Takhesis Calva was a Fallen Aasimar of the Calva clan of Skyfang Keep and one of the five adventurers who answered Syndra Silvane’s call to Port Nyanzaru.12 The lich Acererak, called the Architect, designed the destruction of his clan and raised him from it to be his vessel.23 On the second level of the Tomb of the Nine Gods he was taken from the party and carried down into the Tomb by the Sewn Sisters,4 and he met the party again in the Cradle as that vessel, where he killed Raiketsu and Inete and was killed by Vogal at his own asking.56
Takhesis Calva, to the party in the Cradle
“The Design finishes tonight. And when its tale is told, you will be nothing in it but a footnote.”5
Description
Takhesis was a Fallen Aasimar78 with black hair, ice-blue eyes and slightly pale skin.56 He stood five feet ten inches and was built like a soldier.
From the twenty-eighth of Flamerule he wore the Dreadweave Cloak and carried the greatsword Vigil’s End,9 and from the thirty-first he wore the Calvan Armor, adamantine plate with Aasimar pauldrons.10 The armor bore the crest of the Calva clan, a griffon, across the chest.5 The plate was black, veined with green, and the griffon was silver and stood on a jagged peak.
After his return to life in the Maw Below cold clung to him. He woke from a nightmare with frost on his breath and fractal shadows about him, and he came back from Skyfang with a chilling aura.79
In the Cradle his eyes were filled with starlight, which gave way to blue only for moments.56 There he grew to twenty feet in height, and afterward bore wings of black ice.5
Personality
Takhesis was stoic and gave little away.11 He kept his own company: he walked alone at night in Port Nyanzaru,12 left the city for the Sunken Temple alone and without a word to the party,8 and gave no account of where he had been when he returned from Skyfang with a severed head.9
After he was returned to life in the Maw Below his emotions were suppressed in favor of lethal efficiency, and his manner from then on was cold, distant and efficient.139 In the arena of the Grand Colosseum he chose a course of calculated cruelty.8 He held that emotion was a weakness.4
He acted quickly and by force. He beheaded a blind chanter who controlled a sealed door, which then sealed and exploded,14 and he smashed the keyhole of a sealed shrine door, which set off a second trap.15
Asked by a voice in the Gorge of Teeth whether his flight served Order or Chaos, he answered Order, and named the Architect.16
Abilities
While he traveled with the party Takhesis was a fighter of the Battle Master archetype, and fought in the front line with a greatsword.1793 He took heads: those of the blind chanter in the Maw Below, of Ras Nsi at Skyfang Keep and of the doppelganger Ishmakahl and many more unnamed foes.14218 He cut an arm from the transformed Ifan Talro’a.13
He could fly, and once carried Vogal to safety through the air.17 He was strong enough to haul Vogal bodily out of a tunnel by a rope and to launch him into the air for an acrobatic display.1920 He resisted the pull of the Tomb’s attraction room.21
As an Aasimar he could unleash radiant power.8 He could also channel Acererak’s power as ice.2 His return from death left him with a minor precognition ability.13 After the onyx chest in Wongo’s tomb he was immune to necrotic harm, and the traps of the Tomb recognized him as one of their own.2223
Through Vigil’s End he communed with the ancestral spirit in the blade, and the sword sensed the tie between a Yuan-ti ritual and Dendar the Night Serpent.2425
In the Cradle he killed with a word and a hand, consumed souls, called the spirits of his family out of his own body, struck with rays, spread fear with the beat of his wings, cast disrupt life, and lifted and held his opponents by a pull on the soul.56 Fire harmed him more than other attacks did.6
Possessions
- The Crown of the Unbroken, and the Bracer of the Final Lesson, both taken from a statue made in his likeness beneath the Hungerer’s throne.26
- Wingclipper, a greatsword of obsidian and bone, which he used from Firefinger until he took up Vigil’s End.
- Vigil’s End, the ancestral greatsword of his family, which he took from the crypt of Skyfang Keep and bound to himself with his own blood.2 After his death Vogal took it from his body and hung it above the fireplace of his bar in Port Nyanzaru.627
- The Dreadweave Cloak, which he wore on his return from Skyfang.9
- The Calvan Armor, given to him by Acererak at the death of the Beggar King.10
- A map to Adani in a sealed leather tube, his payment from Jessamine.8
Everything he carried was destroyed with his body when the Atropal burst in the Cradle, except Vigil’s End.
