The Hedge Wizard 3: A GameLit/LitRPG Adventure recap

Hump comes to Sheercliff under the shadow of a Wizard Society bounty on the apprentice it believes murdered his master, and finds a city ringed by expanding dungeons and hollowed out from within by the Blackstone Warlocks. Countess Daston hides him behind an Academy enrolment; a patrol into Stonebark Forest costs lives, exposes warlock saboteurs, and leaves Hump drawing on dungeon essence he cannot safely touch. Back in the city he cracks the warlocks' black stones open, clearing Vivienne of a murder she was framed for, and the hunt that follows uncovers trees that hold human souls. Then the warlocks spring their real plan: a citywide ritual to sacrifice every soul in Sheercliff and pull a fallen god's first servant into the world. Hump burns its anchor down with an original spell, White Flame, and the warlock behind it flees. Ambushed, dosed with warlock powder, and moments from being executed as a warlock himself, Hump instead masters every foreign essence in his soul and manifests it. The siege ends. Sheercliff calls him the White Flame, and he leaves anyway.

Previously: Hump buried his master, the wizard Sethril Woodrow, inherited his staff, his medallion, and a soul-bound spellbook called the Book of Infinite Pages, and went looking for paying work at the newly opened dungeon beneath Bledsbury. He fell in with Bud, an earnest knight sworn to the Goddess of Winter who turned out to be a runaway nobleman, and with Celaine, an archer carrying her people's dragon's blood, and her mentor Vamir. The expedition's generous royal patron, Prince Kassius, proved to be a warlock and a necromancer who preached that the gods are only ascended mortals hoarding the path to power. In the dungeon's core he freed a dying wolf-dragon bound there as its guardian, and to save his friends Hump bound and absorbed her power and burned Kassius down to a husk, at which point a masked shadow tore the world open and carried the prince away. His death was never confirmed; officially he died a hero. Hump came out of it with the dragon's borrowed strength, a far fiercer fire affinity, her egg bonded to him for life, and an unhealed soul injury that his own society defines as warlock's work. Hunting a teacher, the party found the wizard Vivienne at Fishers Lake, and under the lake a gateway into a dead world and the soul-eating gorger behind it, which held Hump captive for a month. He escaped, and the creature was finally unmade inside his own soul-void, but a woman named Lucile died shielding him, and afterwards appeared in his room as though nothing had happened. Vivienne, facing a Wizard Society tribunal, recommitted to teaching him. With her apprentice Dylan, the party rode for Sheercliff.

Three months after Fishers Lake the party reaches Sheercliff, a city choked with refugees fleeing rising monster activity across Alveron. The gate guards quietly warn of people being killed in the streets and left with burnt-out eye sockets, and of orders to keep it quiet. Dylan is finally registered with the Guild as the party's official fourth member. At the Guild's mail office a letter signed only "E.", from an old classmate of Vivienne's and Sethril's, warns that the Wizard Society's council believes Sethril was murdered by his own apprentice, that a bounty is out, and that the council has no name on record. An Inquisitor named Abraxus has been given the case. Since almost nobody knew his master had died at all, Hump begins to doubt the goblin ambush he has always blamed for it. At the Daston estate the Countess will not defy the Society openly, but she enrols the whole party as nominal students of Sheercliff Academy as cover and sets her daughter Marcela to show them around. Three dungeons have opened in the region, the nearest of them under forty miles from the city, and valuable mines beside each have Sheercliff's factions squabbling instead of responding. The Guild announces six expedition teams; the party's is led by a silver-rank adventurer, Ricard, who hands them road quests. Sir Isaac of the Academy repairs Hump's cloak and gives him an artifact battle robe outright in exchange for a look at the dragon egg. The last quest is a bandit hunt near Milton, and the party cannot agree whether desperate men deserve killing.

