Out of Smiteclaw

The party was still weighing Mary Jane's directions when the prison door opened again. Victor came through it badly. He was thrown into the cell bleeding, the place where his right arm had been cut away still fresh enough to turn the room silent before it turned frantic. Whatever leverage he had found with the guard had not protected him from Keredeth. Whatever had happened in the throne room had cost him more than anyone in the cell was ready to understand. Jonah moved first with healing. Ash and the others helped bind the wound, doing what they could to stop the bleeding and keep Victor alive. The injury became real in pieces: the missing arm, the missing bracer, the missing dragon. Walter was gone. Before Victor could explain everything, the Githyanki made the terms of release clear. Contraband had been taken. The rest of the party's belongings would be waiting near the front entrance. When they were ready, the Githyanki would escort them out into the cold. The group took inventory of what that meant. The Gith note from the farm was gone. The glass sword Darius had taken was gone. Walter was gone. Victor, not yet ready to tell every detail, framed the result with the kind of grim joke that only works when no one knows whether to laugh. He had saved everyone. It had only cost an arm. Not an arm and a leg. The party had no realistic way to fight their way back to Walter. Not then. Not from inside the fortress, wounded and watched. Victor had seen enough in the throne room to know there were powerful people behind those doors, and Cynthia's safe route to the south now mattered more than pride. So they went. The escort led them through the lower fortress, past more Dragonborn statues and the sign that finally named the place: Smiteclaw Village, dedicated to the memory of Tameis Smiteclaw the Fallen. The name changed the prison again. It was not just a Githyanki fortress. It was an occupied Dragonborn settlement. The proof appeared as they were leaving. A Githyanki soldier dragged a Dragonborn child away, shouting as the child was pulled toward another barracks. The party saw it, and then the escort kept moving. One more wrong they could not fix yet. At the gate, their bags waited near the fire in separate piles. The Githyanki opened the way, let them collect what remained, and closed the gate behind them. Outside, the air was hard and cold. Snow lay over the mountain. The path south stretched away from Smiteclaw Village and toward the camp Mary Jane had promised. Victor picked up what he could with one arm. Maine offered the warforged prosthetic arm he had been carrying, not because it could solve the wound immediately, but because it was something. Dhaz reattached his own arm and leg. The others gathered themselves, rearmed, and chose the only direction that made sense. South. They had survived the fortress. They had not escaped it cleanly.