The session resumed where Session 20 left off: the elevator opening onto the twelfth floor of Brassalo Health & Research, escorted by a greasy and self-important Viroc liaison officer named Aldric. The floor presented itself as opulent with velvet chairs, mahogany trim, and real flowers in vases, but the air was thick with coppery Shardisite magic and the shard lamps gave everything that particular green-white sterility that made the eyes work too hard. From somewhere deeper in the wing came the sound of someone in serious distress. Aldric walked past it without comment.

The reunion the party anticipated did not happen. While the rest of the group was ushered toward Aldric's office, Viktor was wheeled on a gurney to the far end of the hallway, where four trained nurses moved to sedate him without explanation or ceremony. He resisted, managing to deflect two of the four syringes before the sedative found him twice in succession. Paralyzed and poisoned, strapped to the gurney, he could only listen as his comrades navigated the entirety of the situation.

Lusat attempted to intervene by announcing the party as Viroc internal security under Harold Drekanov and ordering the nurses to stand down. Aldric's casual demeanor cracked. He whistled, signaling the two Atlantean sentinels to step forward with blunderbusses raised. Lusat informed him he would take no further questions, and cast an upcast Fireball down the hallway. The nurses scattered. The Warforged did not.

What followed was a grinding, punishing engagement across the entire twelfth floor. The Warforged proved brutally resilient, their internal Shardisite cores emitting periodic force pulses that stunned and hammered the party throughout. Aldric cowered behind a desk and directed the sentinels between shots from his shard-laced revolver, while Thorun worked through them methodically with hammer and bayonet, ultimately bringing down three of the four. Lusat was knocked unconscious and required stabilization. Viktor, paralyzed on his gurney, could do nothing but watch flashes of gunfire from the hallway while his teammates fought without him.

Early in the fight, Bogdan cast Invisibility on himself and began working the edges of the ward. Using Ghostly Gaze to see through walls, he scouted the surrounding rooms and got his first look at the shard-blighted patients, men and women in the advanced stages of exposure with crystalline structures growing from their skin and faces, their outcomes already decided.

Midway through the fight, a wild-eyed head-physician arrived from deeper in the ward and threw a shard grenade into the melee, detonating a blinding pulse of green force magic. Bogdan, seeing the threat, planted dynamite beneath him, and the resulting explosion tore through much of the ward's interior walls. When the dust settled, the head-physician injected himself with something that set his eyes and veins glowing, then cast a spell that erupted beneath Bogdan in a mass of inky black tentacles that pummeled and restrained him. Thorun eventually confronted the head-physician directly and shattered his spine with a hammer strike. After his death the ward went quiet except for the distant wailing of blighted patients and Aldric's ragged breathing from behind his desk. Viktor, the sedative finally wearing off, came to on his gurney feeling like hell but conscious.

Carl approached the desk. The terms were simple: possessions on the table, honest answers, and this ends cleanly. Aldric had no viable alternative. He surrendered his revolver loaded with two remaining shard-laced rounds, a knife, a Viroc-issue sending stone, and a Department of Arcane Affairs sigil key: a filigree iron coin, obviously magical, bearing the unmistakable insignia of Dr. Sedgewick's department.

When pressed about the ward, Aldric confirmed what the party had already begun to suspect. Most of the patients were nobodies, shard-blighted individuals deemed terminal and therefore expendable. Viroc's researchers would develop a serum or a prototype and they needed test subjects who were going to die anyway. As for the sending stone, Carl asked where it connected. Aldric confirmed what the insignia already suggested: directly to the Department of Arcane Affairs.

But he knew what the party was really there for, and he said so. She was in the far ward. They'd know it when they saw it.

The physician was stripped of everything useful. From his person the party also recovered two additional shard grenades, three syringes filled with glowing green liquid of unknown purpose, a magical scalpel, and a second sending stone bearing the same Department of Arcane Affairs insignia as the one taken from Aldric. A quick search of the pharmacy turned up a tin of magical salve and a set of arcane ear coverings. Viktor also found the nurse who had stuck him first and handed her a bundle of dynamite to hold while he unlocked the surgery room door with the sigil key. The remaining staff, Aldric, the physician, and every nurse still on the floor, were sealed inside under Arcane Lock. Nothing was getting out without the key the party now held.

