Chapter 3: The Lambent Zenith's Last Voyage

With one piece of the Rod of Seven Parts already in hand, its presence made itself known the moment the party stepped through the portal in the Sigil sanctum: the next piece lay somewhere in the Astral Sea. Mordenkainen and Alustriel's research had already pointed the way toward that strange, silver-clouded realm of thought and dream, where time means nothing, hunger and thirst are forgotten, and a traveler can propel themselves onward by will alone.

Into the Astral Sea

The party fell through the doorway into a silver-clouded void, tumbling toward a colossal, misshapen mass adrift in the dark. What looked at first like a dead world was in fact the petrified corpse of Havock, a god of chaos long forgotten by its worshippers — once eight-legged and two-headed, now reduced to a broken, drifting ruin, its limbs and heads scattered across the Astral Sea over the ages. The rod piece's pull grew stronger the closer the party drew to it.

The crossing wasn't peaceful. Two bobbing globes of light in the clouds turned out to be a pair of star anglers — hungry astral predators — stalking the party through the mist. The party fought them off before continuing on to the surface of the dying god, where the wreckage of a ship lay embedded in Havock's bones.

The Wreck of the Lambent Zenith

The Lambent Zenith had once been an elegant spelljamming galleon with a navy-blue hull and golden sails, captained by a deva named Inda Malayuri — an arcanist and emissary whose mission was to guide the lost and bring peace to troubled worlds. During her travels, Inda had uncovered a piece of the Rod of Seven Parts and used its conjuration magic to let her ship leap across the multiverse in an instant.

That mission ended when the Lambent Zenith crossed paths with Havock. The god's residual chaos magic twisted the ship's power and tore it apart, driving its prow straight into Havock's heart. The wreck settled into three broken pieces nestled among the god's bones: the stern segment in the hip bones, the starboard segment in the ribcage, and the prow, impaled in the heart itself. The rod piece, the party sensed, was somewhere within.

The Stern Segment: A Camp of Survivors

The stern segment held the largest group of survivors, camped together under the shaky leadership of a giff named Ilren, who had stepped in after the ship's first mate, Figaro, fell into a strange seclusion. Two githyanki bosuns, Lysan and Zastra, kept watch at the deck — wary but ultimately good-humored once they were satisfied the party meant no harm. They introduced the party around camp, though they clearly had reservations about some of their fellow survivors that they were reluctant to voice directly.

In the galley, the party met Kycera Duskstride, the ship's second mate — a reformed pirate turned assassin who had found a measure of peace cooking for the stranded crew. She'd helped design the ship's security system back when the rod piece was still safely aboard, and once she trusted the party's intentions, she shared what she knew about the artifact's protections. In the mess hall, the party found Daveras, a gruff elven druid who had washed up with the wreck after his own ship, the Verdant Branch, was attacked by space pirates. He'd escaped with his best friend, a blink dog named Ikasa, and a treant named Redbud — though Daveras believed himself the only one of the three to have survived, and his missing card partner Cirit weighed on him too.

At the heart of the camp's unease was Figaro. Barricaded in his stateroom behind a magical barrier, paranoid and unreachable, the first mate had grown convinced he couldn't trust anyone — including his own crew. As the party earned trust throughout the wreck, gathering allies willing to vouch for them, they were eventually able to reach him. What they found was a man whose mind had been quietly poisoned: Ilren, the "giff" who had taken over leadership, was in truth a death slaad in disguise, a creature of chaos who had been tampering with Figaro's memories and secretly luring monstrous predators to attack the camp for its own amusement. Once the party helped restore Figaro's true memories, he recalled Ilren's betrayal in full — and confronted the impostor, who was defeated. Freed from Ilren's influence, Figaro finally opened up. He confided a truth that had been eating at him even after his memory was restored: he'd known this stretch of the Astral Sea was dangerous, but had said nothing to the captain, believing the route worth the risk. It was a confession made quietly, out of guilt rather than pride.

The party also found Cirit, a couatl who had taken the form of a halfling and had been locked away in the brig ever since she discovered Ilren's true nature and tried to warn the others. Freed, she became another voice vouching for the party's good intentions.

The Starboard Segment: Old Friends, Found Again

The starboard segment held a wrecked lifeboat — the remains of Daveras's escape from the Verdant Branch. Guarding it was Redbud, the treant who had grown into the lifeboat's hull to keep it seaworthy and had since rooted itself into Havock's flesh to survive. Redbud was cagey at first about letting the party deeper into the wreck, claiming only to be protecting them from monsters nesting below — which was true, but not the whole truth. Pressed, the treant admitted it was really protecting someone dear to it, trapped in the lifeboat below: Ikasa, Daveras's blink dog companion, who everyone had assumed lost.

The party cleared out a nest of grells that had made their lair in the segment's lower decks, and Redbud's roots parted to let them through. Reunited with Ikasa, the party learned one more quiet, sad truth: Ikasa had seen another of Daveras's friends, a halfling named Palenna Tindertoe, escape the wreck of the Verdant Branch and drift off alone into the Astral Sea. Ikasa hadn't had any way to search for her and hadn't told Daveras, afraid of what the news would do to him. When Daveras and Ikasa were finally reunited, the blink dog happily vouched for the party before Figaro.

The Prow Segment: The Captain's Vigil

In the prow, wedged into Havock's ruined heart, the party found the Lambent Zenith's captain herself — Inda Malayuri, alive but grounded. Years before, she'd lost a leg and a wing in an old battle and now relied on prosthetics; the crash had broken her prosthetic wing, and she'd been trying, without much luck, to repair it in the ship's old navigation room. Wary of raiders who'd already tried to pillage the wreck, Inda was slow to trust the party, but warmed once they offered to help mend her wing or promised to help reunite her with her stranded crew. She told them of the safe room where the rod piece had been kept, sealed away by an emergency ward the moment the ship crashed. She'd seen something serpentine emerge from Havock's heart once, though she'd never dared go looking for it herself.

Breaking the Wards

The rod piece had been sealed inside the ship's safe room by wards hidden elsewhere in the wreck. With the seals found and Inda's help, the party was able to lift the wards and open the way into the safe room. What they found there was not the rod piece, but a ragged hole where the ship's prow had been swallowed whole into the god's still-beating heart.

Into the Heart of Havock

Havock's heart, though its owner had been dead in all but name for ages, still beat — and in beating, it had spawned a hertilod, a parasitic monstrosity that fed on the god's residual divine power and devoured whatever wreckage and travelers wandered too close. When the Lambent Zenith crashed, the heart had absorbed pieces of the ship's ruined prow, and the hertilod had gorged itself on the wreckage — rod piece included.

The party pressed into the heart's fetid, dimly lit chambers, walled in flesh part petrified and part still soft and pulsing, until they found the hertilod itself: a skinless, serpentine creature clinging to the chamber's ceiling, its draconic snout dripping venom. The confrontation was brutal, but the party brought the creature down and recovered the second piece of the Rod of Seven Parts from its gullet.

With the rod piece freed from Havock's vicinity, the warped, malfunctioning teleportation magic that had plagued the wreck since the crash finally settled back to normal. The party made their way back to the portal floating above the dead god's ruined body, rod piece in hand, ready to carry it back to Sigil. Ula, the party's Enchanter, managed to palm a few vials of Havock's blood, while Wankershim filled a few casks from the bag of holding.