Relationships
Acererak, whom Takhesis knew as the Architect, was his master.2 He took Takhesis out of the fall of Skyfang as a boy and shaped him from then on to be his vessel, punishing his emotions with cold until little was left of them.28 Takhesis knew from the beginning that he was to be a vessel and a god, joined to the Atropal in the Cradle. Over the course of the expedition Acererak wore down his mind until he accepted that destroying his companions was good, because they were fuel for his ascension. Acererak returned him to life in the Maw Below with a command to obey,13 sent him visions, punished him for failure and delay,72922518 spoke through his mouth,10 and told him that the fall of the Calva clan had been Acererak’s own design.3 Taban Veilthorn, fighting the party at the Sunken Temple, said of Takhesis, “the Architect’s puppet shows teeth!”29
Rani Calva was his sister, who died for him.30 Acererak used her death against him in visions,72 and in the Cradle she was the last of his family to stand before him.56
The Calva clan was massacred at Skyfang Keep in an assault led by Ras Nsi and his Yuan-ti army.1331 The four of his family whom he named in the Cradle besides Rani were Grathar, Nimue, Cyra and Naeleen.5
Ras Nsi led the assault on Skyfang Keep.13 Takhesis killed him at Skyfang, and killed him again in the Fane of the Night Serpent after Acererak had raised him.22532
The Sewn Sisters, three night hags of the Tomb, spoke to him in Omu, watched him from the Border Ethereal on the Tomb’s second level, and received him when he was taken, calling him their perfect child.25114
Adani was an Aasimar and Jessamine’s bodyguard.3314 Takhesis felt a kinship with her and sought word of her from Malyss and from Jessamine.34835
Jessamine sold him the map to Adani for the execution of Kalan and his family, and approved of how he carried it out.8
Kalan, a foot soldier in the massacre of the Calva clan, was executed by Takhesis in the Grand Colosseum with his wife and two children.8
Taenae died beside him in the Maw Below and was returned with him.13 In the shared dream of Skyfang she lived the death of Rani.28 In the Tomb she grew suspicious of him, and in the Cradle she was the first to call him by name.23115 After he was taken she told Savriel Tirinath who he had been and how he went,36 and once called Raiketsu by his name.37
Vonara watched the executions in the Grand Colosseum from the stands, and her trust in him was broken.8 He gave the party his reasons the next day; whether they eased her is not recorded.35 She recalled the executions again on the morning the party entered the Tomb.19 When she told the story of the Cradle to those who had waited for the party, she left out that he had turned against them.27
Vogal fought beside him in the front line.17153 Vogal spoke of him as a hero after he was gone, and killed him in the Cradle as a sworn brother, the second he had had to kill.306 He kept Takhesis’s kneecap and his sword.627
Glade turned himself and Takhesis into giant apes to break out of the Maw Below, and cast haste on him and Vogal against the Red Wizards.1315 On the last night Takhesis spent with the party Glade tried to reach him, and was turned away.4
Inete saw the Sewn Sisters watching him and saw them take him.114 He killed her in the Cradle.6 She was raised the next morning.27
Raiketsu joined the party after Takhesis had gone and knew him only as a lost companion the party was still seeking.37 Takhesis killed him and consumed his soul.5
The Boy was a child clone of Takhesis, the version before the fall, who traded his life for a party he did not know. The party found him caged on the Tomb’s sixth level.3038
Savriel Tirinath raised a canopy over the Cradle against the Atropal and told the party to stop whatever Takhesis was becoming. He struck at her twice with rays.5
Wongo, the Trickster God, rejected him in his tomb, screaming of his “empty” nature.22
History
The fall of Skyfang
Takhesis was young when Ras Nsi and his Yuan-ti army took Skyfang Keep. The massacre was Acererak’s design, and Ras Nsi and the Yuan-ti were his instruments.3 The clan’s defenders died at their posts, among them the gatewarden Grathar, the lorekeeper Nimue, the archivist Cyra and the mystic Naeleen. His older sister Rani held the escape tunnel against Ras Nsi until Takhesis was through it, and died there.28
Takhesis ran on with her blood on his hands and waited for her to follow. A tall figure in a gray scholar’s robe and an ivory mask came out of the dark, showed him Rani’s body, and brought down the tunnel with a metal hand to shut Ras Nsi out. This was Acererak. He led Takhesis away, set a Yuan-ti child in front of him and offered him a dagger of ice. Takhesis killed the child, and Acererak’s frost took his grief from him. Acererak said, “Good. Now rise, my design.”28