Before moving to the far ward, Viktor turned his attention to the patients in the open beds. A combined arcane and medical assessment confirmed what Bogdan had seen during the fight: these were people at the terminal stage of shard blight, past any threshold of return. If they were out in the world they would mutate beyond recognition or die. In here, Viroc had simply decided to extract whatever value they could before the end came. The empty beds showed where others had already reached one of those two conclusions. Viktor confirmed there was nothing to be done. Shard blight was shard blight. It had been true for a thousand years.

The sigil key opened the warded door at the back of the ward without resistance. The room beyond was a dedicated laboratory of alchemical apparatus, extraction tubing, and instrumentation stations, every piece of it organized around the single occupant of the sealed pod at the room's center.

She was alive. Her chest rose and fell. Her blood was not simply red; it carried green flecks through it, a Shardisite-laced plasma being drawn from her body in measured drops every thirty seconds, collected into a vial that had barely begun to fill. She was not shard-blighted in the conventional sense, showing none of the crystalline wasting or uncontrolled mutation that defined the ward population outside. Whatever had been done to her was different: deliberate, controlled, and she had clearly survived it far longer than anyone else on this floor. The entire room existed for her.

She was unconscious and entirely unreactive. The fight had not reached her. She did not stir.

This was the woman Grigor the Ghost had asked the party to find. The agreement had been to kill her. No one said that out loud. Viktor assessed whether she could be safely disconnected from the apparatus. She couldn't, not without causing immediate and severe harm. There was no clean way to move her.

Viktor lit incense. Bogdan opened his scripture. Lusat stood at the foot of the pod. Each of them, in their own way, reached out to the entity they had named Nadine, the being of hope they had been feeding with intention and belief since their arrival in St. Petersgrad, and asked simply if there was anything that could be done here.

The oppressive weight of the ward shifted the moment she answered. The ambient Shardisite saturation that had made the air feel thick and wrong since they stepped off the elevator was gone. Out on the ward floor where Thorun and Carl were quietly placing dynamite charges, they felt it too. A full breath where there hadn't been one. A faint humanoid outline took shape at the foot of the pod. No wings, no radiance, just a presence unmistakably there, turning to each of them in turn. And with no face to express it, it conveyed sadness clearly.

Nadine told them she had no hope to offer here.

The words carried a gravity that briefly shook the connection. Something wavered, doubt or grief or simply the weight of what that meant coming from the being of hope itself. Viktor held. And Nadine held with him.

Without another word, an arm extended and touched the woman's foot. A spirit lifted from the pod, gently, without struggle, without pain. Grigor's lover took Nadine's hand. Viktor spoke to the spirit as it rose: Grigor had sent them. He had not forgotten her. He would not leave her in this place.

The spirit and the angel departed together. The light receded.

Bogdan then reached into the apparatus and plucked the collection vial free. The moment he touched it, the machine sealed it automatically, engineered to preserve whatever had been harvested. The vial buzzed with concentrated magical energy that was immediately palpable. At the drip rate they had observed, it represented at least a week of extraction. There were no other vials anywhere on the floor.

With the charges set and the surviving staff sealed in the surgery room, the party moved to evacuate. Viktor sent the others to the elevator with a head start. He cut the fuse short, lit it, and jumped through the leaded-glass window in a heroic burst. He fell twelve stories and reminisced on his miniature coma as he rapidly descended to the courtyard below.

He landed fist-first in the courtyard directly in front of the lobby entrance just as the rest of the party walked out the doors. Above them the twelfth floor detonated, windows blowing out across the entire face of Brassalo, holes opening in the stonework, dust and smoke pouring from the upper structure. Viktor laid on hands, recovered the damage the fall had cost him, and brushed himself off.

As the party walked away from the courtyard, the sun was setting over St. Petersgrad. For the first time since they had arrived, a true shaft of light broke through the city's permanent smog and struck the ruined twelfth floor directly, illuminating the wreckage like a beacon visible across the whole city, shining two to three full minutes before the light shifted and the sun continued its descent.

The weight that had defined this city since the dragon's arrival, the despair, the grief, the hollowness of a population running on fear, lifted just slightly for the first time. Someone checked a pocket watch. 5:30 PM. The street preacher's gathering started at six. They could still make it.