Open Plot Threads

Current through Session 25 ("Kreth's Eyes"). Older notes are kept below under "Earlier Thread Notes" as a historical snapshot.

Immediate / Active

Where the party stands now — the Faerie Wood on the Shore (S25)

After a recovery rest at the failing Celsian Athenaeum, Sylvie teleported the company via one of the Amber Reach paintings to the site it depicts: a dark, humid faerie wood on the southern shore (NOT Thistleglass — the coastal-map painting with the three-masted ship and the floating Splendor-motes). They won the fae's hospitality by meeting the Moonshadow's Mirror in a shatter-me contest rather than a slaughter. (GM: this is the repurposed Thistleglass encounter; where does the wood lead — a Blessed-Branch source, a Kreth lead, Draz's home coast?)
Left behind at the Athenaeum: the Runt God stays by the Sacred Pyre, in an uneasy truce brokered by Draz and Ash-begets-Tide with the priest's fungus, both to leash it and to try to feed the failing fire. Sylvie planted a Portal Seed in the Forbidden Library — a possible return-door / first node of a portal network.
Came along: Pinchie and Speaker (now changed — see below). Draz was carried and then slept the wood out (ate a fae fruit; see his arc).
Inola is gone (S24): stepped through a Splendor planar door with a stolen book of planar passage, light and all. (GM: where — the World Above, or elsewhere? what is she after?)
Vanco and Zevin (Draz's father and brother) are still below the Athenaeum, finishing their own heist, promised to return. (GM: their heist? when do they resurface?)

The Faerie Wood & the Eyes of Kreth — S25

The wood's fae keep no Sacred Pyre yet are not Umbral monsters and not umbra-possessed — they chose the glamour. Their court answers to Moonshadow (a soft, child-sized thing) and the Shadow Cast (the great looming shadow that stands over it, with its own eyes). Both wear the Eyes of Kreth — pale moon-orbs set into gouged sockets, divine remnants of Kreth (deception & the moon), kin to the Blessed Branches and the Askavir as god-leavings.
The glamour is real for those inside it. Enveloped by the Shadow Cast, Heyou briefly saw through its eyes: the wood sunlit and teeming with life, his own companions rendered as ugly monsters fouling it, and the Shadow Cast itself no horror but a gentle beast. That is how the eye-bearers see the world — the radiant past, with the intruders as the monstrous ones. (The party now has a first-hand taste of what wearing Kreth's eyes does.)
Kreth "went away and left his eyes." Moonshadow says the god "had to fetch something — surely very big," and doesn't know if he'll return. (GM: what did Kreth leave to fetch? ties to the moon-as-membrane lore below.)
The Mirror is beaten by wit, not force: it set a "shatter me" contest (non-lethal), and Heyou won it by reshaping the mirror-glass in two rather than out-damaging it. The wood then extended the company its hospitality. (A door into the fae, not a war — the party brokered coexistence.)
Speaker is changed (major): during the fight Moonshadow set two Eyes of Kreth into Speaker's face, and afterward the mute construct rose and spoke in a full, sonorous voice it had never had: "Stop seeing. The truth is not always what is seen plainly. Use wisdom to decide whose eyes to trust." Then it went inert again — still wearing the eyes. (GM: is this Kreth speaking through it? Speaker now carries a god's organs of perception — what does that make it, and whose side is it on?)

The recovered books (identified, S24)

The king's book (Heyou lifted it from a Spectral Librarian): a ghost-written military treatise of an ancient warrior-king — his exploits and battlefield tactics. (Mechanical payoff TBD.)
Inola's book: a courtly text on a subtle social/influence magic; researching it could grant Sylvie a Grace-domain card (a domain no PC has).
The Nailed Tome = Ygva's depletion thesis. Her rejected draft / the evidence for her expulsion, detailing how to deplete objects and "containers" as ritual fuel — gruesome. Heyou copied it to magical parchment (the original crumbled to dust). This grants Sylvie Splendor rituals fuelled by depletion dice (d20 → d12 → … → d4, then spent — see the item/rules pass).

