FINDING OUR WAY
Volume One
The Journal of Salanthyr Ympyros
Episode 1 – Kheth
Shivrah 11th, 1474
Almost two weeks on this island, and still nothing. I have walked its beaches at dawn, pressed into its forests at midday, watched its people from the corners of taverns at night—and not a single thread leads back to my parents. Whatever brought them here, or took them from it, left no trace I can find. What follows is what I have learned instead: the shape of this place, its history, its people. Perhaps if I understand the island, the island will eventually give up its secrets.
— — —
The island is called Kheth, though it has worn other names. Dragonborn explorers charted it in 808 DY and christened it
Azun'zadi—then promptly left, having found it crawling with things that wanted to eat them. For over a century it served the Dragovar nobles as a hunting ground, a place to test their courage against rage drakes and worse. By the time they had killed everything worth killing, colonization followed as naturally as the tide.
The name changed in 1100 DY, when a green dragon named Kheth tore the island from a copper dragon named Irindol and decided it deserved a better title—his own. Travelers who disagreed rarely lived to argue the point. The Dragovar made it official in 1375 DY. The name has stuck ever since, written in blood and pride.
Seen from the rigging of a tall ship, Kheth is a rough triangle, fifty miles from north to south. Beaches curl along the northern, eastern, and southern coasts, pale and pleasant enough. The western face is another matter: sheer black cliffs that drop straight into the sea, as though the island turned its back on something out there and never looked again.
The interior is rainforest, dense and restless. Hills rise and fall beneath the canopy, cut through with gorges that swallow sound. The forest is generous to those who know it—timber, topsoil, fruit, herbs, game—and the town trades what it harvests for grain and wool from islands better suited to open fields. It is a symbiotic arrangement, if you don't mind the spiders.
The climate earns its subtropical reputation. Summers are warm and close, the air thick with moisture and the smell of vegetation, interrupted by brief veils of misty rain that cool nothing and soak everything. Winters bring real storms—not dangerous, but insistent—and once or twice a season the sky throws down hail that rattles the wooden rooftops before softening back to rain. The sea, strangely, remains calm through all of it. I find that more unsettling than storms would be.
As for the wildlife: stirges, fire beetles, snakes enough to fill a nightmare, scorpions, spiders, boars, and the occasional spitting drake that will ruin your afternoon. The harmless creatures exist too, somewhere. The rage drakes that once drew Dragovar hunting parties are supposedly gone—supposedly—and I note that the locals say this with a relief too fresh to be entirely convincing.
There is one other landmark worth noting, beyond the town: a ruin on a hill at the island's heart, old enough that no one agrees on who built it. Serpentine figures coil over every surface—stone snakes, or something that resembles them. The locals don't talk about it much, which means it is either very boring or very dangerous. Nothing in my experience has ever been very boring.
— — —
Tyrak'n is the island's only town, pressed against the eastern shore like something that washed up and decided to stay. The name is a contraction of Tyrak's Town, after the human explorer Tyrak von Zarkyn, who arrived in 1369 DY chasing rumors of treasure and found hill giants and orcs instead. His crew won that particular argument with considerable bloodshed, helped themselves to the gold, and Tyrak spent the proceeds building a trading post. The Dragovar, impressed by his audacity or amused by it, named him magistrate. The post became a town. The von Zarkyns became its dynasty.
The current magistrate is Tyrak's grandson Cyrik—steady, watchful, not a man who misses much. What little escapes his notice is caught by his wife Thariel, who seems to know everyone's business before they've finished conducting it. I have been careful around her.
The town itself is modest: mostly single-story wooden buildings, practical and sun-bleached. Two structures announce themselves in stone and ambition—Von Zarkyn Manor, two stories with a turret that surveys the street below, and the Temple of Avandra across from it. There is also an old garrison tower on a hillock at the edge of town, currently wrapped in wooden scaffolding like a patient in bandages, awaiting repairs that the town's purse keeps delaying. The wall is another work in progress—the old wooden palisade being replaced, stone section by stone section, whenever funds and masons can be had. Cyrik intends to finish it within a year or two. I suspect it will take longer. The town itself is protected by guard captain Jegger Trout, a stout-hearted halfling, who, by all accounts, is noble and just. Rumors suggest Jegger is tracking some sort of elusive giant on the island who he has dubbed the ‘Ghost Giant’ for how elusive his quarry is.
All told, there are about 200 souls who reside in Tyrak’n. Here is a list of the most notable:
Aiven Niri (female eladrin): Reclusive, good-natured local wizard who lives outside of town.
