Into the Mirror

Into the Mirror is the D20 Deathmatch campaign that follows the survivors of the Arbiter’s failed coup into a realm of the dead. Flynry is struck down by a meteor at the end of the Battle for the Crown. His old friends Toddleheim and Locket, joined by the Grandmaster’s jittery personal assistant Elianna, are sent after him by the Arbiter. What they find is The Sands of Eternity: a cold green desert under a sky of nebulas, where the sand is made of destroyed souls and dying there means dying forever. The arc is a slow, strange and often very funny story about grief, memory and identity. It ends with the most predictable betrayal in the Void, and it still stings.

Background

The campaign continues the story that began with Fate of the Arbiter in Season 2. In that story, Flynry, Toddleheim, Locket and their friend Orin uncovered the Arbiter’s scheming. In the Hall of Mirrors (also called the Hall of Fates) beneath The Dread Fortress, Flynry stared too long into a mirror, and Locket and Toddleheim “gave something of themselves” to pull him back from the brink. Orin was not so lucky: he was turned to stone and crumbled to dust there.

The Arbiter’s plot came to a head in the Battle for the Crown, his attempt to overthrow the Grandmaster with an army of resurrected champions. Toddleheim and Locket survived their own Deathmatches and spent months trying to expose his betrayal. Flynry fought the final battle for the Grandmaster’s side and was obliterated by a falling meteor in front of the watching Acolytes. The coup failed and the Arbiter ended up in chains. For the friends Flynry left behind, it was a hollow victory.

The Story

Flynry Dies, Flynry Wakes

Into the Mirror, Session 1 (YouTube Parts 1–6 - Flynry Dies, Flynry Wakes, Flynry Walks, Survivors, Reflect… opens on the battlefield of The Grand Coliseum as the meteor comes down. Flynry, played by BdTeej, sees visions of Toddleheim and Locket smiling at him and feels Orin’s giant werebear hands steadying his shoulders. He lets go of his beast form and meets the end at peace: “we did it… his role was played.”

Then he wakes beneath an enormous oak, in sunshine, to the smell of warm bread. He becomes completely certain that this is the real world and that the arena, the Grandmaster and his friends were only “a really complex and crazy dream.” He has a village, a blacksmith friend named Olaf who out-drinks him with something closer to fuel than ale, and a grown son, a politician from Prexmarin, whom he named Orin after his fallen comrade. The whole village has gathered to celebrate his retirement from the Grandmaster’s service. New memories arrive as though they were always there: in this life he won the Battle for the Crown alongside Professor Stabbz.

That night he dances with his wife Lillian under floating lanterns, and for once in his life it feels easy and perfect. She leans in and whispers something in his ear. Then she crumbles into sand in his arms with a crooked smile on her face. The village collapses, the sun goes black, and Flynry is alone in The green-sand desert, where the sand is “like the color of a mirror, reflected too many times.”

Flynry Walks

The desert is cold, wavering and endless, and no point on the horizon ever gets closer. In his panic Flynry shifts too far into his beast form and becomes “more the animal than a man.” He now carries two lives at once: the knowledge that his death was real, and memories of a wife and son who never existed.

A sandstorm pulls itself together into a towering minotaur of green sand carrying an axe that shatters into sand when it strikes the ground and reforms as it is lifted. Battle is the most comfortable Flynry has felt since waking. His punches sink into holes the sand refills as fast as he makes them, so he plunges his arm into the desert and imagines a weapon. He pulls out a greatsword wreathed in searing blue flame. Wherever it cuts, the sand melts into mirror and cannot reform. He leaps and splits the minotaur in half, and the two cut faces become mirrors: his human form in one, his beast form in the other.

The blade cools to a mirror finish. In it he glimpses Toddleheim and Locket living on after his death, and the sand in the blade shifts to point him toward the horizon. Where the crossguard meets the blade, a single word inscribes itself in gold: “truth.” He walks for “days, weeks, months, maybe years. Indiscernible.”

Survivors and Reflections

Back in The Void, the Grandmaster took Toddleheim (played by Ahnubyss) and Locket (played by Miss_Magitek) into her court. Toddleheim searched every library he could find for a way to bring Flynry back. Locket took jobs, wrote nightly letters to her estranged twin sister, and welcomed late-night visits from Baptiste, a dagger-laden elven gentleman who would throw rocks at her window and ask, “Would you have any interest in practicing your stabbing?” Locket allowed that “it would be worth giving it a stab,” Baptiste promised “My knives are sharp. And I have many a honing stone,” and the scene faded out “before we get way too involved there.” She later insisted they were “just friends,” a lie that needed no roll to spot. As the narration put it, there were “a lot of dagger strikes in your headboard.”

