Session 08 Recap – A Long-Leash Arrangement

The third morning back in Emberwood began quietly. Coin in their pockets, a plan to ride for Camp Dawn, and the unspoken weight of decisions made and unmade in the dark. By nightfall, the party had walked into a dead house full of polite monsters, shaken hands with a man who measured them for graves, and learned that some patrons do not need to be lied to in order to be disappointed.

Five Things Left Unsaid

Some things are not shared with the party.

Each member of the Misfits woke on the third morning with something they had written, said, or thought the night before — something they had not passed across the table by lamplight.

Drakzen sat in the chapel-quiet of his room and wondered, not for the first time, whether bringing the rest of the party to the Silver Order was bringing them to the wolves.

Tough Luck had grown tired of waiting. We're wasting time. Hazel is in the city. She could be dying. We need to go. He did not say it aloud. He did not need to.

Rustar had reached a different conclusion. If they're doing healing, they can't be all bad. He kept it to himself. Faith, when it surprises you, deserves a quiet moment first.

Doc had spent the evening with a word in his head he could not let go of.

"Amputate."

"That's a funny word. AMP-U-TATE."

Six drank himself to sleep at a small writing desk, thinking about his arm, his skin, and the dreams he did not want to have again. He woke with the candle still burning. The point of his knife had carved a sentence into the wood beneath his palm.

You were never meant to stay counted.

He could not remember writing it. He only knew, looking at it in the candlelight, that it was true.

A Captain at the Window

Alycia Martell found the party before the morning bell. Captain Lang had been at the window since dawn.

The party climbed the Watchtower stairs to a command room they were beginning to know by sight. As they passed the duty desk, two Hooded Lanterns were arguing in low voices — a wiry woman named Greta Braun, the bandage on her forearm still fresh, and an older man with grey in his beard. They had been arguing for some time. They did not lower their voices for the party.

"—not asking you to go in. I'm asking why we don't watch it. Just watch."

"Because there's nothing to watch, Greta. The captain doesn't send people to the crater anymore. You know that."

"It moved last spring. I saw the survey marks."

"You saw bad weather and you saw what you wanted to see."

When pressed, the older Lantern offered nothing. Lantern business. Nothing to concern you.

The party climbed on. Whatever moved in the crater last spring would have to wait.

The Yoren Contract

Ansom did not turn from the window immediately.

"For several years now, we've been buying potions from a man named Oscar Yoren. He's a bit of a strange recluse, but his work is reliable and he doesn't seem to be bothering anyone. His potions are much cheaper than what the Amethyst Academy charges."

The deliveries had broken down. Two weeks of silence, a half-shipment before that, and several recent potions that had not worked at all — one of them contaminated. Ansom wanted someone to ride to Reed Manor, north of the city, and find out what had happened. Restore the supply if possible. Confirm the worst if not.

Two hundred gold, up front. Lantern access. And Ansom's standing favor, which he said little about but everyone in the room understood.

Tough Luck, who was in no mood to wait, pressed for news of his sister. Ansom told him these things took time.

At the end of the meeting, a messenger arrived from the duty desk with a folded slip of paper. Ansom read it twice before he spoke.

"Her name — Hazel McDonald — appears in a quartermaster's log from four years ago. A supply run into the Garrison. She signed in. She did not sign out."

"I'm not telling you this to give you hope. I'm telling you because you've earned honest information. We'll keep looking."

Tough Luck did not say much after that.

A Sending and a Mill

Six felt it first — the curl of warm air at the back of his neck and the voice that had been in his head before, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

"Ansom sent you after Yoren. He told you what he knows — which is less than he thinks. Eckerman Mill. On your way up there, today. — River"

Twenty-five words, as always.

Six replied. What about what Blackjack Mel knows?

River's response was, by her standards, generous with words.

"He doesn't know shit."

River at the Mill

The mill creaked. River had been working — pale powder at a millstone table, her imp on the rafters, her shield guardian by the door.

She was offering a different version of the same job.

Yoren, she told them, was not a quiet hedge mage with a bad temper. He was a former Amethyst Academy researcher, expelled a decade ago, who had stolen volumes on conjuration, transmutation, and necromancy when he fled. He had survived in the ruins for ten years using methods River would only describe as unsavoury.