Chult and Valachan
On the thirtieth of Mirtul, 1492 DR, Takhesis and four others accepted Syndra Silvane’s commission to find the source of the Death Curse and were sent to Port Nyanzaru.1 On the seventh of Kythorn, when the party’s canoe was destroyed on the Tiryki River, he flew to safety carrying Vogal, and he and Vogal held off the su-monsters that ambushed the party afterward.17 He and Vogal rejoined the others on the spire of Firefinger late in Kythorn.39 On the twenty-ninth the gaze of a stone panther guardian slowed him and Vogal before its magic froze the whole party in place.40
In Valachan he woke in the body of Jarek, a native thief and the brother of Lira, whose body Vonara wore.41 In the battle among the spike traps Jarek rushed to help the fallen Mazati, whose body Vogal wore, and by accident knocked Lira into a spike pit, where she died at once. Jarek, broken by guilt, cut his own throat.42
Beneath the Hungerer’s throne the party found statues made in their own likenesses, and from his Takhesis took the Crown of the Unbroken and the Bracer of the Final Lesson.26 On the journey back to Port Nyanzaru he felt during a night watch that the party was being watched, and the party broke camp at once.43
Port Nyanzaru and the Maw Below
On the evening of the twenty-first of Flamerule the party took rooms at the Dead Fish, and Takhesis went out to walk alone.12 The next morning he, Vonara and Glade set out for the Temple of Savras and found Taenae on the way, robbed and unconscious.44 That day Vogal told him that Vogal’s duel with Tharn Veilthorn was set for the twenty-fifth, Takhesis ordered an outfit for the gala with the others, and he and Vogal went to the Grand Colosseum to learn what they could of Tharn and the fighting pits.45
At the gala of the twenty-third he approached Malyss, who by then led the Green Faction, for word of Adani, a winged woman. Malyss asked for the Black Orchid in return. He refused and left with nothing.34
On the twenty-fourth the pet-shop owner Alice led him, Taenae and Glade to a poisoned well and lent them two of her animals, the fire beetle Iggy and the baboon Kivuli.14 The next day he and Taenae went with the animals into the Maw Below, the dungeon beneath a warehouse. They disarmed a glyph that was poisoning the waterway and ambushed a Yuan-ti patrol. Takhesis beheaded a blind Human chanter who controlled a seal; the door sealed and exploded, and the two had to find another way. In the ritual chamber they found Adani hung over an altar, her blood being drained for a ritual overseen by the merchant prince Ifan Talro’a.14
Takhesis killed the last of the cultists who guarded the ritual. Talro’a shed his skin and became a giant serpent abomination, and Takhesis cut off one of its arms. He died first, run through the heart by a conjured spike of bone, and Taenae was killed moments later.13 At their deaths a shock passed through the whole party, who were drawn into a shared dream of his past: the fall of Skyfang Keep, an Aasimar settlement, to Ras Nsi and his Yuan-ti army.13 Each of them lived the death of one of his family in it, as told under The Calva Dead.28
Neither stayed dead. Takhesis felt a metallic hand silence his last thoughts, and geometric voids replaced the world. Acererak told him, “You have forgotten who you are, Takhesis. Observe and obey.” He woke wrapped in a cold, calculating energy.13 He and Taenae killed Talro’a and the Yuan-ti reinforcements and then collapsed. The rest of the party found them there, and Glade’s polymorph made giant apes of himself and Takhesis, who broke a way back to the surface.13 Both he and Taenae were weakened for a time by their return.46
The Sunken Temple and Skyfang
Before the party set out for the Sunken Temple, Acererak drew Takhesis in a nightmare into a geometric void. He was made to watch Rani die again and again, and was then ordered to kill a Yuan-ti child who changed into Adani. Acererak told him, “Emotion is inefficiency… Fulfill your purpose, little Aasimar.”7
On the twenty-seventh of Flamerule, crossing the Gorge of Teeth, he answered that his flight served Order.16 In the temple the party fought Taban Veilthorn at the Trial of Balance, and Taban and the priest Zitembe ascended, their souls lost to Acererak. Takhesis felt an icy dagger in his skull and Acererak’s voice: “YOU ROBBED ME OF THEIR SOULS!”29
