A Living Dragon Climbs the Stairs

Herman started shaking before the party understood why. The fight on the stairs had already made the master path feel too real for a bought tour, but the guide's fear changed the scale of the problem. He suggested retreat. Then he pointed down the path. Something was coming up the stairs. A young black dragon emerged from below. For the party, that was a combat cliffhanger. For Jericha, it was worse than that. Dragons were not supposed to simply be living under a tourist dungeon. They were supposed to be extinct, exiled, crystal-trapped, mythologized, or otherwise removed from ordinary reality. Aleklot's Rest had built its identity around the memory of a dragon pilgrimage site, but memory was not supposed to breathe. This one did. The scam, the rat path, the dead woman, the void lore, and the grafted bodies all snapped into a sharper shape. The deeper route was not only old. It was active. It had preserved or produced something the modern world believed could not still be here. The next session would begin with a dragon on the stairs.