Alyson Rivers (female halfling): Local priestess of Avandra.
Cyrik von Zarkyn (male human): Grandson of the town’s founder and the current magistrate of Kheth.
Denarion Morrow (male half-elf): Captain of the wrecked ship
Morrow’s Folly.
Ghordan Raiko (male human): Captain of the hammership
Lantheon under the flag of Sea King Valkroi.
Jegger Trout (male halfling): Captain of the town guard.
Johias Ilum (male human): Local fisherman and town drunk.
Lucien Vezetus (male tiefling): Proprietor of the
Talisman (a tavern built into an old caravel).
Magnar Grayshard (male dwarf): Local stonemason, dullard, and son of Szoltan and Voruna.
Szoltan Grayshard (male dwarf): Crusty local stonemason and father of Magnar.
Thariel von Zarkyn (female elf): The magistrate’s wife.
Voruna Grayshard (female dwarf): Wife of Szoltan and local schoolmarm.
The best place to learn anything in Tyrak'n is the Talisman—a tavern built inside the gutted hull of the very caravel that carried Tyrak von Zarkyn to the island over a hundred years ago. The ship never left. Now it sits permanent at the docks, timbers dark with age and ale-smoke, run by a tiefling named Lucien who laughs too easily to be trusted and brews a beer called Impstinger Ale that justifies every word of its name. Once a month, a merchant captain named Ghordan Raiko puts in with the
Lantheon, and the whole town treats it like a holiday.
People talk at the Talisman. I have been listening.
One last thing, and perhaps the most interesting: nineteen years ago, a ship called the
Morrow's Folly broke apart on the rocks during a storm of unusual violence. The wreck is still there, just beyond the town's edge—ribs of black timber jutting from the southern reef, stripped long since of anything worth taking. The survivors were folded into the town, the children especially, and have lived here ever since. Captain Morrow himself is still among them, older and quieter than I imagine he once was.
He will not say where he was taking the children. He will not say where he was coming from. He will not say much at all when it comes to that night.
I find that very interesting.
— — —
Shivrah 11th, 1474
The
Javanvashir was a Dragovar warship—not the kind of vessel Tyrak'n was accustomed to receiving. The ships that normally made port here were tradesmen and hammerships, low in the water and unremarkable, and built for commerce. A warship was something else entirely. It came in low and dark against the morning light, its hull scarred with the particular wear of a vessel that had seen more than trade routes, and its arrival set the town abuzz. I watched people crowd the docks to look at it the way people look at anything they can't quite account for: mouths slightly open, good sense temporarily suspended, murmuring to each other in a tone reserved for things too large to ignore and too dangerous to approach.
I found myself close enough to two dockhands to catch their exchange.
"That's a war hull if I've ever seen one," one dockhand says to another, coiling a rope he has stopped paying attention to.
"Wonder what business a Dragovar warship's got with a place like this," the second replies, not taking his eyes off it. "We're not worth the time."
"Maybe they're not here for us."
"Everybody's headed somewhere else these days. Doesn't mean they don't stop to look around first."
The ship was commanded by a dragonborn named Captain Zakhijin, his first mate Taazhon at his side. Both men moved with the clipped precision of soldiers who had long since stopped distinguishing between giving orders and breathing. They informed the dockhands they were here for supplies and to put off a few passengers before sailing west to the Myrthon Regency though they did not say why. Their crew, however, were less disciplined, and the word that filtered through the docks in their wake was the same word that had been following warships around for months now. War.
Captain Zakhijin was pointed to the Talisman. His senior crew followed, boots loud on the wooden dock, and the crowd that had gathered to watch them arrive slowly returned to their own business — though the word they'd left behind didn't go anywhere at all. It settled over the town instead.
— — —
By evening, the Talisman was packed to the timbers. Lantern light and pipe smoke hung together near the rafters, thick enough that the ceiling beams seemed to have grown soft edges. You couldn't move between the tables without negotiating a path through elbows and raised voices, and the air carried the mingled smell of spilled ale, roasting meat, and the particular sourness that comes from too many bodies enjoying themselves in too small a room. Zakhijin's officers were in good spirits. They knew they were sailing into something difficult and had decided to drink first and reckon with it later. They weren't looking for trouble.
Trouble, as it happened, wasn't looking for them either. It simply fell their way.