Escorting a trader's caravan, the party is ambushed by bandits led by a man who travels in bolts of lightning, and turns back to hunt them rather than leave their prisoners to die. The camp is hidden behind a magical veil, which is strange for starving men, and so is their good steel. Hump collapses the veil and finds captives, tortured men, and children inside. The leader takes a child hostage; the woman beside him transforms into something fanged and feral, and Hump names her for what she is: a warlock. Dylan kills her. The leader is beaten down and surrenders, and when Bud hesitates over the killing blow he puts a hidden knife into Hump's chest, stopped by his new robes. Celaine drops him with an arrow and calls Bud a hypocrite to his face; Bud privately resolves to change. The camp's stores turn out to be supplies stolen from the region's own dungeon defences. In the warlock's chest Hump finds a purple potion and a black stone artifact ringed with runes his spellbook cannot read, styled like Prince Kassius's ritual formation. Dylan receives his fifth blessing from Krioc. Hump, whose nightmares have not stopped, is privately frightened by how little he felt burning men alive. He masters a spell of his own, Rock Missiles, on the road back. At Sheercliff's gates security has tightened hard: that morning a young priestess was found dead inside the city, eyes blackened, blood drained, at the heart of a ritual circle.

Countess Daston recognizes the party's black stone: the Wizard Society mentioned another like it, and she has bought their cooperation by trading them access to the murdered priestess's ritual scene, a bargain Sir Roderick of the temple district resents bitterly. She hands the stone to Graham, a researcher chasing whether a weakening veil between realms links Fishers Lake, the new dungeons, and the warlocks, and asks the party to keep both the stone and her own investigation quiet. At the murder house the formation echoes the thirteen-part binding Kassius once used; Abraxus traces multiple casters, all rank five or higher; the priestess was not sacrificed but fed upon. Outside, the Inquisitor with Abraxus turns out to be Eliana, the "E." of the letter, who tells Vivienne the Society still has no name for Sethril's apprentice, because he never registered one. Bud's cousin Arthur arrives representing House Blackthorne and ambushes him with the fiancee he fled, Emilia, who is in Sheercliff on her own family's business and says so. The party also runs into Luna, a priestess who treated Hump after Bledsbury. Days later they are boxed into an alley by six attackers demanding "the Blackstone", an artifact the party no longer even has. Their leader, an air wizard, escapes wounded; his enforcer doses himself with a powder, transforms, and nearly strangles Celaine before Bud kills him without hesitating. Kelisia's pillar descends in the aftermath: Bud has his third blessing at last.

Bud's blessing settles as Armor of Ice, plating that bursts into retaliatory frostfire when struck. The one captured attacker talks freely: the gang are warlocks tied to the city's killings, their leader answers to superiors he did not consult, and he moved on the party only because he spotted them at the gates. How he tracked a stone they were not carrying, nobody can explain. Vivienne vouches for Eliana and brings her in on the account, while quietly keeping Hump's connection to Sethril from her. Natalie assigns the party a patrol at the Stonebark Forest dungeon, the least advanced of the three: bronze-rankers under Ricard will push for the core while iron-rank parties shield the villages, with Marcela commanding the patrols. On her advice the party recruits a fifth member, Emilia, who agrees partly to take the pressure off a marriage neither family will drop. Her brother, a duelist, beats Bud on points in a formal honour duel but comes away respecting him. At a mandatory council meeting Lord Ferrand, Randall's father and Countess Daston's chief rival, accuses her of hypocrisy for hiding the party's black stone; she embarrasses him for it. Abraxus tells the room that the priestess's death implies powerful warlock allies inside the upper city, perhaps at the council table itself, and looks at the Countess as he says it. He has no evidence yet. The party rides out at dawn.