Acererak then pulled him out of the world into a void of ice and shadow above the ruins of Skyfang Keep, his ancestral home. From an obsidian throne Acererak punished him for the two lost souls by twisting an icy dagger in his chest, and offered redemption: “Your clan’s murderer hides in your ancestral home… END HIM.” He opened what was called the Soulforge Algorithm in Takhesis’s mind, which flooded him with repressed memories of the massacre.2
At the gatehouse Takhesis toppled a tower onto two Yuan-ti broodguards and, with Acererak’s power, encased a statue in ice so that its spear ran the survivors through. The statue wept blood. In the ancestral crypt he found Vigil’s End entombed in stone and guarded by a specter. He let his own blood melt the stone. The ghost wailed, “Bound! Like I was!” and frost climbed his bleeding arm and bound the sword to him. In a hall of mirrors he gave way to the whispers and saw his clan rotting and his sister shrieking “COWARD!” In the archives he found a Yuan-ti torturing an adventurer and killed them both.2
In the throne room Ras Nsi sat on a throne of petrified serpent bones between two pureblood wives, with the mummified body of Skyfang’s celestial dragon hung behind him. He said, “Acererak’s pup? What are you doing here? My deal with the Architect stands.” Ras Nsi was at full strength, which Acererak had not predicted. Takhesis killed the wives and then beheaded Ras Nsi. Acererak returned and said, “You are yet my masterpiece, Takhesis. Let success forge you.” Takhesis was dropped back into the Sunken Temple, gasping. Whether the killing had taken place in the world or only in the vision was not known at the time.2
The party slept that night without him. On the morning of the twenty-eighth an icy rift opened in the chamber and he stepped through it in the Dreadweave Cloak, with Vigil’s End in his hand, and threw the head of Ras Nsi on the floor. He explained nothing.9
On the thirtieth he communed with Vigil’s End and was greeted by the ancestral spirit within it.24 That evening he went down into the Temple of Euphoria with Vogal, Vonara and Glade.47 When the Beggar King died the next day, a shadow gathered around Takhesis and his cloak, and Acererak spoke through him: “A king’s dying breath… exquisite. But kings are appetizers.” Acererak consumed the Beggar King’s power and sent the party south: “Seek the city that laughs with nine dead tongues. South. South. Where rivers bleed into stone and feathered kings devour the sun.” He added a command, “Bring me the bard’s sorrow, the druid’s bond, the wizard’s pain… and I shall gift you true power,” and left the Calvan Armor for Takhesis.10
The Theater of Justice
On the third of Eleasis a summons brought Takhesis to the Grand Colosseum, where the arena had been made into a “Theater of Justice,” a replica of Executioner’s Run, paid for by the merchant prince Jannalor Tezim. In her box Jessamine showed him Kalan, whom she presented as Ras Nsi’s favored blade and the man who had murdered his sister. Kalan had been a foot soldier in the massacre, one of many, and had not killed Rani. He was chained in the arena with his wife and two children. Her price for the map to Adani was that Takhesis be the executioner of all four, to prove that “sentiment is the currency of the weak.”8
Takhesis entered the arena before the crowd. He killed the wife and the children first and made Kalan watch, then destroyed Kalan with his radiant power. Jessamine gave him the map. The spectacle settled one of the three favors the party owed Tezim.8 Vonara saw it from the stands.848
He did not go back to the party. He left the Colosseum and walked alone through the jungle to the Sunken Temple.8 He found it risen from the ground on the bank of the Tiryki, with a town of tents and refugees around it. A guard force under the veteran Elias Thorne stopped him, and let him in when he had explained who he was. Thorne asked that the settlement be taken under the party’s protection, and Takhesis left the decision to the party, who arrived by air on the fourth.48
That day he spoke to them of the arena. He told them of the bargain with Jessamine, and said that the father of the family had been a “Traitor of Port Nyanzaru” who was directly involved in the massacre of the Calva clan. To him it had been justice for his people.35
Omu
On the fifth of Eleasis, before the party left the Sunken Temple, Acererak sent him a vision of a frozen void, a monstrous heart of ice holding an unborn child, the Atropal, and the south, and repeated his command and his price: Vonara’s sorrow, Taenae’s bond and Inete’s pain. Takhesis woke disoriented. The party grew suspicious of Vigil’s End, and Glade’s detect magic did not identify the blood magic of the Calva in it, which quieted them for a time.49 Before they left, Acererak’s voice sounded over the settlement of Tawb and three of its people were frozen into statues of ice, with the warning, “YOUR FAILURE IN THE CITY OF NINE TONGUES WILL HAVE A FAR LESS TIDY PRICE.”49 At Kir Sabal Takhesis, Glade and Vogal called on Princess Mwaxanaré, who offered to tell them of Omu in return for a pledge of fealty, which they declined.49