Johias Ilum—the town's most committed drunk, a fisherman by vocation and a cautionary tale by habit—had had considerably more than his fair share that evening. He managed the sitting portion of the night without incident, holding court at the end of the bar with a story about a fish that grew larger with each telling. He was midway through it—"and I swear on my mother's grave, the thing was as long as this bar"—when he decided, unwisely, that the moment called for another drink fetched personally rather than shouted for.
The walking portion was where things went wrong. He pushed to his feet and set a course around the
Javanvashir’s First Mate, heading for the bar, leaning on the air for support it declined to provide. He caught his foot on Taazhon's boot and went down hard. His glass hit the floor and shattered. Those nearby looked over with the mild interest of people who'd seen Johias fall before—someone near the hearth muttered "there he goes again" without breaking off his own conversation.
Taazhon's interest was not mild. He crouched and picked up something from among the shards—a silver dagger, its hilt cast in the shape of an A. He turned it over once in the lantern light, and whatever he saw in it drained the idle boredom clean out of his face. He stared at it for a moment with the expression of a man who had just found a viper in a breadbasket.
It was a Fang of Ardyn. The emblem of the Knights of Ardyn. The empire calls them terrorists, which, in the empire's vocabulary, tends to mean anyone who has made the mistake of inconveniencing it.
Taazhon hauled Johias upright by the collar. "Captain. Look here."
Zakhijin crossed the room without hurrying, the crowd parting for him the way crowds part for men who are used to it. He looked at the dagger, then at Johias, and his expression settled into something harder than surprise. "They're everywhere these days," he said—not alarmed, but disgusted. "Bind him. We'll have his secrets soon enough."
"Captain, on my life, I don't know nothing about knights or empires or—" Johias started, the words tumbling out too fast and too slurred to emphasize his conviction.
"Save it for the questions I actually ask you," Zakhijin said, already turning away.
Johias was tied to a chair with unhurried efficiency. His face was the face of someone who had just understood that the evening had taken an irreversible turn—the drunken good humor gone out of it all at once, replaced by something closer to a man watching his own future rearrange itself without his permission.
While Johias was bound to the chair, Taazhon lingered a moment near the captain, his voice low enough that it wasn't meant to carry—though I was close enough to catch it anyway.
"Let me lead this one," Taazhon said.
Zakhijin glanced at him, something assessing in the look. "You're not usually eager."
"I'm eager for this one." Taazhon's jaw was tight, his eyes fixed on Johias with an intensity that had nothing to do with military procedure. "My sister's husband was accused of corruption two years back—falsely, whatever the tribunal decided. The Knights burned his warehouse to make their point. He was inside finishing a ledger he never got to defend himself with. She's raised two children alone since."
Zakhijin was quiet for a moment. "That's not proof this one had anything to do with it."
"No," Taazhon agreed. "But he wears their mark, and I have yet to meet one of them who didn't have someone else's blood making their cause feel righteous." He said it without heat, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted it—the flat certainty of a man who had turned his grief into a permanent, practical hatred rather than a passing one. "I'll be thorough, Captain. You have my word."
Zakhijin held his gaze a moment longer, then nodded once. "Thorough. Not excessive."
"Is there a difference, with these people?"
Zakhijin didn't answer that. He simply turned back toward the onlookers in the room.
I thought about that exchange for a long time afterward—how a man could build something as vast and permanent as this hatred out of one warehouse fire and one sister's grief, and how completely he seemed to believe it made him righteous rather than simply wounded. It did not make me any more forgiving of what came next. It did make it harder to think of him as merely cruel.
Nephthys attempted to smooth things over before it could go further. She rose smoothly from her seat, all easy charm, and crossed to where Zakhijin and Taazhon stood over Johias's fallen chair.
"Captain," she said, warm as anything, "surely a man this deep in his cups isn't worth the trouble of your evening. Let us get him out of your hair—buy your table a round on the house, and you'll never have to think of him again."
Zakhijin didn't even look at her fully. "This isn't a matter of hair, girl. It's a matter of empire."
"Of course, of course," she said, undeterred, shifting tack with barely a pause. "But surely a captain of your standing has bigger concerns tonight than one drunk fisherman's poor choice of company. The Myrthon Regency, was it? A man sailing into that kind of trouble hardly needs—"
"How do you know where I'm sailing." It wasn't a question. Taazhon's hand drifted, unhurried, toward the hilt at his belt.
Nephthys's smile didn't waver, but something behind her eyes recalibrated fast. "Small town. Word travels faster than ships do."