Stonebark Forest is petrified grey, and its creatures have grown stone-crushing teeth to live in it. The party takes the village of Tailsend; the other party leaders under Marcela are Corvin, a knight of Ordana who resents her command and says the villagers are not his problem, and Eve, a quiet Chosen of Rathlar. Tailsend has been cut off from its food since the dungeon corrupted the forest, so the party escorts villagers out to harvest the trees they eat, guarded by a huntsman, Harlow, and the tame stonetusk he rides. A hammertooth swarm hits them. Celaine abandons her bow for her dagger, Bloodshadow, and nearly loses herself to the bloodlust still in the blade before Hump forces it out of her hand. Marcela brings word that the assault on the dungeon core has begun, which means worse is coming. That night Hump dreams of the core itself, and Lucile's apparition urges him to reach out and take it. He refuses; she blocks his way; and then she becomes the gorger, chains him, and forces its power into his soul, until his bonded dragon appears and he burns his way out with white flame. He wakes to find it was not only a dream: his channels are damaged and real dungeon essence lingers in the room. He drew on the core in his sleep. His spellbook has unlocked a tier-four soul spell, White Flame, under a note saying it is forged only through despair.

Hump tells Emilia the rest of the gorger story and asks the party to watch him for warning signs. Then ogres, which do not belong in Stonebark at all, raid a farm near a neighbouring village and kill a farmer, and Hump argues they must be hunted before they entrench. Marcela agrees. Len, a Chosen in her party, has taken an open dislike to Hump and needles him throughout. Fifteen Chosen track thirteen ogres to a stream and ambush them, but the beasts draw on dungeon essence and armour their skin with it, the same red power Hump felt in his dream. Bud kills the chieftain, Dylan the shaman, and the fight is won. Then the ground splits. The dungeon expands its domain around them in about a minute, tearing up trees and opening fissures, and animate roots drag an ogre corpse underground. Two of Eve's party go down; Matthias, Marcela's shield-bearer, is pulled partway into a fissure. They almost have him out when roots take his legs and drag him back into the red mist, and his screams stop. Hump says flatly that he cannot be saved and pushes a frozen Marcela into ordering the retreat. Len shoves Hump to the ground and blames him for the death. Hump answers that everyone chose this, and that three villages still depend on them. It is the first companion any of them has lost.

The group fights its way back to Tailsend, where Corvin has gathered every villager from the other two settlements. Then the forest attacks: corrupted animals stampede the barricades, and behind them come animate trees driven by a dryad, a nature spirit bleeding dungeon essence from its eyes. A strike team breaks through to it, and when a shockwave from deep in the forest empowers everything corrupted and Lucile's apparition surfaces in the mist urging Hump to just take the power in front of him, he refuses and burns the dryad down with White Flame instead. The horde keeps coming until bronze-rankers under Jacob, a Chosen who wields lightning, arrive to break the siege. Sixteen villagers are dead. Jacob brings worse news: the assault on the dungeon core failed, something went wrong, and nobody knows whether Ricard lived. The next morning the group rides out again to rescue three bronze-rankers cornered by razor claws, cats that should not exist this far south. They save all three. Their spearman, Tanek, thanks them, then recognizes Marcela's name and asks whether she is Count Daston's daughter, which she confirms. Stonebark keeps producing creatures that do not belong to it, and the dungeon is plainly far stronger than anyone assumed.

Word comes to evacuate all three villages to Sheercliff. Hump goes to find Marcela and instead finds Tanek's spear through her stomach and the village innkeeper dead on the floor for trying to stop it. Tanek says her name is reason enough, calls himself a warlock to Hump's face, and offers him a way out that Hump refuses. Cornered and outclassed, Hump deliberately pulls on the ambient dungeon essence to hold him off, which is no longer an accident but a pattern. Marcela blocks a killing blow meant for Hump despite her wound; Jacob arrives and pins Tanek alive; the healer Fila saves Marcela's life on the floor. Hump collapses from blood loss and essence overuse, and the gorger comes for him while he is under. This time he looks properly at his own soul and finds two foreign growths on it: the dragon bond, and a smaller, uglier fragment the gorger left behind, which has been suppressing his control every time he touches dungeon essence and speaking to him in Lucile's voice. He pushes it back himself and expels the essence, waking days later in the evacuation convoy. Marcela, recovering, tells the party in confidence that the dungeon's growth was sabotage: Blackstone Warlock infiltrators struck at Ricard, and with him incapacitated, one of them forced something into the core to trigger the expansion. Two of the infiltrators are now held alive, on the Countess's orders.

