The Dragon-Grafted Wake

The things on the stairs woke into violence. The dragon-grafted humanoids came upward with claws and acid rays, bodies warped by pieces of a legacy Jericha had mostly learned to treat as history. They were not dragons, but they were close enough to make the dungeon's old story feel alive in the worst possible way. The stairs became a narrow emergency. Darius, Jonah, and the others took claw and acid hits while the party tried to stop the wave from reaching them cleanly. The grafted bodies resisted acid, as if the dragon work inside them had taught their flesh what to ignore. Gumbo, somehow still Gumbo in the middle of it all, wanted dragon purses. Then the fight grew stranger. Jeremiah's eyes went black as he used Aboleth-touched power to enslave one of the grafted attackers. Morgan answered death with death, raising one of the fallen grafted bodies as a zombie to turn the stairway's casualties back against the stairway. The master path was no longer only revealing old danger. It was forcing the party to use their own strange gifts in public, under pressure, while dragon-made bodies crawled out of the dark below.