"Word," Zakhijin repeated, and something in the word made clear he was now wondering exactly how much word had traveled, and to whom. The temperature in the room, already bad, dropped further.
I watched her realize, in real time, that she'd made it worse rather than better. She'd reached for charm and found she'd handed him a second thread to pull. She held her ground a moment longer, searching for a way back to smooth footing, and found none. The music had stopped. The chatter had stopped. Every head had turned.
Nephthys stepped back toward our table, and for just a moment before she composed herself, I saw something rare on her face: the particular frustration of someone who is very good at this and knows exactly which word cost her the room.
"I need a cleric," the captain said, loudly, to the room at large.
Marduk stepped forward as if ordered by a superior. "Here, sir." He crossed to where Zakhijin stood, hands open, posture careful. "How may I be of service? I am always glad to serve the empire when called upon."
"I intend to have answers. I need him conscious and undamaged between sessions."
The pause Marduk took before responding was very brief. He nodded is understanding.
In the corner, Prepotente took a long pull from his ale. "Well," he said to no one in particular, "naughty word." He said it the way another man might comment on the weather—mildly, almost cheerfully, as though the sentence was an inconvenience rather than a man about to be tortured. I watched him for a moment longer than the comment warranted. There was no flinch in him, no shift in posture, nothing that suggested the scene playing out ten feet away was affecting him the way it was affecting everyone else who knew Johias. He simply watched, took another pull from his ale, and seemed entirely comfortable doing both at once.
What followed was an hour I would rather not have witnessed, though I understood why I stayed. Taazhon and Zakhijin were methodical, unhurried in their process. Taazhon asked his questions, applied his persuasion, and waited for answers with the patience of someone who viewed suffering as a reliable tool rather than a regrettable necessity. Between rounds, Marduk healed the damage—restoring Johias to something approaching whole, so the next round could begin with a fresh start. It was, I must acknowledge, a deeply unpleasant system, one that turned mercy itself into an instrument of cruelty.
At one point, during a particularly bad round, I glanced over and caught Prepotente smiling faintly at something—not at Johias's pain exactly, more at some private amusement I couldn't identify and didn't especially want explained to me. It vanished as quickly as it appeared, and he offered nothing when I looked at him a beat too long.
I filed it away, the way I was beginning to file away a great many things about this new companion of mine, and said nothing.
Johias did not break easily. He admitted membership in the Knights and did not, apparently, see the point in denying something they'd already found the emblem for — but insisted, again and again, through a mouth increasingly unwilling to cooperate, that he had done nothing against the empire. Another round extracted the information that he was meant to meet a contact, though he claimed not to know who, or when. A further round produced nothing new. Taazhon and Zakhijin administered one more, just for good measure, which was the kind of thoroughness that makes men like them effective and men like me quietly furious.
Then it was over. The sailors stood, straightened their coats, and asked for directions to the magistrate. I gave them. Then, without quite deciding to, I fell in behind them. So did Marduk, Nephthys, and Prepotente.
— — —
At Von Zarkyn manor, Zakhijin laid out his case with military brevity, each sentence delivered like a report rather than an accusation. The four of us provided testimony—witnesses to the incident, which meant witnesses for both sides, whether the captain liked it or not. Whatever Johias was, he deserved a fair hearing.
The magistrate listened to all of it without interruption, then scheduled a trial for the following morning. Zakhijin pushed for execution, as though it were the obvious and only reasonable outcome. We were asked to return in case further testimony was required.
Marduk's role in that interrogation left a mark on me. He healed the injuries Zakhijin and Taazhon inflicted on Johias—not out of mercy, but to extend the fact finding session. It raised questions about his character I wasn't entirely ready to answer.
We managed to get a few minutes alone with Johias afterward. They'd left him in a storeroom off the manor's kitchen, wrists still raw from the rope, his earlier bravado long since drained out of him along with most of the drink. He looked smaller than he had at the tavern, folded into himself on an upturned crate, and when we came in, he flinched before he saw who it was.
"Didn't expect anyone'd bother," he said, and something in his voice cracked slightly on the last word.
He told us his side of it, haltingly at first and then with more conviction as he found his footing.
"They're not what the empire says they are," he said. "The Knights don't want the empire burned down. They want the corruption out of it—the officials skimming grain shipments while whole streets go hungry, the tribunals that already know their verdict before the accused says a word. And those at the top who allow it to happen. Someone has to hold them to their own laws, since they've stopped doing it themselves."
It was, almost word for word, what Marduk preached in his sermons, and I watched it impact him in real time—something shifting behind his eyes as the words settled in, familiar in a way he clearly hadn't expected them to be.