Outside Sheercliff the refugee camps have become multi-storey stone housing, raised by earth-wielders on the Countess's orders. Vivienne's tribunal has been postponed indefinitely by the Countess; Graham has built an artifact that identifies warlocks without the old ritual, and the Temple Guard are using it, but every warlock taken carries a black stone that yields nothing, even under Eliana's mind magic. Two more dungeons have expanded, one killing half its expedition, and the region now has earthquakes twice a day. The party is promoted to Bronze One and paid well for it. Arthur, grieving a fellow knight, disowns Bud for staying with them. Countess Daston takes Hump to tea alone and explains why he keeps being singled out: she is a sixth-circle Chosen of Imira with a blessing of limited foresight, she senses pivotal moments coming and the people who matter to them, and she felt one around him. She gives him an artifact ring and a century-old family spelltree that ends in a tier-six lava spell, and asks him what he thinks she is seeing. He tells her the truth about Kassius: that he struck him down, and that a long-limbed shadow stepped through a tear in the world and took him. She goes pale and names the thing a Riftwalker. Emilia formally joins, hears every secret the party has, and stays. They debate running, and choose to stay in Sheercliff and meet whatever is coming among allies.

Both captured warlocks are found dead of an oral soul poison, and Vivienne, who had just left them, is arrested for treason. The evidence is timing, and the motive belongs to General Bennet, a duke's appointee under pressure to produce results. Countess Daston gets her safety and nothing more. So Hump does the reckless thing: he tells Marcela everything about his soul, and she believes him, and she has Graham bring a black stone to the Daston training grounds under a false pretext. Graham's artifact confirms three essence signatures in Hump where anyone else has one. The stone's central rune is a destination, not a lock, and when Hump feeds it directed intent it drags him into total darkness where something with glowing white eyes looks back at him, until Celaine kicks the stone out of his hand. Graham gets his reading: a full essence signature, the breakthrough Vivienne could never reach. An earthquake hits at that moment, tying the stones to the tremors. Countess Daston breaches into the room in full armour, listens to Marcela's cover story, and chooses to accept it. At the council she uses the breakthrough to end Vivienne's tribunal, and Abraxus retaliates by publicly accusing Hump of murdering his master and being a warlock: the body he examined years ago had its throat slit, not an arrow wound. The Countess orders Hump tested on the spot. Marcela takes the artifact and fakes the reading with her own essence, and he walks out clean.

Vivienne is free, and she and Abraxus strike a truce: he shares what he knows of Sethril's death in exchange for word of the black stone research. His account is that the body was found two days after burial, throat cut, equipment stripped, which is why it took so long to identify. Hump's arrow story and Abraxus's knife wound cannot both be true, so someone with rare skill disguised the wounds well enough to fool an Inquisitor, and the goblin ambush may have been arranged from the start by someone who wanted the spellbook. Which means Hump, whose name is now publicly attached to Sethril, may be next. Vivienne does not entirely rule out Abraxus himself. Marcela offers the Daston intelligence network and recruits the party into her squad for the coming operation. Vivienne resumes Hump's soul training: his White Flame casting already reaches past a rank-three wizard, but casting from soul strength leaves the soul exposed, so she teaches him to defend it, and he holds against her pressure by the end of the week. He takes Luna out, chaperoned, and is shadowed at a distance by his own party for safety; it goes well enough that she kisses his cheek and picks a second date. Then an Academy summons arrives, unusually secretive, and the party guesses correctly: the citywide detection artifact works, and the warlock hunt starts now.