Eventually a vague letter from the Grandmaster arrived: their friend “may not be completely gone.” The pair travelled to the Dread Fortress, past portraits of the Grandmaster and of a man with a golden shield. In the throne room they found the Arbiter lounging sideways on the Grandmaster’s throne in chains and sackcloth, picking his teeth with a knife. The Grandmaster was away, and the Arbiter was obliged to help. Beside him stood Elianna (played by ParallaxStella), a small tiefling with red reading glasses, a notebook and a deep dislike of her charge: “We haven’t washed him in a few days because no one wants to go near him.”

The Arbiter led them down to the Hall of Fates, remarking that he thought they might be “nostalgic” for the place they had lost Orin. He explained that the floating mirrors are part portal, part living creature. When Flynry gazed into them, a piece of his soul was taken, “and upon his death, that debt was collected.” Each of them had to look into a mirror and resist. Toddleheim, whose desire was still “just a warm bosom to rest my head,” faced his ideal woman pressed against the glass and squeaking back and forth; he tore himself away with “Well, it is a good bosom.” Locket saw her twin sister. Elianna, revealed as the group’s chaperone, saw a snowy cabin and herself curled up with the Grandmaster under a blanket. She pulled her hand back: “She wanted me to come back safely and I will do that.”

Then the Arbiter, in a suspiciously good mood, explained that he only knew one way to get there. He raised a hand and unmade all three of them. As they grayed and chipped away like Orin, he cackled: “That’s one way to solve my problems.”

They woke together in the green desert. Toddleheim read the sand and found it was made of broken souls, “Souls of the dead who have been destroyed. Completely.” Overcome, he plunged his fists into it, wept and screamed Flynry’s name. The desert split open in a line pointing the way. It led them to Flynry, now wielding a sword of aqua flame and fighting a pack of sand scorpions.

Claws of Sand and Shifting Sands

Into the Mirror 7–9 - Claws of Sand, Shifting Sands, Hourglass (session 2) picks up mid-fight. Flynry has become a desert veteran who flips around scorpions like a bullfighter. Locket hacks claws off as fast as they grow back, and Toddleheim discovers that fire turns the creatures to glass. Elianna, who had never been in a battle, greeted it with a string of “fuck, fuck, fuck” and kept cursing (“I didn’t sign up for this”). She also landed her first kill with a spectral scythe that took off a scorpion’s head and dropped it at Flynry’s feet like a gift. She tried to curtsy and fell over. The survivors sank back into the sand and rose again as one giant scorpion. Elianna, remembering her promise to the Grandmaster, stared it down and blew it apart in a burst of purple flame.

The reunion was tender and strange. Flynry was grayer, had lost his very large beard and spoke differently, so changed that Locket said that “if not for my intuition, I would say that this isn’t even Flynry.” For him, years had passed. For them, it had been months. Elianna named the place from her reading as the Sands of Eternity, and Toddleheim filled in the rest from an old book of legends. It is a realm for the dead that sits apart from every other underworld. “I do regret to inform you that we are all dead.”

Flynry pulled a wooden spoon out of the sand, like the one he had once bought for Frank, the disgruntled chef who cooked with bones and sticks. He explained that “Your experience here is what your mind makes it.” Elianna sketched him for the Grandmaster and looked into the sword, Truth, for a sign of hope. It showed her a ziggurat crowned with a mirror-like gem that beamed light into the sky, then rewound the path that led there.

Then Locket looked into the sword and asked it to “Show us the way.” Behind her reflection she saw figures on a dune. She realized they were real just as an arrow went through her throat. Her blood poured out almost at once and she fell to her knees, and as Flynry caught her, her body turned to sand and ran through his fingers. Because she died in the Sands, Locket is dead for good.

Shatter and Mortaurios

Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios (ITM session 3) begins in grief. Flynry roared at the sky, and Toddleheim began shifting into a werewolf, weeping the whole way. Flynry held him until it slowed. Elianna scooped Locket’s sand into a bag in case they could “put her back together.” When Toddleheim finally looked into Truth, he saw himself as the old, contented wizard he is on the inside, and learned that in this place your shape may be “up to you.”

The story then rewound to moments before Locket’s death and introduced Cerys, Miss_Magitek’s new character: a gray-skinned, blue-haired aasimar in battered armor, “jaded by this place.” A band of outlanders had stripped her of her weapons, slashed her back, put an arrow through her wrist and tossed her a bow with one arrow for their own amusement: “Nothing but time here. Why not have a little fun?” Blazing with radiant fury, she fired at the man presenting himself as a target. A spear in her leg threw off her aim, and the arrow sailed over the dune and into Locket. At the table, her player summed it up: “I killed my own character.”

