34: The Fractured Soul
🎧 Podcast Link • September 26, 2025
The session opens with the party in the midst of combat against Crang and his controlled ravers. Crang, a powerful entity channeling Helisanna's patron, proves to be a formidable opponent with devastating attacks and high saving throws that make crowd control nearly impossible.
Combat Chaos
The battle quickly becomes desperate. Crang's attacks deal massive poison damage, and the ravers' psychic assaults begin draining the party's intelligence scores. Ohma (run by Luke while Zack was away) takes the fight to Crang directly with a Stunning Strike, then turns his fists on the raver mobs until the music takes hold of him and he starts dancing, while Bru attempts various crowd control spells—most of which fail against Crang's exceptional saves.
The situation deteriorates when Helisanna's patron takes full control. Despite Olivia's attempts to protect her with magic, Helisanna fails her saving throws and begins attacking the party with her full Eldritch Blast arsenal. She drops Olivia and keeps blasting her while she is down, and the party struggles to maintain focus between dealing with Crang, the raver mobs, and their possessed companion.
Silas, blinded and with his intelligence drained to nearly nothing, fights instinctively. Elspeth focuses on destroying the sound panels powering Crang's abilities, correctly identifying them as key to ending the encounter. Her dedication to this strategy, combined with Bru's well-timed Shatter spell, proves crucial.
The Speakers Fall
When the final speaker is destroyed by a nearly mindless Silas, the battle shifts dramatically. The pulsing music stops, and an otherworldly presence fully manifests through Helisanna. Her patron, Y'chek (or "Ruthalk" in Dwarvish)—an ancient primordial entity associated with dark, melancholic music—offers Helisanna a final choice: resist, submit, or try to overpower the entity.
Helisanna chooses to submit. Face to face with herself, she sees her pale skin and purple veins and what the pact has cost her, and she starts tearing at the veil that has held her. This time a small dwarven spirit, an avatar of Tyr answering Olivia's spell, helps her rip it open: "Let's tip the scales."
The Split
In a flash of light, crackling lightning and the scream of reality breaking, Helisanna literally splits into two people. The drugged, goth rocker version carried away by adoring ravers, and a new figure—Leliana Goldspring, a cheerful, nature-loving bard with blonde hair and a sunny disposition.
Leliana explains that she has been trapped for years in a dreamlike prison inside Helisanna's consciousness. After an open mic one night, a stranger pointed her toward a shrine. She chose not to go, went to bed, and woke up looking out through Helisanna's eyes. She's witnessed everything the party has done but has been powerless to act. The darker Helisanna was apparently born from the choice to go and accept the pact.
Theological Research
Using her extensive knowledge of Dwarvish folklore, Elspeth (with Bru's Flash of Genius assistance) recalls ancient stories about Y'chek. The entity is one of the oldest primordial beings—not a god of a domain like hills or lightning, but the spiritual embodiment of sad, dark music itself. Part of an ancient "orchestra" of primordial forces, Y'chek represents percussion and drums, and has evolved with music through the ages, now seeping into electronic music.
Key facts learned:
- Y'chek doesn't have will or desire as mortals understand it—it spreads like vegetation seeking fertile ground
- The weakened barriers between planes have given it unprecedented influence
- It historically lured people (especially dwarves) into the deep earth, never to be seen again
- It can potentially be countered by promoting joyful music, strengthening planar barriers, or by becoming god-killers, as the Eldorans have
Difficult Choices
The party now faces several dilemmas:
Regarding Helisanna/Leliana: Are they two halves of one fractured soul that should be reunited? Is one the "real" person and the other a construct? Can Leliana's positivity overcome Y'chek's influence if they merge? Or should they simply eliminate the corrupted Helisanna and protect Leliana?
Regarding the City: Helisanna has left to prepare the ravers for the attack on Helja's forces, but she's now fully under Y'chek's influence. The party fears this could lead to genocide rather than liberation. Can they trust her to follow through with the plan, or will Y'chek use the ravers to "party the city to death" as the ancient legends describe?
Regarding the Timeline: With less than two days before the planned uprising, the party must decide whether to proceed with overthrowing Helja while Helisanna/Y'chek controls the ravers, attempt to "fix" Helisanna first, or evacuate the city entirely.
Silas proposes using Leliana to either merge with and heal Helisanna, or to use her positive energy to vanquish the dark half entirely. Elspeth leans toward saving Helisanna, seeing her as a friend despite everything. Bru sees it more pragmatically—kill the bad one, protect the good one. The party remains divided on whether Helisanna ever truly cared about them as friends or only saw them as tools for fame.
Session End
The party is left in the aftermath of the battle, with Crang and the ravers departed, an unconscious Ohma sleeping off his compelled dancing, a confused but friendly Leliana offering to help, and the looming specter of an even larger conflict ahead. They must soon decide: save Helisanna, destroy her, or find some third option—all while racing against the clock to prevent a cataclysmic clash between the dragons and Y'chek's ravers from consuming High Forge.
The question of whether they were ever truly Helisanna's friends, or merely convenient stepping stones to stardom, hangs heavily in the air.