Fifty adventurers sweep the city for more than ten warlock sites. Hump's squad finds theirs under the Hogshead Brewery, with two dead adventurers on the cellar stairs. He is cut off and duels a warlock wizard who manifests a soul pressure that feels unearned and thin next to Vivienne's, and finds he can shrug it off; he takes the man alive. Celaine's fifth blessing arrives mid-battle in full view of strangers, publicly marking her as Chosen of a goddess outside the Pantheon, and Sir Ricard chooses to congratulate her and ask nothing. Then they find the tree: glowing, softly beautiful, its bark patterned with screaming human faces, and a total blank to essence-sensing, which is how the warlocks stayed hidden. Ricard forbids destroying it in case that kills what is inside, and asks Hump to look. Through a ritual spell Hump is hit with a flood of death and despair and countless voices, and confirms the souls are real. A second tree turns up in the Countess's own raid across the city. By nightfall eight bases are destroyed and twenty-two warlocks taken, four trees found, and Vivienne names them the Trees of Damnation. The prisoners will not break, because they are not criminals: they believe the gods are oppressors and mean to take back power meant for humanity, which is what Kassius preached. Warlocks have been found among the nobility. Another base is located that same night.

The hunt takes a noble's manor, and the man transforms into something boar-like when the detection artifact comes out. Then a silver-ranker's whole squad is killed and every bronze-ranker is summoned to the Opera House, where they find hundreds of corpses drained grey, Lady Helen Astida's among them. A warlock named Anthony walks onto the stage, turns aside a blow from Sir Roderick that should have levelled a street, and tells them he let himself be found: he is a distraction, and his part is finished. The doors seal, a Tree of Damnation erupts through the floor, and the dead stand up. Roderick fights in a manifested giant's armour of golden light while Sir Ricard batters the barrier down; Hump works out that the tree behaves like an artificial dungeon core and must be killed at its base. Underneath, they find the trunk, the core, and the missing High Priest of Osidium fused into the roots from the chest down. Natalie touches his mind and recoils, because he is screaming, and Roderick kills him himself. He says the Shrine of Osidium is likely the true target and that only three people know what it holds. Outside, the whole city is burning, and a great tree of damnation stands over the Shrine of Osidium. Kelisia's power envelops Bud in the street: he has broken into his third circle. Marcela refuses to hide, and leads them for the Daston vault and the war artifacts inside it.

Marcela's blood opens an ancient stair through the cliff to the estate. From the vault she takes a phoenix feather, an heirloom said to lend one user a gold-ranker's strength once, and asks Hump alone to choose who wields it against the central tree. He takes it himself. On the way they free a hundred people trapped under a barrier at the Academy, Bud and Marcela tear that tree's core out, and the freed crowd learns they were lured there by an order in Lord Ferrand's name. He never came. At the Shrine of Osidium, Countess Daston conjures a moon that eclipses the sun. It is not enough. Anthony cuts Sir Ricard across the throat, overwhelms her inside her own eclipse, and runs her through, throwing her aside so her blood sprays the sealed shrine doors, which is exactly what Lord Ferrand needs: he presses his marked hand to them and they fall to sand. Roderick takes a sword thrust meant for her in his own shoulder, Vivienne drives Anthony back with a wall of water, and Natalie pulls the wounded countess out through a portal. Her containment barrier collapses, spilling monsters across the upper city. Anthony walks into the shrine. Hump's group slips into the House of Stone by a back door and meets Abraxus carrying an unconscious Eliana. He staggers mid-sentence, and attacks. He is stronger than Vivienne. Corvin's party stays behind to hold him. The others reach the central tree just as a bronze beam tears out of the shrine, and a whole section of the White Cliff, the Shrine with it, drops into a widening chasm that splits Sheercliff in two.

