigid.

The session ended there — Aztlan's cell door still locked, one guard held and one moving, fire dancing on the water, and the exit still a wall-breach away.