Soul Spots the Dragon-Grafted

Jeremiah did not treat the dark below Aleklot's Rest like a place he had stumbled into. He understood too much of it. As the group pushed deeper along the steep descending stairs, Jeremiah described meeting the Aboleth at a shrine and finding purpose through void energy. He came from the Underdark, but he spoke of light as something he still carried, something that could shine because of where he had come from rather than despite it. That was when the path changed again. Farther down the stairs, Jeremiah saw a line of humanoid figures beginning to wake. They were not ordinary undead, not clean monsters from the tourist dungeon's safe vocabulary. Their bodies had been grafted with dragon parts, turning the hidden route into evidence of experimentation, corruption, or inheritance left beneath a town built on dragon pilgrimage. Herman recognized the danger too late to be useful. He admitted this was the master course, then realized he had forgotten his master notebook. The guide who had signed them into a curated dungeon no longer had the script for what came next. The hidden path had moved beyond waivers, beyond tourist rules, and beyond simple monsters. It had dragon work in its bones.