Anthony stands over the ruin holding what he took from the shrine. Three figures batter at a barrier sealing the city from outside. Abandoning the beam, Anthony begins a summoning that draws through every Tree of Damnation in Sheercliff, and Hump sees what it is for: the sacrifice is every soul in the city, and the shape in the widening rift is the same thing that took Kassius, far larger now. Abraxus breaks through and Patrick is dead behind him. To survive, Hump stops resisting the dungeon essence and takes it, beats Abraxus down, and has Dylan bind him rather than kill a man he believes is being controlled. His spellbook opens itself to an old note dated year 424, signed Nithrand, describing a city that fell when a god's shrine was desecrated, called the breaking of a first seal. Hump merges his essence, the dungeon's, and the phoenix's into one stream and unleashes White Flame, burning the tree, its core, and the ritual with it; his master's staff is destroyed. The barrier shatters and three strangers marked with a three-eyed sigil drop into the city. Their wizard, Starick, knows Anthony by name. Anthony kills one of his own to open a blood portal and escapes. Eliana, meanwhile, has Hump's spellbook. She claims her master tried to recruit Sethril and Sethril killed him; she doses Hump with warlock powder; he loses himself entirely and beats her bloody, dragging out that her order calls itself the rightful heir to his book. Bud stops him with an armoured strike. Starick gives him a choice: master what is inside him now, or die as one more warlock. Under his guidance Hump absorbs the phoenix, the dungeon essence, the gorger's fragment, and finally the dragon, which does not resist, and manifests his soul.

Starick names the thing beyond the rift: Baelkor, first servant of a fallen god, the same entity that took Kassius. He names Anthony a rogue from his own order, confirms the stolen seal is the second of a series to fall, refuses all accountability, and vanishes warning of a coming great war. The city is swept and the warlocks are driven out. Abraxus, still enthralled, killed two of Corvin's party before being killed himself in the aftermath. Sir Ricard is dead, and Arthur, and Luna's chaperone, and two of Marcela's party. Countess Daston lives but will never walk. Eliana is arrested, tests as not technically a warlock, keeps accusing Hump, and never mentions her order to anyone. Vivienne, who failed to see her, stays in Sheercliff in the Countess's service to watch her. Hump collapses from record essence overuse and is walking within a day, because his manifestation unlocked a technique that heals it, and his spellbook yields a letter: Sethril foresaw his own death and warns that the book is alive and grows more visible to its hunters as its wielder grows. The city calls Hump the White Flame. Count Daston comes home, offers the party permanent service, and reveals a border stronghold has fallen in a coordinated attack; King Henry is recalling every Chosen. So the party splits: Bud, Dylan, and Emilia for House Blackthorne and the Fallen Lands, Hump and Celaine north for the Dragon Keeper trials at Drakalyn. The Countess gives Hump a manor, the family library, and a gold-rank staff; he takes them and leaves anyway, afraid the order that wants his book will come for it. The egg hatches into a black-and-gold dragon he names for the night storm. Alone on the balcony he speaks to his spellbook, and it answers: a vast essence core hidden in its spine, a silver owl on its cover, a presence he judges to rival a god's. Then it is gone, and he has no idea what he carries.

The siege is broken and the city holds, at heavy cost. Sir Ricard, Arthur, and Luna's chaperone are dead; two of Marcela's party are dead; Abraxus is dead, killed in the aftermath after killing two of Corvin's companions while under Eliana's control. Countess Daston survives but will never walk again. Anthony escaped through a blood portal, vowing to return, hunted now by the three-eyed order that departed warning of a coming great war. Eliana is imprisoned, tests as not technically a warlock, still blames Hump publicly, and says nothing to Sheercliff's authorities about her own order, which wants Hump's spellbook. Lord Ferrand is a fugitive under a kingdom-wide bounty; his son Randall is cleared. A border stronghold has fallen in an attack coordinated with the assault on Sheercliff, and King Henry is recalling every Chosen, so Bud, Dylan, and Emilia ride for House Blackthorne to await deployment toward the Fallen Lands. Vivienne stays in Sheercliff, entering the Countess's service to watch Eliana. Hump, a rank-four wizard with a manifested soul, a manor of his own in the upper city and a new gold-rank staff, leaves rather than take the Dastons' offer of permanent service: his master's posthumous letter warns that the Book of Infinite Pages grows more visible to its hunters as he grows. He and Celaine ride north for the Dragon Keeper trials with his newly hatched dragon. On the last night, the spellbook answers him, and shows him a vast essence core hidden in its spine, and a silver owl on its cover. He has no idea what he is carrying.