Cards From Beneath
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Session 13 — The Feeding, Reversed

Area: the cave (assumed; unrecorded)

Context

Picks up from session 12, with Liora under the Feeding Mark Percival cast on her, and with the making of a Providence card fresh in hand.

Saving Liora

Percival reversed his own spell, the Feeding Mark. Cast as written, it marks a creature with a dark-blue line under its skin; the mark soaks up part of the damage the creature takes and turns it into temporary hit points, while Valis feeds on a fragment of its pain.

Percival turned it the other way: instead of feeding Valis, he used it to drain power out of Valis and into Liora, to save her. In the terms of the making, that is the Spirit — the price paid to awaken the card — paid out of his patron rather than out of her.

It worked. Liora was saved.

The mark he was undoing was never his. In session 12 Valis, angry at being thrown toward the chains, cast it through Percival onto Liora as revenge, and Percival had no choice. In session 13 he turned Valis's own spell back on Valis.

Restoring the Knight

He then tried to restore the Knight. A restored bond needs its Echo — what the creator willingly leaves behind — so he gave one of his own.

The Echo

What Percival left behind was his knowledge of his own history: what he did for the Low Lanterns. The years of quiet work against The Heights, the hidden mechanisms, the reason he is who he is in that city — he gave up knowing it.

In its place he now has a childhood with Valis. He remembers meeting Valis at eleven, running from strict parents to the Low Lanterns at sixteen with Valis waiting under his window, and building a small life there together. He remembers Valis promising, "I'll find you." He believes it completely.

What he now remembers is recorded in Percival Vale, under Percival's Past — A Life With Valis. The original backstory stays in the file as what actually happened.

Whether the Knight was restored is unrecorded.

Open

  • Whether the Knight bond was reforged, and whether Liora is the Knight.
  • What draining Valis cost Valis, and how he took it.
  • Whether Liora is still becoming a card, or was pulled back from it.
  • How the reversal worked — whether it is something the Feeding Mark can always do, or a one-time thing.
  • Whether the party saw what he gave up, or only that he did something.
  • Whether the swap was Percival's choice of replacement, or Valis's.

DM Notes

  • The replacement memory is entirely about Valis — and Valis is the one being drained. Whether Valis wrote the childhood he now remembers is the obvious question.
  • Valis is bonded to the Nightmare (Chain). A childhood with a friend who was "always there" is a very Nightmare-shaped gift.
  • The real backstory has him born in The Heights; the new one has strict parents he ran from. The Heights and the noble families are still after him — and he no longer knows why.