On the ninth, in the gallery of Tamborus, who received the party as the curator Magister Tabor, one exhibit was the Skyfang Mandate, a stone tablet recording the massacre of the Calva clan. Tabor described the massacre as the preserving of order and told Takhesis that his ancestral sword would look better on a pedestal than at his hip.31
On the tenth, in Omu, Acererak punished him with another vision. Because he had delayed in the port and the jungle, the Architect revoked his “gift” and showed him the beheaded body of Ras Nsi raised and repaired with crystallized shadow and clockwork. Acererak demanded his submission, and Takhesis resisted. Acererak answered, “Take the cubes. The puppet awaits its second execution.” A second voice, the chorus of the Sewn Sisters, followed: “Oh, he’s such a strong boy when he focuses… Kill the serpents and everything will be okay.”25
In a walled compound he destroyed the altar of a Yuan-ti death ritual.25 At Kubazan’s shrine, when gas filled the sealed room, he smashed the keyhole of the door; a glyph went off, and those still inside scrambled out.15 On watch that night he saw a party of Red Wizards moving east and woke Vogal, Glade and Inete. He, Vogal and Glade caught the wizards at Shagambi’s shrine and killed them before they could defend themselves, and hid the bodies.15 On the eleventh he went with Glade and Taenae to I’jin’s shrine,50 and on the twelfth he and Vonara explored the ruins in the northeast, drove off an attacker they could not identify, and found the main entrance to the Fane of the Night Serpent beneath the royal palace.51
That night Acererak told him, “You walk when you should be transcending. You allow your shuffling through the muck of Chult, tethered to cattle, to erode my design,” and said that he had raised Ras Nsi only as an insult to Takhesis’s slowness.18 The party entered the Fane with Takhesis and Glade posing as converts, who kept their gear. When Ishmakahl, who had persuaded the party to split up, was exposed as a traitor, Takhesis beheaded him, and the body turned into a doppelganger. Takhesis then went to the armory, gave the password, and loaded weapons into bags of holding, which he and Glade carried to the prisoner pits.18 The prisoners rose with those weapons.3
As the party entered the throne room Acererak told him by telepathy that he himself had designed the downfall of the Calva clan, and that Ras Nsi and the Yuan-ti had been his instruments.3 Takhesis and Vogal held the front against the adamantine hydra that guarded the room.3 When the King of Feathers broke into the fight, Takhesis ignored it, drove through the melee to Ras Nsi and killed him, as Acererak had commanded.32
On the morning of the thirteenth he threw Vogal into the air for an acrobatic display before a troop of monkeys, and received a vision from the Atropal that mocked his efforts.19
The Tomb of the Nine Gods
The party entered the Tomb on the thirteenth of Eleasis. Takhesis hauled Vogal by a rope out of a tunnel of magical darkness where a shadow demon had attacked him.20 On the Grand Staircase the screaming skulls in the walls bore the faces of people Acererak had killed and of people Takhesis had executed. The party said nothing of the second.20 He and Vogal resisted the pull of the attraction room,21 and he was among those left on the wrong side of the wind tunnel until Glade held its blades still.22
In Wongo’s tomb, where three chests required three volunteers, he climbed into the onyx chest. A trap of Acererak’s took hold of him there. He came out unharmed but hollowed out, more resistant to necrotic harm and further detached from humanity.22 Afterward he walked past a skull-mouth trap without setting it off. Taenae grew suspicious, he deceived her, and she concluded that nothing was wrong.23
On the second level Inete looked into the Border Ethereal and saw the Sewn Sisters spying on the party, their attention fixed on Takhesis. By then Taenae and Inete were openly suspicious of him. He gave nothing away of what had been done to him or of his link to Acererak.11
During the party’s rest that night he took the second watch. He stood with his bare hands pressed to the freezing stone of the Tomb. Glade tried to reach him. Takhesis spoke of the dungeon’s design, of the fragility of mortality and of emotion as weakness, called the Tomb a crucible that separated the worthy from the weak, and ended, “The dungeon is perfect in its design.”4