The party charged over the dune. Elianna put most of the outlanders to sleep. Cerys cut deep into the archer, and Flynry knocked him to his knees and took his head off with the greatsword; the head rolled down the dune and the body evaporated into sand, like Locket. Elianna then took a dagger off a sleeping outlander and calmly slit two of their throats, prompting “Our librarian’s a sociopath.” Cerys finished the last one, driving her longsword through his chest. A tense standoff followed. Flynry held his sword on her, and Elianna stepped between them, terrified and pleading because Cerys knew the city from the vision. Cerys apologized: “I meant to kill one of them. They set me up.” Toddleheim looked at her reflection in Truth and saw her true self, radiant and winged, and grudgingly decided she could be trusted. She whispered the city’s name into the wind, and the sand opened into a mirror-portal.

Mortaurios, the city of the dead, was a bustling desert metropolis of bazaars and thousands of residents, with no sand monsters and no children. The currency is soul gems: fragments of souls that were never fully ground into sand. Flynry still carried one, the quarter-sized gem he found when he killed the minotaur. Elianna searched Locket’s sand for a shard and found nothing. Royal guards led by a weary captain named Bronn, whom the mirror showed as “small and burdened,” escorted the party into the great ziggurat. Inside, light from the stars bounced through mirrors into soothing blue patterns, and two figures waited on their thrones.

Royal Audience and Otherside

In Into the Mirror Session 4 (YouTube parts 12–13) - Royal Audience and Otherside, the party met Queen Cantressa, poised and wearing a crown of soul gems, and King Quintol, ancient, slumped and cataract-eyed. The queen remembered welcoming Cerys “hundreds of years” ago. She called her city “a place of reflections. And a land of broken mirrors and shattered dreams,” and offered the party a quest: retrieve The Orrery of Dreams, a legendary item said to grant what you want most and perhaps open a way back to the living. In the reflection of Flynry’s sword, Elianna saw the king as a robust, young, wine-drinking warrior. The queen’s reflection did not change at all. The queen said the king had fallen to “sand sickness” while hunting the Orrery himself. Elianna sensed she was telling the truth, with “more that’s being unsaid.”

That night Flynry discovered he could taste food again. Elianna melted Locket’s sand into two small glass remembrance stones and gave one each to Flynry and Toddleheim. Flynry thanked her “for keeping what’s left of her safe for so long.” In the morning, servants led them to another hall of floating mirrors. Toddleheim noted that “The last time I used one of these mirrors, I was brutally murdered.” They stepped through into a snowy mountain ruin “straight ripped out of Skyrim.” Flynry remarked that “the queen could have told us to pack a coat.”

At the summit they melted through a wall of ice into a cave piled with treasure. An ice dragon landed in the gold “like a splash into water” and sealed them in with its breath. Toddleheim shrank it. Flynry conjured an illusion of Kenny the goblin, one-armed, stuffing his pockets with gold, and the dragon fell for it. Elianna summoned a spectral winged guardian. Cerys landed two back-to-back natural 20s, smirked at Flynry, and drove her blade into the dragon’s neck. Its blood poured over the gold, and it turned to snow before it hit the ground.

The Scholar

Into the Mirror 14 — The Scholar is short and ends on a gut-punch. In the dragon’s snow, Cerys found a large, uncut soul gem that was clear white instead of green, something none of them had seen before. On the highest pile of the hoard sat a golden orrery of interlocking rings, inscribed in Celestial: “The path to dreams begins with the truth.” When Elianna brought it near Truth, the rings spun, the sword glowed, and metal touched mirror in a blinding flash.

They landed in an unfamiliar stretch of green desert before a grand library tilted half into the sand. Inside, an eight-foot man with black wings pulled books from the shelves one after another. Each one crumbled to sand while he muttered “I need to know.” Recognizing his own first days in the Sands, Flynry laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, and the light came back into the man’s eyes. With it came a smug, familiar smile: “I can make good use of all of you. You will do nicely.” It was the Arbiter.

Old Friends and Sky

Into the Mirror 15–16, Old Friends - Sky put the party face to face with the man who had killed Toddleheim and Elianna, and who thought little of it: “I remember killing you and then I went to lunch and then moved on.” He had news. He was dead too, murdered in the throne room of the Dread Fortress by someone now presumably holding the Grandmaster hostage. In a demeaning “Let me tell you a story, children,” he explained how he had once helped the Grandmaster overthrow her uncle, The Shadow King. He admitted to a “small miscalculation”: he had built The Box of Chaos to contain the King’s soul, siphoned its power, and had his mind clouded by its whispers while the King rebuilt himself from the box’s sacrifices. “An arm here, a leg there. Cryptocurrency.”

The party was unmoved. Elianna confirmed that the history was true and added that “he’s always been a pain in the ass.” Then she tackled him and beat him with her book until he rewound time and put her back where she started. “God, not here too!” He finally introduced himself properly, “My name, let’s begin here, is Vythorn,” and laid out his goals: save the Grandmaster, kill the Shadow King, “and I would like my power back.” Elianna flipped him off, and he replied, “Yes, you are Elusia’s type.” Flynry made him look into Truth, which showed only the same old Arbiter: “Nothing’s changed. It’s the same as it’s always been.” The party agreed to work with him anyway and sealed their alliance with Cerys in a blood oath on a page of Elianna’s notebook. “Did we just get blood married?”

