The Commune Tea Turns Into Horror

Tarria arrived at the Pink Pony Tavern carrying a revenge thread with Boost and the Graven Scourge already tangled through it. That should have been enough trouble for one episode. It was not. The party followed a lavender thief trail out toward a hippie commune, where a psychedelic tea ceremony slipped from strange to catastrophic. Panic, whispers, and manipulation turned the ceremony into mass blinding, pulling Willow Dewglade and the commune into a tragedy that looked spiritual from a distance and horrific up close. Then the redcaps came. The group survived the ambush and pushed onward to Xalaethra's abandoned camp, where Havyk claimed the Mantle of the Medusa and the party discovered Calithea, Xalaethra's captive sister. Calithea's warning made the pattern clearer: the party's choices were making hags happy, even when the party thought they were solving the immediate problem. By the end, Tarria had joined the Pink Pony Girls, Havyk had gained a powerful Medusa-linked mantle, and the commune survivors had been pulled deeper into Xalaethra's orbit. The episode did not simply add a new teammate. It showed how easily mercy, drugs, revenge, and hag design could all wear the same face.