Part 3 - Chapter 1
Six months had passed since the fighting ended in Redharbor, though few in the city agreed on precisely when peace had really begun.
King Natali remains upon the throne. This is no small thing, though neither is it the same as saying that her position is secure. The worst of the unrest following Dagoth’s attack has quieted, but it has not disappeared. Her enemies among the merchants and lesser nobility have grown more cautious in their accusations, though not necessarily less committed to them.
The Crimson Council has suffered setbacks, but influence is not so easily rooted out. Its members remain difficult to name and harder still to accuse of anything substantial, while those who prospered from the city’s disorder have not forgotten how near Redharbor came to breaking. The markets are open, the ferries run, and the city watch patrol streets that once again belong to merchants, laborers, and families rather than monsters, soldiers and the dead. The capital endures in the uncomfortable void between trauma and whatever comes next.
Further inland, Canibri rebuilt what the White Serpents had burned. Scaffolds climbed the surviving walls, new roofs appeared among the blackened rafters, and carts carrying timber and quarried stone crowded roads that had recently belonged to soldiers and refugees. The Serpents’ survivors had scattered, their banners had disappeared from the roads, and for the first time in years their name was uttered more in bitterness than fear. Whether that meant they were finished or merely waiting had become a question for another season.
For the moment, attention had turned east. Ships arriving from Chansa brought more than spices, blue glass and salt-stiffened canvas. They carried broken pieces of statuary wrapped in wool, old coins whose markings no scholar in Redharbor could readily name, and artifacts uncovered from the hard country beyond the coast. At first, these things had been curiosities. But recently they were appearing with greater frequency.
Excavations were opening beyond the settled coast. Prospectors returned with maps copied from older maps, each promising ancient tombs, buried treasure or cities swallowed by the eastern sands. Merchants began financing expeditions. Scholars followed them, hiring guards, laborers, guides and anyone else willing to exchange good judgment for the possibility of riches or fame. Passage east by way of Greenbrook and Sundabar had grown crowded enough that travelers sometimes waited days for a place aboard the ferries. Not everyone returned.
And the rumors were myriad. They spoke of metal doors exposed by shifting dunes, of strange lights seen out in the wilds, and of monsters emerging from the depths of the desert to tear through expeditions and caravans. Some claimed the creatures were upset by the influx of humanoids in their territory. Others insisted that something farther inland had driven them toward the coast, and into contact with the goodly folk.
More recently, travelers had begun returning with stories of something larger. A caravan guard swore that he had watched a dragon pass above the mountains at dusk, its hide scarcely distinguishable from the gathering storm. The survivors of another expedition claimed that something enormous had circled their camp for three nights before driving them from the ruins they had come to excavate. There were reports of livestock taken, horses found burned in their traces and unfamiliar tracks crossing the old roads after a rainfall.
Most such stories could be dismissed as tavern invention, particularly after traveling the length of the coast. Jiub did not dismiss them. There had been blue dragons in the eastern sands once. He knew of two by name.
Azrathain had been patient, brooding and possessed of a cunning that made his movements difficult to predict and his long silences more troubling than open violence. He was said to have watched cities for years before making his intentions known. Kharadros had been a simpler terror: brutal, acquisitive and remembered principally for the number of people required to satisfy his appetites. Both belonged to an older age, when dragons still laid claim to the eastern sands and whole stretches of country went unnamed on human maps. Those names were now lost to time, and forgotten by all but the most wizened sages and historians of the eastern expanse.
Unbothered by these ominous rumors, wealthy patrons sent agents east with sealed instructions. Scholars in Redharbor, Greenbrook, and across the western lands paid well for artifacts brought back from the desert. Mercenary companies found themselves courted by nobles who had never before considered the expense of hired swords, while smaller bands assembled in inns and dockyards, their members meeting one another for the first time over borrowed maps and promises of payment.
With them came everyone accustomed to making a living from such gatherings. Wherever armed fools gathered in large numbers, there would soon be work for healers, thieves, merchants, undertakers and more heavily armed fools. Guides raised their prices. Ferrymen added crossings. Warehouses emptied and filled again as food, canvas, rope, lamp oil and casks of water were purchased for journeys to the interior.
They converged upon Chansa, the practical little harbor at the edge of the Desert.
It was not the greatest city in the East. Oyaram, farther south, was larger, richer and better known. Chansa had no patience for that comparison. Its ferries ran, its warehouses were full, and its people had spent generations outfitting travelers who arrived convinced they were the first to discover whatever waited beyond the horizon.
White, rusty orange, and slate hued limestone buildings climbed from the water beneath awnings of faded turquoise and cobalt. Bronze fittings turned warm beneath the sun. Nets, cedar spars and lengths of bleached rope crowded the harborfront, where sailors argued over berths beside caravan masters arguing over water supply. Beyond the city, the cultivated coast gave way to dry hills, old roads and the beginning of the eastern country.
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For six months, your lives have carried on without one another.
Now, whether by choice, necessity, coincidence or something less easily explained, those separate paths are drawing together once again.
This chapter begins in Chansa.
Before we get together in October, tell me what your character has been up to since our last adventure ended. It can be a paragraph, a few bullet points or something more (or less) substantial - whatever feels right.
Consider what the intervening months may have changed:
Where have they been, and what brought them to Chansa?
Have they gained or lost anything important?
Has their appearance or equipment changed?
Have they learned a new skill, acquired a new habit or formed a new relationship?
Have their beliefs, loyalties or ambitions shifted?
You may also use the time-skip to explore a different direction for your character mechanically. If you would like, you may exchange up to two levels in your current class for the same number of levels in another class, keeping your overall character level unchanged. The last adventure was a trying one, and some time has passed in which your character might have recovered, reassessed themselves or discovered abilities they had never previously cultivated. This is entirely optional, but if another class better reflects who they have become - or simply offers something new you would enjoy playing - you are welcome to explore it. We can work together to make the change feel natural.
You’re welcome to introduce new people, places, rumors or complications from your character’s recent life. I may draw on them during the campaign. If any part of their story would be unknown to the other characters, send it to me privately! Private lore is welcome.
You need not explain exactly how your character finds the others - I’ll take care of that.
