"Scatter and circle! Charge between breaths!" Thurl calls out.

It never works but it's definitely worth trying. If it does, it could save them a lot of hassle.

Reed grabs one of the rods attached to his belt. Persistent Hold monster.

Please work please work please work.

It does not work. This is an adult red dragon, a creature of legend, and it shrugs off the spell despite the metamagic. A molten eye locks on to the caster responsible.

Acting with an alacrity that Reed will not have seen in his prior adventuring, one beat of its huge wings propels it half the distance between them, and en route its tail lashes out to split a hippogriff in half. Bolts of lightning are thrown at it by some of the other mages in the Feathergale Knights, most of them only glancing hits.

Its mere presence is terrifying. Of those wheeling around to charge at it, only a few pairs of rider and steed both manage to hold their nerve instead of faltering in fear, and those that do connect are met with the dragon's maw and claws waiting for them. A single lance scrapes along the scales of the dragon's spine; the rest fall broken with their wielders.

Fire kindles once more in the dragon's throat, a heat like a furnace that can be felt from here. It locks eyes with Reed again and resumes its pursuit.

Rude. Luckily it's a fire dragon. Reed is not particularly afraid of fire.

On the other hand Ponybane and Savra should probably be normally afraid of it. Dammit.

"Getting us outta here. Accept the spell and immediately dive for the ground." Dimension Door - bringing them both with him if they're willing - targeting a couple meters above the trees and as distant as possible. He picks the same direction the dragon is coming from to make it harder to spot them.

"Whoa!'

Ponybane flaps to a halt, and Savra quickly guides her steed to land under the cover of one of the trees before the dragon can spot them again. 

"Do you have a spell for this? It's going to be a slaughter," she says, looking up through the foliage. 

The dragon roars, and another blast of flame sweeps across the sky.

"Oh, I have many."

Fly. If he was with his party he'd take the time to properly buff, but people are dying right now, so. Another Dimension Door, targeting the air about a hundred feet behind the dragon.

He had considered invisibility, but he can probably tank the fire better than most here, so it's time to be brave. And a little reckless.

"Hey ugly face, the postman is here. I've come to deliver" - dramatic pause - "PAIN."

He'll grab his other rod and prepare to throw lightning at the dragon as soon as it gets in range.

The dragon is more than cooperative about getting within range. Most of the other knights have already given up on offense and scattered. With surprising agility it reverses direction, twisting around in the air and flapping to gain altitude before swooping down on Reed again. He'll only have time for the one lightning bolt before it's closed the rest of the distance between them. 

"Take this, you oversized lizard!"

Empowered Lightning Bolt (1.5 * (10d6 = 44), DC 22). It's not as good as his Fireball, but a Fireball would be completely useless here.

The dragon takes the bolt straight on, roaring in anger. It's hurt, more than any of the other attacks managed to do to it, but not impeded at all by the shock. Opening its mouth wide, it exhales a gargantuan gout of dragonflame that engulfs Reed and sixty feet of sky around him. It is impossibly hot, a clinging conflagration, only marginally less damaging than being fully immersed in lava would be. Just the noise of the air burning around him is so thunderous as to almost be deafening.

And then, unlike lesser dragons Reed may have fought, it flaps its wings again, surging forward through its own flames to send a claw reaching through the blaze to try and snatch him from the sky.

Ouch. He had tried to dodge the fire, but got quite unlucky (1d20 + 8 = nat 1) and ended up right in the middle of it.

That's a lot of fire. Reed is quite fire resistant, but this is way more than he expected.

He tries to Dimension Door away through the noise but the claw takes him by surprise and he loses the spell.

And then the dragon's grip on him tightens with bone-crushing force, pulling him into the fanged jaws that close around his torso.

Well. Fuck.

It's not as if he doesn't know what happens when he tries to cast while grappled. It fails. And this time he doesn't have Qhor with a Breath of Life ready.

But still, it's the principle of the matter.

Dimension D... the dragon is too strong.

He loses the spell.

The world goes black.

The sun is not so shrouded over Toril as in the Domains of Dread.

The Dark Powers have long bent events towards repeating tragedies, cycles of love and hope and loss that torment the darklords. On Toril, the flow of time is more mutable. Chronomancers have walked the timestream since the days of Jeriah Chronos of ancient Netheril, naturally-formed time gates in secluded locations offer passage to the past or future, and black obelisks are scattered across the realms to avert catastrophe by turning back time, though they could not save their creators from the archlich Vecna. 

(One such obelisk remains standing in Nightstone, near Daggerford.)

The sun rolls back across the sky.

Reed finds himself outside a mist-shrouded settlement, with high walls, many tents that have sprung up outside them from a temporary population boom, and construction work ongoing to install more ballistae atop the walls.

What.

The last thing he remembers was becoming a dragon's snack, and now he is completely unhurt and his magic feels replenished.

He checks his ring. It doesn't contain Mirror Image.

Is this some kind of afterlife? It looks suspiciously like the city he left about a week ago.

Well, only one way to find out what's happening.

He walks towards the city gates.

Well, this is eerie. Reed is pretty sure they said the exact same words the previous time he was here.

"Thank you, I'll head straight there."

He goes to find Sir Isteval. The path is as he remembers it. He can't be sure, but he has the feeling that everything is as he remembers it.

It is all exactly as he recalls.

"I am Sir Isteval. The servants said you were here to see me?"

Yeah, the paladin sure doesn't seem to recognize Reed. More importantly, Thurl is here and is not surprised to see Reed alive.

"I'm here to join the offensive. I am a sorcerer of some power although..."

Yeah, the best policy is still to be honest with a paladin.

"Ok, so. I have an utterly unbelievable story about how I got there, which means that I'm probably confused or missing something."

"I found myself in front of your city some minutes ago, but my last memory is being snacked upon by a red dragon, while trying to defend the expedition Thurl which will lead and leaves tonight. I know it doesn't make sense, I don't get it either to be honest."

"That is... not completely unbelievable, but I would want to hear more to trust such a vision. Was there any symbolism to signify it was granted to you by a god?"

"Not... really? When Qhor got a vision from Ezra he was quite sure it was from his goddess. This didn't feel like a dream? For one, it was way too... vivid? And also, I remember the last week in way more details than I would expect from a dream."

He looks towards Thurl: "Darkness and air".