Session 09 – Chapel of Saint Brenna (Part I)

Opening Image

Each PC turns over the previous night at Eckerman Mill. River left disappointed. Yoren left alive. The weight of unfinished business in the dark before dawn.

Table Ritual — What Each PC Carried In

• Six — Old hatred for the Amethyst Academy returned. He'd let himself be swayed by them and was mad at himself for it. The feelings he'd suppressed after Reed Manor came back up. He has regressed to not trusting the Academy.
• Drakzen — Worried about how the Silver Order would receive this group. Specifically did not want Frankie coming to Camp Dawn. Prayed the Order wouldn't go fanatic and force his hand.
• Doc — Mulling the patterns of delerium. Quietly working backwards from observed phenomena to try to determine what the underlying rules are.
• Augustine — Still shaken by the portrait of his great-aunt at Reed Manor. It has been so long he had assumed he wouldn't see them again. He regrets not being more confrontational when he had the chance — that house was owned by his blood.
• Rustar — Thinking ahead to the Inner City. Specifically, Queen's Garden. How are they going to get in there and survive?
• Tough Luck — Hazel's name is fresh. Wendell Crain is a lead he hasn't chased yet.

Camp Dawn

The road west brought them to Camp Dawn and an audience with High Flamekeeper Ophelia Reed.

She had been expecting them.

Three factions were moving on the Chapel of Saint Brenna — each seeking the Sceptre of Saint Vitruvio, a relic of the Sacred Flame lost in the city's fall. The Silver Order's own strike team was already en route. The Followers of the Falling Fire had dispatched agents of their own. The Queen's Men had taken an interest the High Flamekeeper could not fully account for.

She asked the party to go ahead of all of them.

For Drakzen, she had something more.

"The Chapel of Saint Brenna holds the remains of clerics and paladins of the old order. It also holds Saint Brenna herself. Her rest, I'm told, has been disturbed."

"I will not ask you to do what your order demands of you. But if you choose to — the Order will know that the last of the Order of Light walked into a desecrated chapel and made it holy again. That's a story that's been waitin' to be told for fifteen years."

She pressed an ember pendant into his hand. She gave him a letter. She sent them east.

Theodore Marshal did not appear.

Stick's Ferry

The party did not return to Emberwood.

They rode east instead, into the Outer City, and found the Drann at Stick's Ferry — a crossing managed by a ferryman who communicated largely in grunts and an open palm.

Payment was mixed. Copper satisfied him as well as gold.

He rowed them across in silence, then began grunting out the melody of Old MacDonald somewhere in the middle of the river. He did not explain this.

The ruins on the other side were quiet.

The Chapel

The Chapel of Saint Brenna rose from a hillock in the middle of a desolate residential borough — one tower standing, one collapsed into rubble, stained glass long since scattered in the dirt.

Two warhorses were hitched outside. Silver Order livery.

In the crematory garden behind the chapel, a scarred man with burns covering half his face was crouched over the hands of a stone statue, studying what he clearly believed was a sceptre.

It was not a sceptre. It was a winch tool — an immovable rod — held in the hands of Saint Tarna since before the city fell.

Ser Bryce Landry of the Silver Order met them at the chapel entrance. He had been expecting them too.

The Negotiation

The scarred man in the garden was Rorsh — a Queen's Men bandit captain sent to recover "the silver sceptre relic at Saint Brenna." He had been at the statue for the better part of the morning, convinced he was defusing a trap.

The party spoke with him.

They told him the truth: what he was holding was not the Sceptre. The real relic was deeper inside, behind a puzzle that required the rod he'd been wrestling with all morning.

Rorsh thought about this for a moment.

"So you're telling me I've spent ninety minutes trying to defuse nothing. That's the kind of day I'm having."

The party convinced him to abandon this job. His crew followed.

Into the Chapel

With the garden clear, the party recovered the immovable rod from Saint Tarna's hands — Tough Luck broke the hatch lock behind the statue to reach it — and entered the the Undercroft.

The rest of the party entered the chapel proper. The altar box yielded scrolls, holy water, anointed oils, a block of incense, and a silver holy symbol of the Sacred Flame.

The brazier had been searched by someone before them. Alchemical fire flasks remained, overlooked.

Water leaked steadily through cracks in the floor above the undercroft.

The Undercroft

Returning back outside to look for Tough Luck and Augustine, the rest of the party found the door behind the statue was opened. Below it, in the undercroft, four mephits had been living for fifteen years with nothing to do but argue.

Cindy (magma, self-appointed leader) demanded payment.

The party offered delerium shards.

The mephits accepted. They became, if not friendly, then considerably more forthcoming.

They spoke of the winch system that controlled the doors deeper in. They spoke of the droning from the south tomb — something moving in there, they said, something that had been at it for days. And they mentioned a woman in a hood with a red scarf who had come down three nights ago and walked the whole undercroft without touching anything before leaving the way she came.

The session ended here, in the dark beneath the chapel, with the winch system ahead and the droning growing no quieter.

NPCs Encountered

• High Flamekeeper Ophelia Reed — Camp Dawn; formally hired the party for the Sceptre recovery; gave Drakzen an ember pendant and a letter with the names of the dead
• Stick — ferryman at Stick's Ferry; grunts; accepts copper; knows Old MacDonald
• Ser Bryce Landry — Silver Order knight leading the chapel strike team; expected the party; cooperative throughout
• Rorsh — Queen's Men bandit captain; mistook the immovable rod for the Sceptre; talked down and paid off; left without violence
• Ashley, Dusty, Smokey, and Cindy — mephits of the undercroft; bribed with delerium shards; shared what they knew

Loose Threads

• The Ansom debrief has not happened — he is still waiting on a report about Reed Manor and Oscar Yoren
• The winch system and what lies beyond it remain ahead
• Saint Brenna's tomb is droning
• The woman in the hood with a red scarf came through three nights ago and left without taking anything
• The Falling Fire have not yet appeared

Next session: Session 10 - Chapel of Saint Brenna (Part II)

Previous session: Session 08 - Reed Manor (Part II)