Chapter 2: The Wizards Three

Chapter 2: The Wizards Three

Word of the party's deeds in Neverwinter had scarcely settled into legend when the strange mark left by Vecna made itself known again. The characters had returned from Neverdeath Graveyard carrying an invisible, unshakeable link to the lich-god — a presence no ritual, sage, or spell could explain or remove. Whatever time passed after Neverwinter, that link remained, a quiet reminder that something vast had noticed them.

A Wish Gone Astray

Unbeknownst to the party, a reckoning had already begun. Alustriel Silverhand — the ancient, beloved archmage and immortal daughter of Mystra, once High Mage of Silverymoon — had detected a sinister pulse of magic rippling across the multiverse. Her divinations led her to a horrifying truth: Vecna and his cultists were siphoning stolen power from countless souls across the planes, and whatever he intended to do with it would be catastrophic.

Alarmed, Alustriel summoned her two most trusted allies: Mordenkainen, the renowned but famously reckless archmage of Oerth, and Tasha, the chaotic demonologist and adopted daughter of Baba Yaga, author of the legendary Demonomicon of Iggwilv. The three gathered in Alustriel's private sanctum in Sigil, the City of Doors, and wove together a Wish powerful enough, they hoped, to unravel Vecna's ritual before it could be completed.

The spell did not go as planned. In a flash of light, the world dissolved around the characters, and when their senses returned, they found themselves standing not where they had been, but in a candlelit parlor deep within Alustriel's sanctum — face to face with three of the most powerful wizards in existence, all of whom looked as baffled as they felt. "You can't be the answer to our Wish," Tasha muttered, unimpressed, before Alustriel gently ushered the disoriented party toward more comfortable seating.

The Sanctum in Sigil

Alustriel explained where they were: a hidden sanctum built around a portal she had discovered centuries ago, linking Silverymoon to Sigil, the city at the crux of the planes. She had since fused that portal with the shattered remnants of a Well of Many Worlds, turning it into a gateway capable of reaching nearly anywhere in the multiverse — a secret she guarded fiercely, revealing the sanctum only to those she trusted completely.

When the characters mentioned Vecna's Link, Alustriel's confusion gave way to grim understanding. She reasoned that since the Wish had failed to achieve its intended purpose, it must instead have reached out for anything bound to Vecna — and found them. Their fate, she realized, was somehow entwined with the lich-god's plans. She laid out everything she knew: Vecna was gathering stolen power on a scale that threatened to unmake and remake existence itself, with him standing atop the ashes as its supreme and unchallengeable god.

The three wizards were plainly spent from the Wish — drained and fatigued from the effort of the failed spell. Yet it was Mordenkainen who spoke first with a new plan, retrieving a silver chime from one of the sanctum's cabinets of curiosities.

Mordenkainen's Contingency

"I worried our Wish wouldn't be enough to stop one as powerful as Vecna," Mordenkainen admitted, "so I prepared a contingency." He held up the item — the Chime of Exile, an artifact capable of banishing a target back to their home plane. His plan: weaken Vecna enough during his ritual to make him vulnerable, then use the chime to hurl him back to Oerth, severing him from the ritual and shattering his plan before it could be completed.

But weakening a lich-god of Vecna's power would require an artifact of comparable might. Mordenkainen revealed he had been quietly searching for exactly such a thing — the legendary Rod of Seven Parts, its seven pieces scattered to the far corners of the multiverse. He claimed to already know where the first piece could be found: hidden deep in the Underdark of Faerûn, inside a secret haven for the cultists of Lolth known as Web's Edge. He promised that once one piece was recovered, its magic would guide the party to the next, piece by piece, through the sanctum's portal.

Alustriel and Tasha, startled but grateful for his foresight, agreed it was their best hope. With the sanctum's portal keyed to the quest, and the wizards promising to keep researching Vecna's plans while the party traveled, the characters set off for the Underdark.

Into Web's Edge

Stepping through the portal, the party emerged in a cramped, lightless passage of the Underdark, just steps from a hidden iron door — the concealed entrance to Web's Edge, a clandestine meeting place for agents and clergy of the Spider Queen. From here, cultists and covert operatives orchestrated infiltrations of clerical orders, sabotage against Lolth's enemies, and conversion campaigns aimed at Underdark strongholds like Blingdenstone, Gracklstugh, and Mithral Hall. Some agents passed through in hours; others lingered for weeks awaiting comrades or hiding from pursuers.

Venturing inside, the characters found a facility built on deception from its very entrance — a false front littered with the bones of adventurers who had stumbled in blind and paid for it. Deeper in, they encountered a shrine where Lolth agents prayed among grisly trophies, a summoning chamber where a svirfneblin sorceress called forth an Abyssal ally, and a meeting hall where cultists plotted an assault on a nearby mining settlement.

In the prison cells of Web's Edge, the party found a handful of unfortunate captives, all deceased.

At the heart of the complex, in the cavernous Sacred Web Hall, the party found Web's Edge's strangest resident: Ker-arach, a monstrous spiderdragon that had crawled through a rift from the Abyss months earlier, tended and revered by the cultists as a living sign of Lolth's favor. Bound in the silk of her web at the center of the hall was what they had come for — the first piece of the Rod of Seven Parts. Duskin managed to retrieve the Rod piece while the party battled the dragon, and Vecna's old enemy Kas the Betrayer made an appearance as well. He, too, was searching for the Rod pieces in his own battle against Vecna. The party offered him a truce; they would recover the Rod pieces and would in turn, once they had them all, trade it for Kas's sword, the only weapon known to have harmed Vecna. Kas reluctantly agreed but seemed convinced that the party would not succeed and left to gather what Rod pieces remained himself.

The Piece Recovered

With the rod piece finally freed from Ker-arach's web, the characters made their way back through the portal to Sigil, carrying the first fragment of an artifact said to be humanity's — and the multiverse's — best hope against Vecna. Back in the sanctum, they found a new face waiting: Malaina van Talstiv, Alustriel's wife and a retired adventurer in her own right, who greeted them warmly and offered her help in whatever way she could, from gathering information abroad to tracking down useful magic.

With one piece of the rod in hand, its buried magic already stirring toward the next fragment, the party's road forward was clear — reassemble the Rod of Seven Parts, piece by piece, before Vecna's ritual could reach its end.