Session 2: Threads in the Dark

Location: Fort Leilon and surrounds
Time: Morning, the day after the Mine Ritual
Theme: Secrets awaken. Choices emerge. The past reaches out with shadowed hands.

Vex Maravo — The Name in the Needle

Vex woke to shadows that whispered. Not metaphorical ones — literal, writhing shadows, coalescing into a fey stranger draped in midnight. It brought him a letter sealed in Cassian’s hand… and a stone darker than pitch.

The meeting turned into a duel of words: riddles sharpened like knives, banter edged with hidden meanings. In the end, Vex cut deeper. He teased out the stranger’s true name: Narrowthread . With that victory came a gift — a silver needle, bound with a single favor. Speak the name in darkness, needle in hand, and the fey will answer. Once. Just once.

Elia — The Dream of Two Lights

Elia’s sleep bled into vision: a ruined lighthouse, a ritual steeped in shadow and blood. Two lights beckoned — trust, or power. She chose the dark, pouring it into a silver plate, and the sea itself answered with a pulse of hidden magic.

She woke with trembling hands to find the dream had teeth. A vial of liquid shadow sat by her bed. A riddle whispered at the edge of her mind. Dream? Memory? Or some mingling of both?

Hunter — Echoes and Ciphers

At the Salted Knot, Hunter picked up coin from the captain, nothing fancy — work’s work. But paying off a drunkard’s debts bought him more than thanks: a journal filled with ramblings of a singing stone and a cursed seal in the mine.

The handwriting felt familiar. The cipher hidden between the lines even more so. Old lessons resurfaced — and with them, the suspicion that his mentor’s shadow stretched longer than he thought.

Vespera Rue Noctwyn — The Shrine of Echoing Shadows

Rue returned to the mine, her parents’ absence pressing as heavy as ever. Thrain Coppercleft , gruff as stone, offered her a deal: help the miners, and he’d share what he knew.

So she descended to the forbidden fourth level. There, half-buried in collapse, she found it: an ancient shrine. Shadows clung to the walls like breath. And in the flicker of lantern light, she saw them — her parents. Or the shapes of them. Watching. Waiting.

Shyk — Stone Remembers

At the chapel altar in Fort Leilon, Shyk’s morning prayer did not vanish into silence. The stone answered back. Ancestral memories stirred — fragments of the Watchers at Dusk, fragments of something older still.

Elder Willem found him there, and with quiet urgency asked Shyk to speak with the sea elves. Beneath that request was a deeper truth: the glowing marble beneath Leilon was not just stone. It was memory, faith, and secret — bound tight and waiting.

Lady Cassandra Vexmoor — A Seat at the Table

Cassandra dined with Cassian Albright, and found herself offered more than food. Power.

He spoke of taxes rising, road bandits bleeding trade, diplomacy with sea elves dangling by a thread. And then he spoke of storms, of the lighthouses that guard the coast, of their deeper purpose — keeping something sealed.

One of those lighthouses, Graytower Beacon, had failed. Cassandra was to lead the expedition to restore it. A ship would be provided: The Mermaid’s Lament. A ritual of Greater Restoration would be prepared. The rest? Up to her.

Threads Tighten

By day’s end, all six carried new weight: favors owed, shadows clutched, visions haunting, truths unveiled.

Leilon whispered with rumors of glyphs and blood. The mine still breathed. And on the horizon, the sea darkened with storms to come.