"He is a hedge mage with several other hedge mages for company. Do not underestimate him, but do not overestimate him either. I would not be sending you if I thought this was beyond you."

She wanted his research. His spellbook, his journals, samples of his work — anything that explained how a man could ignore the Haze for a decade without turning into a dreg. Two hundred fifty gold, a pearl of power set with delerium, and a first-level contaminated spell taught to a willing pupil. She named two candidates: Doc, who would find use for it, and Six, who would resonate with it.

The party asked after the supply line. River told them what mattered to her and what did not. She did not ask whether they cared about Ansom's request. She assumed they would manage both. They did not correct her.

The Misfits Sign Their Book Again

Before leaving, the party paused at the wall of the mill where their names had begun to accumulate. The Misfits had been writing on that wall since the spring. The wall did not seem to mind.

Drakzen added a single line below their last entry: Round 2, going back in.

Tough Luck drew, with great care, a phallus.

They rode out of Emberwood that afternoon.

The Cairn Hills

The road past Eckerman Mill bent north and west, climbing into a dying woodland the locals called the Cairn Hills. Old burial stones, half-swallowed by underbrush, flickered with the faint octarine sheen of contamination. The party had not gone an hour before a low mist rose from a depression in the path and resolved itself into shapes.

Three Delerium Dregs. Two Frenzied Dregs, charging hard.

The fight was over almost before it began. Six PCs at full resources made short work of the pack. Doc, who had been packing his kit for exactly this opportunity, harvested what the rest of the party considered unspeakable and he considered Tuesday.

Collected: 2 Aberrant Animus, 1 Natural Weapon (Claw), 1 Hide, 1 Spine, 1 Aberrant Dust.

The Manor's slate roof became visible through the trees a short while later.

Smoke from three chimneys. Too many for a dead house.

Two Polite Monsters and a Magic Word

Reed Manor stood behind a rusted iron fence. A broken fountain sat before its doors, and in the stagnant pool an obese toad watched the road with too-steady eyes.

Two figures in heavy brown overcoats moved on the grounds. The party recognized what they were before they recognized that they were moving.

The ogre zombies did not attack. They did not even speak much. The first asked, slowly, what the party wanted. The party tried friendliness. The zombie repeated itself. They tried questions. The zombie repeated itself. They tried introductions, formal greetings, references to the Hooded Lanterns — nothing.

Finally, Drakzen, exasperated, said the word potions.

The zombie at the gate turned slowly. Its hood slipped. The bandaged face beneath had seams where there should have been skin.

"Follow... this... way..."

It knocked three times on the front door. The door opened.

The Dining Room

A young man and a young woman admitted the party — apprentices, the party learned later, named Marco and Gemma. They led the Misfits through a grand entryway with a faded Reed family crest tapestry and into the dining room.

Gemma withdrew to fetch their master. Marco stayed, hovering near the sideboard, polite in the way someone is polite when they have been told to be.

The party tried small talk. Marco answered exactly as much as he had been instructed to answer, which was very little. How long had he been here? A while. Was he from the city? Around. What did Yoren teach him? Whatever I'm ready to learn.

Doc, who had recognized Marco's face from the weekly shipments to Shepherd's Gate, leaned back in his chair.

"You're the delivery boy."

Marco's polite expression flickered for the first time. He was not a delivery boy. He was an apprentice mage. He had been studying for nearly three years. He delivered the potions because someone had to deliver the potions.

Doc nodded thoughtfully, as if the distinction had not occurred to him and now did. The apology was not quite an apology.

Marco did not say anything else after that. He stood by the sideboard until the door opened.

Above the mantelpiece hung a framed portrait.

A family of five. Father, mother, two daughters, a son. The colors had faded but the faces had not.

Augustine looked at the portrait for a long moment.

He knew her.

The woman in the center — the mother — was his maternal great-aunt. He could not have named her with certainty, but the set of her eyes and the line of her jaw were the same as his own, and after a moment the rest of the party saw it too.

No one said anything. There was no time.

The door opened.

Oscar Yoren

The man who entered was short, wide, and wrong.

Sores ran along his neck. His teeth were the color of old bone. His eyes glowed faintly purple-green in the firelight. He did not sit. He did not smile.