On the morning of the fourteenth of Eleasis, the eighty-second day of the expedition, the party stepped onto the balcony of the Grand Staircase. The hum of the Tomb stopped, frost spread across the stone, and a wave of pressure from below drove everyone but Takhesis to their knees, paralyzed. He rose an inch off the floor. His armor turned translucent, a violet light lit in his eyes, and a tether from the dark below fastened on his chest. He said to his companions, “The Master calls…” and the tether drew him into the Ethereal Plane and down the shaft. Inete saw the three Sewn Sisters waiting for him. They cradled his face and whispered, “Welcome home, our perfect child… the cradle is waiting.” They wrapped their cloaks around him and all four sank out of sight. Takhesis had accepted Acererak’s call.4
After his departure
The party was attacked on the staircase at once and fought through the shock of his going.52 On the third level the shadows of the Chamber of Opposition showed Inete, Vogal and Taenae visions of their own deaths: Inete beheaded, Vogal hurled into a lake of lava, Taenae consumed by a burst of necrotic magic. They were premonitions of the fight with Takhesis and the Atropal.53 Withers, bargaining with the party over a contract, told them that their companion was “below.”54 The beholder Belchorzh, dying, called the party midwives who were helping to bring something unholy into the world, and they took it as confirmation that Takhesis was being prepared for something beneath them.55 Their stated purpose remained to find him.37
On the sixth level, on the sixteenth of Eleasis, the party found the Boy, a caged child of about twelve with Takhesis’s face, unscarred, who asked whether Rani had sent him.30 He named every member of the party but Raiketsu, and recalled Vogal crawling into the devil face on the first level.30 When the Boy said that he was no hero, Vogal said of Takhesis, “He was…”30 The party came to believe that the Boy was Takhesis, and that if the Boy died their chance of bringing Takhesis back died with him.38
The Cradle
That afternoon the party came down into the Cradle and found no one there but the Atropal feeding above the Soulmonger, and a mask of Acererak the size of a doorway. Raiketsu struck one of the three struts that held the Soulmonger. A shadow formed behind him and killed him with a word and a hand.5 The shadow thickened and turned, and showed black hair, the Calva crest and, for a moment, ice-blue eyes before starlight filled them. Taenae said, “Tak? Is that you???”5
Standing over the body, Takhesis told the party that for eighty-four days they had been spectators inside his Grand Design and had understood none of it, and that it finished that night.56 The words were wholly his own, and Acererak did not speak through him. The fire of Raiketsu’s soul rose from the body with Shagambi coiled around it, and both went into him. The Atropal’s cord struck his breastbone and he grew to twenty feet.5
Savriel raised her canopy. The Trickster Gods rose in their hosts, and Taenae became the Avatar of Chakuna.5 Takhesis did not raise his sword. He put his hand on the griffon and called five names: Grathar, Nimue, Cyra, Naeleen and Rani. Five shapes pulled themselves out of him and took their stations. Rani said to the Avatar and then to the room, “We failed him once. We will not fail him twice. Forgive us.” The other four never spoke.5
Taenae attacked him directly and found that the harm passed down into the strut beneath him, which was the first to fall. She and Glade broke the second, and the third followed. Grathar, Cyra, Nimue and Naeleen fell one after another in that order, each of them relieved. Rani did not fall. Twice Takhesis struck at Savriel with rays, and each time her canopy lost a rib.5
When the last strut broke, the Soulmonger fell into the lava and dragged the Atropal after it. The cord tore out of Takhesis’s chest and he fell. The ichor followed him down, and wings of black ice caught him ten feet above the lava. Vigil’s End came off his back, and he smiled. “Now the fun begins.”5
Fear spread from his first wingbeat, and of the party only Glade was frightened. Rani left her place and set herself in the air in front of him, with both scimitars and her wings spread to cover him.6 When she fell she lowered her blades, looked at him and said, “Brother. Wake up.” Everything the family had poured into her passed into him at once. His eyes cleared, and then the starlight returned.6 Glade and Inete each cast disintegrate at him, and he resisted both. At length his wings shattered and the lava crusted over to catch him, and for one breath his eyes were blue.6
