Session One: The Beginning

It began on the Fifth of Maestrahn, a day soaked in brine and omen. The clouds hung low, sullen and bruised, while the wind laughed bitterly off the sea, flinging salt against slate and stone. In the warmth of the Good Neighbor Café, tucked along a wind-bitten stretch near the Tide Crown’s edge, five souls shared idle laughter over mugs gone tepid: Brikk the Brawler, fists like paving stones; Nerissa the Sorceress, whose eyes shimmered like heat on glass; Padgett the Swashbuckler, light on her feet and quicker with a grin; Tolliver the Investigator, always listening; and Valden, a fighter full of too much hope and too little caution.

It was then that Karpas came, older brother to Valden, never one to waste words. He spoke of opportunity cloaked in shadow. A task meant for nobodies, for faces that wouldn’t stir suspicion. Something that might crack open the city’s iron-latched doors.

Valden, eager and earnest, sold the idea to his friends before the fog had even lifted. By dusk, a message arrived: they were to meet a contact at The Sage Harp, a radical sanctum where the tangled chants of Miell’s quiet reverence met the wild hymns of Marawae. There, incense danced in fractured sunbeams and Maharluni throat-singers filled the nave with sound both haunting and holy.

In the trembling candlelight, they found Daga, a street-urchin by way of elven blood and dwarf-sized body, and a known whisper-peddler in Barangay Maharuwa. Daga had a name for them—Cricket Thimblewhistle, gone missing. A clever halfling with the bad habit of knowing too much.

The case began in earnest.

They sought out The Tangle Step, a discreet tailor’s nook catering to petty nobles and eccentric clients. There they met Tita Deska, who stitched secrets into every hem. Then, to The Stave and Cord, a noisy tavern where smoke clung to your clothes and watching eyes lingered longer than comfort allowed. It was Padgett who first sensed it—the gaze, the weight of it. When the party left, they were not alone.

In a narrow alley beyond the tavern’s lantern glow, Tolliver crept forward and was greeted by violence. A hand crossbow bolt bit into his shoulder, another whistled past, and then came an arrow, loosed from deeper shadow, skipping across the stone toward the rest. The assailants were swift and desperate—poorly armed, poorly trained, and wholly committed. One fell. The others fled into the night, leaving behind little but blood and smoke and questions.

Their path led next to The Hollow Cup, a cramped tea shop hemmed in by damp wood and halfling hospitality. There they spoke to Mama Ilza, and to Hopper, Cricket’s sister. She handed them a satchel he had left behind, a thing of small weight and heavy implications. Its lining was kissed with arcane ink, its outer stitching rough and torn, a patch or crest hastily removed.

The trail turned toward rot and runoff.

The Soot-Eyed Cistern, a ruin half-swallowed by the city’s undergut, was said to be older than the first river walls. Its stones wept, its tunnels whispered. And beneath it all, a passage, maybe, beneath the Serpentine herself.

They are left with pieces. Cricket fled. He took something he should not have. He ran not out of guilt, but out of fear. The kind of fear that burrows deep. The kind that doesn’t speak.

The kind that means something is coming.