Session 13 Recap - Voices Below the Ivory

Some doors don't open. You go through them anyway.

The opening Tarokka pull turned up The Executioner and The Paladin — and a reading that sat oddly with everyone at the table:

Justice, when it finally comes, won't look like a victory. It'll look like letting go.

No one had a guess what it meant yet. By the end of the session, they had a locked basement door, a smugglers' den, and the first real look at the place Mel had been steering them toward for weeks: the Black Ivory Inn.

The Ledger at Shepherd's Gate

The party set out from Emberwood to finish what Ansom Lang had started weeks earlier — the quartermaster's log that named Hazel McDonald as having passed into the Drakkenheim Garrison four years ago and never signed back out. This time they wanted the actual page.

On the way, they passed Eckerman Mill. River was not there, and neither was any of her equipment — an absence nobody had an explanation for.

At Shepherd's Gate, Slovak had a hint waiting for them about a smithy on the Scar, but Tough Luck wanted the ledger first. Slovak didn't have authorization to open the garrison books to outsiders, and said so. Tough Luck's answer was to flip the man's desk and make his intentions plain. Two gate captains arrived to keep the peace, and for a moment it looked like it might come to blows — until a hard-nosed intimidation check turned Slovak around instead. He retrieved the book himself, under escort, and set it open to the page:

SHEPHERD'S GATE — GARRISON PASSAGE LOG
Book VII — Supply & Personnel
14th of Harrow, four years past — Detail: Supply run, Drakkenheim Garrison

Name	Role	In	Out
Hazel McDonald	Quartermaster's Clerk (Attached, Provisional)	✓ 06:40	—
Corporal Bram Osgood	Escort, Garrison Company	✓ 06:40	✓ 19:55
Nella Ferris	Escort, Garrison Company	✓ 06:40	✓ 19:55
Wick Talbot	Quartermaster's Clerk (Senior)	✓ 06:40	✓ 19:55
"Dredge" (no surname on record)	Hired Porter	✓ 06:40	—

Ansom's report from weeks ago had the shape of it right. The page confirmed the rest: five names went in that morning. Three came back out by evening. Hazel didn't — and neither did the porter listed only as "Dredge."

Tough Luck pressed Slovak on Osgood, Ferris, and Talbot. Nothing turned up on the spot, but Slovak agreed to keep digging.

Borrowed Horses

With a long ride ahead of them to reach the Black Ivory Inn, the party detoured to Camp Dawn to see about mounts. Quartermaster Ostra Vane lent them horses without much ceremony — her only condition being that they came back healthy.

The ride took them the long way, around Drakkenheim's outskirts and back through Emberwood, where they paused to send word ahead to Ansom Lang: they were riding out to the Black Ivory Inn and would be back within a day or so.

The Inn on the Untouched Street

They reached the eastern outskirts of the city and heard the music before they saw the building — piano, drifting through streets that, as they got closer, looked like they'd never been touched by the meteor at all. They hitched their borrowed horses on a street that belonged, impossibly, to a Drakkenheim that wasn't supposed to exist anymore.

A doorman greeted them. As they were seated, the unease set in fast. Drakzen's Divine Sense caught something old and wrong beneath the building. Six saw a face in a window that no one else at the table saw. Tough Luck's Tremorsense picked out a basement below, connected to a tunnel.

While a waiter took their order — ale, lamb chops — a few of them went looking. Rustar found his way through the kitchens, past shelves of produce far too fresh for a ruined city, to a staircase leading down. Six stepped outside the front door chasing the face in the window, and found himself looking at Drakkenheim as it stood before the meteor ever fell.

Inside, the party spoke with "Open" Mike Connolly, the Inn's owner, seated near the stage where Miss Charlotte played piano. In a corner booth they found Aaron Grint, hooded and dressed in Hooded Lanterns garb — agitated well past reason the moment the Lanterns were mentioned. A slap didn't bring him back to himself.

The Basement Den

Food was slow to arrive in the crowded tavern, so the party stopped waiting and went down themselves. They found a locked door, voices on the other side, and someone telling them to leave. They broke the door down instead.

What waited behind it was a smugglers' meeting — the same old smuggling tunnels Mel had described weeks earlier, the ones he'd claimed offered a back way into the inner city. The fight that followed was ugly. Tough Luck took the worst of it but held the doorway, bottling the smugglers in one spot while the rest of the party ground them down. It ended in victory.

Session 13 closed there, in the wreckage of the den, with a passage still waiting somewhere beyond it — and a face in an unbroken window that only Six had seen.

NPCs Encountered

• Slovak — Shepherd's Gate garrison clerk. Refused, then relented, then handed over the ledger himself.
• Quartermaster Ostra Vane — Camp Dawn quartermaster. Lent the party horses on good faith.
• "Open" Mike Connolly — owner of the Black Ivory Inn.
• Miss Charlotte — the Inn's pianist, and the source of the music heard blocks away.
• Aaron Grint — a hooded patron in Hooded Lanterns garb, violently unsettled by any mention of the Lanterns.
• An unnamed smuggler crew, defeated in the basement den.

Loose Threads

• The ledger names — Osgood, Ferris, and Talbot logged out that evening. Hazel and "Dredge" did not. Slovak is still digging.
• "Dredge" — a hired porter, no surname on record, who vanished the same day as Hazel. Worth a second look.
• The face in the window — only Six saw it, and only Six followed it outside into a Drakkenheim that shouldn't exist. He hasn't explained what he saw.
• Aaron Grint's reaction to the Hooded Lanterns — unresolved. Something is very wrong with him.
• The tunnel beneath the smugglers' den — the same one Mel described as a possible way into the inner city. Still unexplored as of session's end.

Next Session

With the smugglers cleared out, the party still hasn't found what's actually wrong with the Black Ivory Inn — or what's waiting behind the passage the smugglers were guarding.