On the crust he cast disrupt life, which stripped from the party the last of what the gods had lent them. The party saw that fire did him the most harm and turned to it. He cut down the Avatar of Chakuna with Vigil’s End, and Taenae was left kneeling in her own body. He lifted Vogal with the pull on his soul and struck at him while he hung there. Vogal was brought down twice, and both times his rage put him back on his feet.6
With every one of the party close to falling, Takhesis said, “I’m not going down alone.” He seized Taenae with the same pull, rushed Inete, and beheaded her with one swing.6
He took another step and his knees gave. He caught himself on Vigil’s End, put his hand to the griffon and called, and nothing rose. One of the party said, “We are your family too…”6 He collapsed, and Taenae was released. The frost stopped and the sword fell. He said, “No. The Atropal is dying because I am dying. If you save me, you save it. Don’t be cruel.” He set the point of the sword against his own chest and said that if they would not do it, he would.6
Vogal accepted and killed him, remarking as he did so that this was the second time he had had to kill a sworn brother.6 The starlight went out of his eyes, and they were blue for the final time. 6 The mask never moved, and Acererak’s name was not spoken over him.6 Vogal took Vigil’s End and a kneecap from the body.6 The floor cracked outward from beneath it, and Savriel warned that the Atropal was dying with him. The Death Curse ended, and the Atropal burst into a sphere of white that consumed the chamber. The party had no time to carry his body out, and the sphere took it.6
Epilogue
On the morning of the seventeenth of Eleasis Vonara told those who had waited for the party what had happened in the Tomb, and passed over his part in it.27 Vogal hung Vigil’s End and the kneecap above the fireplace of the Broken Knee Bar in Port Nyanzaru.27
Takhesis remained dead. One year later, on the anniversary of his death, each of the party, wherever they were, felt a cold hand on the back of the neck at the same moment, and with it the sense that he was happy now that he had returned to his clan.27
Appendix
Notes
Behind the screen
On August 19, 2025, Patrick, the Dungeon Master, proposed to Coop that Takhesis become an inside agent, on account of the character’s Lawful Evil alignment. The idea grew from there, step by step, until Takhesis was designed as the final villain of the campaign.
Takhesis was the only one of the five original adventurers who never hosted a Trickster God. Wongo rejected him in his tomb, screaming of his “empty” nature.
In his speech in the Cradle Takhesis told the party that they would be “nothing in it but a footnote.” The next morning Vonara told the whole story to the camp above the caldera and left out his turn, so in the version Chult heard, the part left out was his.
Inete’s vision in the Chamber of Opposition came true to the letter. She saw herself beheaded two days before Takhesis beheaded her. Beheading was his habit: the blind chanter, Ras Nsi, Ishmakahl, and last of all Inete.
Speech in the Cradle
The following is Takhesis’s speech over Raiketsu’s body as written by Coop, who played him, in full.
“Eighty-four days you have bumbled through my Grand Design — spectators in the greatest work ever attempted, seeing none of it. You have been standing inside it since Omu, and not one of you understood.
And now — NOW — you struggle. Now you decide to oppose what you cannot even fathom. Pitiful.
The Design finishes tonight. And when its tale is told, you will be nothing in it but a footnote.”
Appearances
Session 1 to Session 3 · Session 5 · Session 8 to Session 36 · Session 38 to Session 44 · Session 47 to Session 54 · Session 56 · Session 58 to Session 70 · Session 89 · Session 90
In Session 10 and Session 11 he appeared in the body of Jarek. He is mentioned in Session 71, Session 77, Session 78, Session 84, Session 86, Session 87, Session 88 and Session 91.
References
Footnotes
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Session 89 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18 ↩19
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Session 90 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18 ↩19 ↩20 ↩21 ↩22
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The vision of the fall of Skyfang Keep that the party shared in the Maw Below. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
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Takhesis’s speech, above under Speech in the Cradle, from Session 89. ↩