Re: Chapter 7.5: The Final Battles
Darratheir's blow buries the Arrow of Fate into Tiamat's breast; you can hear the cracking of ancient bones like the dawn of time.
Sonliin-the-dragon raises his claw and hits the Arrow of Fate dead on. A wave of dark energy washes over the party; for a long moment, everyone in the party blacks out. When the party awakes, Tiamat lies at their feet, and begins to collapse in on herself, folding in with dizzying speed.
At this point, Martha and Harald appear. They gape at Tiamat's fallen body. Then, the platform starts slowly sinking toward the ground. At the halfway point, Bahamut appears in his full draconic glory. Any remaining canaries flutter over to him and become full-fledged gold dragons that bow before him. Bahamut lifts one talon, and the characters are fully healed and recover from all conditions. Zog's ruined body rises and revives; the changeling stands good as new before the rest of you.
“You have the thanks of a god . . . you have the thanks of all, all across the many planes, all who strive for good.
“Yet I wonder whether you understand the enormity of your deed. Come! Grasp my wings. I’ll show you just what you’ve wrought.”
With a silver flash, Tiamat’s Lair disappears and you find yourself flying over the town of Rivenroar, where all this started what seems like forever ago. Tiamat circles lower and lower over a particularly fine manor on the edge of town.
“That belongs to Magister Tulm,” Bahamut intones.
“He’s well into his eighth decade of life, and he’s amassed a fortune providing advice and counsel to various dukes and high priests . . . a fortune so great that he could never spend it all. So look!”
As you watch, an old man heaves a sack onto the back of a wagon, wipes his brow, then clambers into the front of the wagon.
“Magister Tulm has just realized that he has more money than he’ll ever need. He’s pulled his extra wealth out of his cellar—a cellar replete with fiendish traps, by the way—and he’s going to distribute it in the town square.”
Another flash, and you’re high above another familiar place: the city of Overlook. Bahamut soars to the town’s outskirts, where you see a farmer mending a hole in a pasture fence.
“A simple, pastoral scene, but consider this . . . Farmer Collob comes to this gap every day to look at the thoroughbred horses in his neighbor’s pasture. How he wished he could have horses like that! Now Farmer Collob is fixing the fence so he can’t peer through it anymore. Not because he’s given up hope, but because he no longer envies his neighbor.”
There’s another silver flash, and you find yourself flying over Hestavar. Bahamut lands atop his own temple.
“See my own temple. My priests have melted down much of the gold filigree that decorates—nay, obfuscates!—the temple interior. We’re saving some for a rainy day, but the rest we’re giving away to our brethren at the temples of Pelor, Erathis, and Ioun, whose temples were damaged while I was away.”
With another flash, the heroes find themselves in Bahamut’s chambers in Celestia.
Bahamut regards you kindly with his platinum eyes. “When you killed Tiamat, you didn’t just defeat a god. You defeated the very wellspring of greed and envy. “This doesn’t mean the end of money, but gold coins are now merely a medium of exchange. No one wants gold coins or other riches for their own sake. That’s why Magister Tulm gives away his extra wealth: He can no longer fathom a reason to keep it. It’s not strictly out of the goodness of his heart, but because he no longer has the concept of greed.
“Farmer Collob is still fascinated with thoroughbred horses. It’s just that he doesn’t despise his neighbor for having horses that he himself lacks. That envy no longer poisons life on both sides of that fence. What’s more, it’s likely that his neighbor will sell one of those horses to Collob for no more than he’d charge for a common plow horse, because he, too, sees no reason to keep something to himself when it means more to someone else.
“Good and evil alike are affected by the end of greed and envy—which you saw in Hestavar. Even bulwarks of virtue like the temple of Bahamut are not immune to greed.”
Bahamut gives a low snort that might be a chuckle, might be a cough.
“There’s still evil in the world, of course. The tree of evil has multiple roots . . . not just greed. But you’ve fundamentally changed the world forever, heroes. I encourage you to visit it and see what you’ve done before . . . moving on.”
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