Tallulah Taken Alive

The fight ended because Nick finally found the angle. Tallulah moved too quickly for most clean answers, but the basement had been narrowed by stone and pressure and pain. Nick blasted her straight back into an old box. The impact dropped her hard enough that she fell onto her own knife, the kind of ending the room seemed to want. But she did not die. The shades vanished with her fall. The darkness lost its certainty. For a moment, the party had the simplest possible choice in front of them: let the Tallyman bleed out in the basement where she had built her ritual, or keep her alive and make the city deal with what she knew. Jonah did what Jonah does. He stabilized her. The mission had never required an execution. It had required investigation, confirmation, and protection for Witchborn forged caught in the violence. Tallulah alive meant answers could still exist somewhere beyond the knife fight. It meant Lawful and the Ex Force might get more than a corpse and a story everyone would argue over later. The party stripped her of her weapons and tools. Two daggers. Two unmarked bottles. One blade ordinary-looking until its condition made it dangerous. One dagger cleanly enchanted. The bottles remained questions for another table. Then they bound Tallulah with what they had, rope and cloth and caution, and dug her out of the wreckage. The Tallyman hunt had not ended with revenge. It ended with custody.