"Who sent you?"

The party told him the truth: Captain Lang. The Hooded Lanterns. They had come about the potions.

Yoren accepted the answer. He explained, in the careful tone of a man practiced at it, that one of his apprentices — Bolter, he called him — had gone into the ruins for ingredients and had not returned. He was a man down. Production was slow. The shipments would resume when he had a replacement.

Then he leaned in.

"You want potions. You want answers about the Haze. So do I — for different reasons, no doubt, but the work is the same."

He had a formula, he told them. Aqua expurgo. Protection against the Haze. He had it. He could not brew it. The ingredients required eldritch lilies that grew only in Queen's Park, deep in the inner city, where his apprentices died and he would not go.

Bring him the lilies. He would brew them what they needed. Both sides richer for it.

The party agreed.

A Quiet Word for Six

Yoren noticed Six the way a man notices a shape in a window that should not be there.

"You're further along than my apprentices. How long? Six months? A year? Two?"

(He was smiling. It was not kind.)

"The Academy would have you for this. They have a name for what's happening to you. I have several. The interesting thing is — none of mine end in a chain or a cell."

He offered Six a lesson. An evening in the lab. A chance to see what controlled exposure looked like, from someone who had nothing to gain by lying about it.

Six did not refuse. He did not agree.

The door, on Yoren's side, was left open.

A Disappointment, Quietly Delivered

The party rode back through the Cairn Hills as evening fell. They did not return to Emberwood. They turned in at Eckerman Mill instead — to talk with River first, before facing Ansom in the morning.

River was at the millstone table when they arrived, working over the same pale powder. She did not look up.

"Tell me what happened. Use your own words."

They told her. They had not brought the research. They had not brought the spellbook. They had agreed to fetch eldritch lilies from a place she had explicitly described as beyond their strength.

River set down the pestle.

"You took a long-leash arrangement with a man who has spent ten years making sure he survives whoever he works with. You have agreed to walk into Queen's Park — somewhere your party cannot survive at this strength — to bring him ingredients he will use to brew something he will then sell back to you, or not, depending on how the season treats his mood."

"You did not bring me his research."

She did not raise her voice.

"I am not angry. I am clarifying our arrangement. I will not pay you the agreed sum. You did not deliver the contracted work. You may keep the favor of the Academy, conditional. Bring me his spellbook, or his notes, or his head, within the next month, and we will be even. Bring me nothing, and we are done. The contaminated spell goes with the contract."

Six pushed back. He thought she was being unfair. They had done work. They had taken risks. They had come back to report.

River looked at him for a long moment. The unsettling smile.

"I am not mad at you, Six. I am just disappointed."

The party did not stay long after that.

A Camp in the Mill

They settled in to sleep outside the mill, on the grass behind the old grain shed where the wind off the river was thinnest. They did not ask for shelter inside; River had not offered. Through the slats they could see the faint glow of her lantern, still on, still working. Her shield guardian stood at the mill door, unmoving, untiring.

The party rested.

That night, sleep came easier than it should have. They woke with a clarity they had not had yesterday.

The work had changed them. It always does.

The party advances to Level 4.

Six dreamed nothing he could remember.

He sat up before the others, looking at the back of his hand for a long time.

Faction Shifts

Loose Threads

• The party owes Ansom Lang an honest report. The longer they wait, the harder the conversation.
• River has given them thirty days to deliver Yoren's spellbook, notes, or head. After that, the Academy's favor is gone.
• Oscar Yoren is alive, expects eldritch lilies, and is patient — for now.
• Hazel McDonald signed into the Garrison four years ago and did not sign out. Tough Luck has a name and a place.
• Augustine saw his great-aunt's face on a wall in a house he had never visited. He did not pursue it.
• Six does not remember carving the words into the desk. He only knows they were true. He has not told the others.
• The crater moved last spring, according to a Lantern whose word the captain has discarded. Even Lanterns will not patrol it now.
• The Chapel of St. Brenna still waits. Camp Dawn has not yet called.
• Blackjack Mel is still owed an answer about Six.

First appearance in campaign: Session 02 - Emberwood Village

Recent involvement: Session 06 • Session 07