Vythorn recognized the Sands of Eternity. He said the realm was once connected to the living world, with open doors and trade, until about 2000 years ago, when the doors closed and only the mirrors remained. From the shelves he pulled a huge tome of the Sands’ special items. It described the Orrery as capable of shaping reality, and the writing on its inside ring called it a key, “a piece of a larger machine.” The tome listed it alongside a bronze figurine, a red-gemmed amulet and “the sword of truth” itself. He made the book vanish for safekeeping.

Then a voice outside shouted, “Come on out! We know you’re in there.” A tiefling with a glaive introduced himself as Sky, a “steward of this place, in a way,” and explained that his need “is only satisfied by taking your belongings.” Elianna shoved the Orrery down between her breasts. Vythorn tried to rewind time again and fizzled; something here dampened his magic. Flynry declared they would find “nothing but the edges of our blades,” and the fight went badly. A raider wizard’s whirling blade cut through all of them and dropped Cerys, an orc dropped Flynry, and Elianna’s mass healing pulled them back up. The session ended mid-duel of counterspells, with Sky’s glaive coming for Toddleheim.

The Way Out

In Into the Mirror 17, The Way Out, the party lost. A crushing void orb dragged half of them together, and the orc cut down the rest. The Arbiter shrugged, threw down a dagger and surrendered: “You win.” While the party was unconscious, he quietly asked Sky whether he was sure he didn’t want to kill them. Sky replied, “There’s something wrong with you.” Sky’s army crested the dune, his mages healed everyone, and he settled for half their belongings. When his people sensed something magical, Flynry blamed it on the Arbiter’s off-putting aura. Sky believed him and let them keep everything.

Sky turned out to be a reluctant leader of outlanders, or “free thinkers,” exiles from Mortaurios who live by the black-market trade in artifacts. He called sand sickness “just another lie of the queen” to keep people behind her walls. He led them to The heart, an enormous hollow soul gem underground, home to a whole mining town and “the remnants of a vast soul.” (Nobody there noticed what the table dubbed “Elianna’s third boob,” the Orrery still stuffed in her shirt.) From a kobold shopkeeper named Cyrus, Flynry learned that the Golden Lady figurine is a rumor everyone claims to have owned. The kobold pitched him a disease-immunity necklace with a glance at his belt line, “you look like a man who likes to have a good time” (“Party animal I am”), but Flynry traded the Atlas of Endless Horizons for a pendant to wear “if you ever find yourself close to death.” Elianna’s emerald amulet turned out to hold a unique soul gem, and she traded it for a pendant of good health. When asked, Sky admitted he doesn’t really like leading. In the sword’s reflection, his secret urge was harmless: picking Vythorn’s pocket.

Sky also told them of The Oasis, said to be the old meeting point of the worlds, and showed them a polished patch of soul gem that worked as a mirror. They stepped through into a lava field reeking of sulfur, where a structure of vast rings hung over the lava like a giant orrery. Flynry’s verdict: “Oasis, my behind.” The Orrery glowed and spun near its center. Vythorn took it, began adjusting its rings, and the huge rings overhead moved in response. That woke the guardians: fire elementals, sword-wielding rakshasa and finally a giant wading through the lava.

The party held them off. Elianna conjured a rainstorm to sear the elementals, and Toddleheim shouted translations of the rings’ writing to Vythorn. The spinning rings smashed the bridges and dropped the guardians into the lava. Flynry threw Toddleheim clear of a flaming boulder and took it on the chin. Cerys went “full supernova.” Elianna ran to heal the battered Flynry. Behind them, Vythorn spoke: “I wish it could be different, but this only works for one.” In the same moment, Toddleheim realized that one of the lines he had fed Vythorn said exactly that. Vythorn tore the Orrery open and pulled it over himself like a portal. “Nothing personal, the Grandmaster has to be saved.” The blast ripped the top half off the giant, leaving a stump of blood in the sky, and the Arbiter was gone.

Aftermath

The arc ends with Flynry, Toddleheim, Elianna and Cerys stranded on the ruined platform of the Oasis, alive in the only sense the Sands allow. Vythorn has escaped alone through the only known key. Locket is gone forever. Her friends keep her memory as two glass stones made from her sand.

Plenty is left unresolved. Cerys still carries the strange white soul gem from the dragon. The Golden Lady and the red-gemmed amulet from the Arbiter’s tome remain unfound. Sky’s door in the heart is still open to them. And the queen of Mortaurios is still keeping her secrets, about her husband, her walls and the Orrery she sent them to find.

The Black Tome

Explorer