"That's—" Marduk started, then stopped, something guarded crossing his face. "That's close to doctrine I've preached myself. Suspiciously close."
"Suspicious how?" Johias asked.
"How convenient, that a man facing execution happens to describe his cause in words that would move the one cleric standing in the room." Marduk's eyes narrowed slightly, though his tone stayed even. "You knew I was here. You've had all night to think about what might save you."
"I didn't know anything about you until you walked in," Johias said, some heat entering his voice for the first time. "I'm not clever enough to build a lie that precise on the spot, and even if I were, I wouldn't waste it on a stranger's sermon I've never heard."
Marduk studied him for a long moment, clearly unwilling to simply take the coincidence at face value. "Maybe you understand better than most why I serve the cause," Johias added, quieter now. "I never burned anything. Never hurt anyone. I just believed what you apparently believe too—assuming you actually believe it, and this isn't simply something you say from a pulpit."
That landed harder than anything else he'd said. Marduk didn't answer right away, and I watched him turn the accusation over, testing his own conviction against a man who'd just handed it back to him as a challenge rather than a comfort. Marduk said nothing further that night.
I find myself unable to settle on what to make of Marduk's character. A man who healed Johias purely so the questioning could continue, who now openly suspects the same man of manipulating him—there's no single thread here I can follow to a clean conclusion. I suspect this is a conversation we'll need to have eventually, the two of us, plainly and without an audience but today is not that day.
Johias also told me something that had nothing to do with politics. He reached into his shirt with hands that hadn't fully stopped shaking and drew out a thin chain, an amulet swinging at the end of it, tarnished silver catching what little light the storeroom offered.
"This belonged to your aunt," he said. "Alethia. You're Salanthyr, aren't you? Word travels."
My Aunt Alethia had been missing for a year, her absence one of the smaller mysteries folded inside the larger ones surrounding my family—was she a Knight of Ardyn? He had been carrying this for her, kept in trust for the right moment and the right person. He decided that moment was now, and that I was that person.
"She'd want you to have it," he said, pressing it into my palm before I'd fully decided to take it. "More than she'd want me holding onto it, anyway. I never did anything worth the trust she put in it."
I turned the amulet over once, feeling the weight of it settle into my hand, then closed my fingers around it before anyone else in the room could get a good look.
A guide toward my family, perhaps. Or simply a mark, announcing to anyone who knew, to look that the last Ympyros in Iomandra was easier to find than he should have been.
— — —
The four of us returned to the manor the following morning as instructed, the hall considerably emptier than it had been the night before, most of the town having lost interest once the initial shock wore off. Cyrik sat behind a heavy desk, Thariel beside him, both looking as though they'd slept poorly.
"I've reviewed the testimony," Cyrik said, addressing the room at large. "The four of you spoke to Johias Ilum's character and conduct. Captain Zakhijin has made his position on the appropriate sentence equally clear." He glanced toward Zakhijin, who stood rigid near the wall, arms crossed. "I find no evidence connecting Johias to any act of violence or sedition beyond possession of a symbol. Possession alone, under Dragovar law as I understand it—and as it applies on this island, under my authority—does not warrant execution."
Zakhijin's jaw tightened, though he said nothing yet.
"My verdict is banishment," Cyrik continued. "Effective immediately. He is to leave Kheth and not return."
He read the rest of it out with the flat, careful cadence of a man who knew exactly how unhappy it would make at least one person in the room and had decided to get through it as quickly as dignity allowed.
Captain Zakhijin was not gracious about it.
"Magistrate, you are fortunate that I am on a tight military schedule," he said, each word clipped and deliberate, "otherwise I would report this deplorable decision to the proper authorities and have your title stripped. Nevertheless, I will abide by your ruling, despite your flawed interpretation of Dragovar law." He turned to Johias, who had gone very still. "Mark my words—wherever you flee within the Dragovar Empire, you will be hunted. Your time as a free man is drawing to a close." Then, to Taazhon, without so much as a change in tone: "Ready the crew. We leave immediately."
"Aye, Captain," Taazhon said, and moved slowly toward the door. He paused in the doorway and let his gaze move across the four of us, unhurried, deliberate, the look of a man cataloguing something he intended to return to.
"Rest assured," he said quietly, "the empire's justice will find you for your role in this disgrace."
Then he was gone, boots receding down the manor's outer steps, and within the hour the
Javanvashir was cutting back out to open water, sailing west and trailing behind it the gossip that has been on everyone's lips for months now.
