Previously on Reclaiming Orathos

One in the morning, and the party is back in the water. Silithane found Water Breathing torn from a stolen pirate's spellbook, so now all seven — plus the raven and a salamander — can breathe the flooded dark of Grey Vale Cave.

You slip past the sleeping Queen. You meet a clog-wearing scholar who watches her through binoculars for Laewendas and won't help you kill her. Jex digs a meteorite older than the cave itself out of a sinkhole. Valmora heals Gono — the last missing woodling, who weeps that he's the last of his kind, then learns his husband No-Go has waited fifty years.

Then Lash dives ten minutes straight down and cracks open the under-prison — home to egg-tending crocodile-people who've named themselves the prison's reluctant guards.

But three disturbances finally wake the Queen for good. She wades into the water and hunts. You all dive — except Otto, who was never given Water Breathing. The Queen catches him, and takes his hands.

You surface among the Grenkh, shaken, granted passage to the jail. The lost prisoner is found. She's too big to put back. And somewhere behind you, there's no handless body... yet.

SUMMARY: A present-tense recap of Session 26 — the watery descent past the Queen, Gono's rescue, Lash breaching the under-prison, and Otto's loss to the Queen's hunt — ending on the unresolved fate hook.