Ghosts in Shells

While the rest of the party focused on the tournament, Saggiato and Tamil stayed out of the spotlight. They were not registered as fighters and instead turned their attention to a different battlefield: the hidden war of spies. Their plan was simple enough: Inspect a safehouse on the far edge of Gossamer. Look for signs of harengon agents working against them. They agreed to split briefly and rendezvous near the house in about twenty minutes. On his way, Saggiato spotted something that cut through the noise of the crowd like a blade: Kilijan reacting sharply to the presence of the Five Fingers of Garresh—specifically to Antja, the female harengon among them. Saggiato tailed her through the press of bodies and banners, but Gossamer’s streets swallowed her up. In the chaos of the festival, he lost her. Instead, he ran into a merchant named Issmeth. The man was smooth-tongued, observant, and not nearly as casual as he pretended to be. He showed Saggiato his wares and, between the lines, offered something else: hints that he might know where Antja was, and that he could help track her. Saggiato did not pick up on the subtext. He deflected the conversation toward prostitutes instead. Issmeth, deciding he’d badly misjudged Saggiato’s priorities, pivoted and also started talking about prostitutes, masking his earlier intent. Still, he wasn’t quite ready to give up. He left Saggiato with a card—and, attached to it, a single strand of Antja’s fur. Saggiato pocketed the card without examining it too closely and headed off to meet Tamil as planned. When the two regrouped in the woods near the manor safehouse, they didn’t find answers. They found an ambush. Harengon spies attacked them among the trees, turning their quiet recon into a sudden fight for survival.

Meanwhile, inside the Arena of Gossamer, the grand spectacle continued. The team duels were over; now it was time for the singles. The matchups: Kilijan vs. Greg Weneon vs. Galrog Manasa vs. Max The fighters were introduced with full pomp and theatrical flourish, their names echoing off stone and enchantment as the crowd roared. Image Once the ceremony was over, the niceties vanished. Galrog was eager to tear Weneon apart, snarling for blood. But Weneon fought with cold control and clever movement, outmaneuvering the brutal fighter and finally dropping him, the arena floor drinking in his defeat. On the other side, Manasa and Max clashed in a tight, intense duel. Their fight was fierce but fair, the outcome still unresolved as the arena’s attention shifted. Kilijan, facing Greg, didn’t waste a single heartbeat. As soon as the match started, he went all in—no probing, no slow build-up, just raw aggression. He improvised mid-fight, strapping dynamite to a net and hurling the makeshift explosive trap at Greg. The result was chaos and fire: a devastating combination of control and destruction that left the crowd screaming and Greg reeling. In the meantime, Saggiato escaped the harengon together with Tamil and made it back to the Arena.

Greg found himself overwhelmed, pressed hard and fast by Kilijan’s relentless assault. With no clever tactic left and no answer to Kilijan’s brutality, Greg turned where a cleric turns when all else fails: to his god. He called upon Divine Intervention. It worked. Greg’s form twisted and expanded, armor and flesh shredding into something enormous and terrible. In a thunder of magic and bone, he transformed into an ancient white dragon, an avatar of his god’s will and wrath. The dragon faced Kilijan, breath building into a storm of killing frost. The crowd fell silent, spellbound by the sheer scale of it. Then, from the arena gate, someone stumbled into view. The real Greg. Bruised, naked, beaten half to death, he staggered forward and shouted for the dragon to stop. In that instant, the truth snapped into place like a trap: The Greg Kilijan had been fighting wasn’t Greg at all. It was an impostor, wearing Greg’s face and wielding his borrowed divinity.

The dragon did not listen. It unleashed its icy breath straight at Kilijan. The world became white and biting and final. Kilijan felt his body start to disintegrate under the dragon’s breath. Skin, bone, and breath were stripped away. As the frost tore him apart, the blue makeup on his face began to run and flake away. Beneath it, there was no vedalken. There was no blue skin at all. Kilijan’s true nature was revealed: He was a wechselkind—a changeling, a borrowed body, a life built on a second flesh. As he lay on the edge of death, one last image seared itself into his mind. Above him, Frul swooped into the arena on a glider, diving straight toward the dragon. He threw a spell focus at Greg’s feet, a crucial tool, then rammed himself and the glider into the dragon’s head in a desperate, sacrificial strike. Greg seized that moment. Using the focus, he cast Banishment—on both Frul and Kilijan—hurling them out of the arena and into another plane to save their lives. The dragon remained. The crowd screamed. The fight for the arena wasn’t over.

Kilijan awoke in a barren stone desert, the sky wrong and distant. Nearby lay Frul, motionless in the sand. Panicking, Kilijan reached out with his paladin senses, calling to Darius, Greg's patron. Nothing answered. Eventually, Frul stirred, and the two men spoke. The battlefield was gone, but their burdens weren’t. Frul confessed his deepest hesitation: Greg had offered to resurrect his wife and two children—but Frul was afraid. Afraid that what came back wouldn’t truly be them—just bodies with borrowed breath, ghosts trapped in shells. Kilijan understood that fear too well. He opened up and revealed the truth of his own existence: His original body was gone. He had been resurrected by his father into a different form, partly to make the loss easier on his mother. His life since then had been lived in a body that was never technically his, a wechselkind bearing the weight of someone else’s grief. If he could live and still be himself, maybe Frul’s family could too. Frul then revealed the true nature of the imposter Greg. It was an experiment gone wrong. When he was a child, he wanted to cast simulacrum on Greg and created this abomination Kilijan was fighting. Greg survived and they kept it a secret, paying a drunken wizard to open a portal to Avernus and casting the imposter in there. Now he has returned to get his revenge. That honesty, laid bare in the nowhere-place of Banishment, pushed Frul toward a decision. He chose to accept Greg’s offer. When the spell ended, the stone desert vanished. The two of them snapped back into existence in the arena.

Back in Gossamer, the fight had not waited for them. The ancient white dragon still rampaged in the arena. Arel Gossamiri, the master of ceremonies, stood in the stands, pouring magic into the beast—trying to keep it bound with a Hold Creature spell. His face was pale with strain. On the ground, the rest of the party fought desperately, attacking the dragon as Arel’s control slipped, inch by inch. Kilijan and Frul reappeared amid the chaos. In the middle of it, Manasa heard a familiar voice inside his mind: Darius, his patron, anxious and afraid. “Kilijan called me. Is… is she also there…?” Then, behind Kilijan, a figure approached: a hooded dragonborn, walking calmly toward the battle while murmuring to himself: “The spell Arel is casting is not strong enough. This kind of beast requires something much stronger. Something ancient, that a friend of mine taught me years ago…” The dragonborn lowered his hood. It was Garresh—the commander who had ordered the massacre of Kilijan’s village years ago, the man whose name was etched into Kilijan’s trauma. Garresh began to cast a spell: Hold Dragon. A spell that, as far as anyone knew, was known only by one person. In that moment, Manasa heard Darius cry out a name with raw, aching recognition: “Adona! My love…” The dragon froze between rampage and restraint. The crowd held its breath. And on the arena sand, past and present finally collided.