War. But not just any war. Civil war.
I watched it go from the edge of the dock, the ship shrinking into a dark line against a lighter horizon and told myself their parting words were simple frustration—the sting of a soldier who'd been made to look foolish in front of witnesses. I am not sure I believe that.
— — —
The four of us retreated to the Talisman afterward. We didn't plan it—it was simply where all of us ended up, independently and then together, claiming the same corner table without discussing it first. We sat with our drinks and let the evening settle around us.
It was Nephthys who broke it first, tilting her cup toward Marduk with an expression that wasn't quite an accusation. "So. You heal a man just so a Dragovar captain can hurt him again. Care to explain that to the rest of the table, or should I keep guessing?"
Marduk didn't flinch from it. "I explain it to myself every hour since it happened, and I still don't like the answer. If I'd refused, they'd have found someone less careful than me, and Johias would be dead rather than banished. I chose the version where he lives." He turned his cup slowly on the table, not quite looking at any of us. "There's also this—I serve the empire. That oath doesn't come with an asterisk excusing me from orders I find distasteful. I've told myself for years that duty and conscience rarely conflict if you serve carefully enough. Last night was the first time I've had real trouble believing that." He paused. "I'm not asking anyone to think well of it."
"I don't think well of it," I said. "I also don't have a better answer, which is worse, somehow."
Prepotente, who had been quiet since we sat down, finally spoke without looking up from his ale. "You're all treating this like it needs to sit right with you. It doesn't have to. It just has to be over." He took a drink. "It's over."
Nephthys raised an eyebrow at him. "Nothing bothers you, does it."
"Plenty bothers me." He said it flatly, without elaboration, in a tone that closed the door on the question rather than opening it further.
I let the silence sit for a moment before turning it toward myself, mostly because I suspected no one else was going to. "For what it's worth—thank you. All of you. I don't know what would have happened to Johias, or to that amulet, if the four of us hadn't ended up in the same tavern tonight."
"Don't get sentimental about it," Nephthys said, though not unkindly. "We happened to be standing in the same room when it mattered. That's not fate. That's Tyrak'n being small."
"Small enough that we're all still sitting here instead of walking away," I said.
She didn't have a quick answer for that, and for a moment none of us said anything at all—four strangers who had each made the same choice, in the same room, for reasons that hadn't yet been asked out loud. Something had shifted. A shared experience has a way of doing that—particularly one that asks something of you before you've decided what you're willing to give. We had stood in the same room and made the same choice, more or less, and now we were sitting at the same table. Not yet a team but possibly the beginning of one.
We were still there when a dragonborn woman approached the table, unhurried. Serusa, she said her name was—she had disembarked from the
Javanvashir along with one other passenger, a gaunt, one-armed elf who lingered near the door the entire time she spoke with us, saying nothing, watching everything. A worn leather case sat at his feet throughout, gripped loosely in his remaining hand as though he'd carried it every mile of the journey and had no intention of setting it down for good. He was introduced only in passing, as "Faerdan, my associate," and offered nothing beyond a thin, humorless nod before returning his attention to the room at large. Something about the stillness of him—the way his remaining hand never quite stopped moving, as though counting something only he could see — left an impression I couldn't immediately account for. Serusa, for her part, had apparently decided to stay behind rather than continue west with the ship.
Serusa introduced herself as a member of the Shan Qabal, a scholarly sect operating within the Dragovar Empire, focused on arcane research and weapons development.
Her proposition was simple. "Forty gold each," she said, "to explore the wreck of the
Morrow's Folly along the coast and bring back anything of interest." She said it the way one might offer directions, entirely unbothered by whether we accepted or declined.
The name of the wreck hit Prepotente somewhere personal. He would later reveal it was the ship that had carried him to Kheth nineteen years ago, and he has spent those nineteen years knowing almost nothing about what happened that night or why. Whatever remains of the
Morrow's Folly is, for him, a question he has never had permission to ask directly. Forty gold is forty gold though. The wreck has most likely been stripped long since. But most likely is not certainly, and none of us were in a position to turn down either the money or the answer. We accepted.
I sense a long journey unfolding before me. One that might bind me to these companions through many trials. To find my vanished family, I'll need allies. Supporting them now could pave the way for their help later though I won't delay too long in asking.
. Seriously though this was the best 4 year campaign ever for me. Also the only 4 year campaign I’ve been a part of but that’s not relevant….. haha