Speaker

A faceless stone thing in the dark below the Forbidden Library. Sylvie tried to wake it with Splendor (it refused) and then with a piece of her own Umbra (it took). It woke and followed her up, naming itself Speaker. (GM: what is it, what does it want, and is it kin to Kelun and the old talking constructs?)
S25 — it now wears the Eyes of Kreth and has spoken (see "The Faerie Wood & the Eyes of Kreth" above). An Umbra-woken construct now fitted with a moon-god's eyes, delivering warnings in a borrowed voice.

Character Arcs

Sylvie — demigod, Umbra-witch, unburdened of the Godshard

RESOLVED (S15): Demigod transformation — absorbed Mollthain's Splendor essence via Damnation. Permanent: Ichor of the Gods (advantage die always d10); Weight of Divinity (fail-with-Fear → mark a Stress or give the GM a Fear).
RESOLVED (S17): gained teleportation — how the party travels now.
RESOLVED (S21 → S23): became the vessel of the Godshard (a god-fragment, drawn from the drained dean), then expelled it in the Forbidden Library, where the Floating Eye destroyed it. She "kept a shadow of her own in its place." (GM: what is that shadow — a lasting mark of having carried a god?)
NEW (S24): studied Ygva's copied depletion thesis — she is now learning depletion-fuelled Splendor rituals (the very art Ygva was expelled for). She also carries Inola's Grace-domain book (a research option) and the Amber Reach "true faces" (teleport unlocked).
Her heart is still missing. Ygva held it — and Ygva is now dead. Where is the heart? (OPEN — Ygva's death orphaned this thread.)
Stoneweaver origins / "Sister Moon": at the Stoneheart Peaks she took up a focus-stone that answered her, and learned her stone-magic always ran on instinct, not book-knowledge. The torn-out crown of her mountain is "part of the moon" now; her rites "called back the moon" (S17). Connection possibly tied to Kreth (False Visions / the Moon). (Sister Moon began when, after losing all magic as a stoneweaver, she started channeling a new kind of magic — coinciding with the full moon; cause unknown.)
NEW (S25) — the godhood question. Reading the paintings, she clocks the golden Splendor-motes and asks, privately: is the world poorer for the want of Splendor, or of the gods? Her research answers that the gods were Splendor's source at "the 99% level" — to replace them she'd have to become "a fusion reactor of Splendor," i.e. a god herself, the source that mends the world. She is now openly entertaining apotheosis. (Central arc question — where does she take this?)
NEW (S25) — lore she now holds: the God-King's last writ is an apology that established the Sacred Pyres and admitted he'd be away and likely not return (no reason given). And the moon in pre-absence texts is not an object but a membrane over the whole sky that thins to bring visions — that is Kreth; the floating orbs are the Eyes of Kreth. She is chasing why the gods left and how to bring them back un-angered.

Draz — Otheidas blood, Beast Form, a family found

RESOLVED (S20-21): took Casper tol-Otheidas's heir-circlet → Splendor-sight (sees Splendor as light/aura); gained Beast Form (bird); relit the Athenaeum pyre with the scepter.
Otheidas blood: Inola named the circlet the crown of God-King Otheidas's heir and marvelled that both crown and Beast accepted him — "it is in your bloodline too." (Major: what does his descent from the god-king mean?)
Gentles the Runt God (teaching it to greet him softly).
Family (S22-23): found his father Vanco and brother Zevin frozen in the vaults. The truth: Vanco carried Zevin (one of two older twins) west to the Athenaeum; Draz's mother turned back for Draz with the second twin, and neither the mother nor that twin was ever seen again. (OPEN: the fate of the mother and second twin.)
Binding rune on his arm (Borek revealed it) — still uninvestigated. Compass steadied at "eleven o'clock," pointing toward Ossa. Heretic mark (inner bicep, see below).
S25: off-screen this session (player absent) — his Runt-God/Ash-begets-Tide work is what keeps the god by the pyre. In the wood he ate a fae's offered fruit and slept the whole visit; wakes next session. Level-up still owed (with Sylvie's).

Heyou — a construct, and the ones who made him

RESOLVED (S23): Vanco returned Heyou's original motive-core (drawn from his own chest). Vanco and Zevin had been sent to the Athenaeum specifically to learn how Heyou, a construct, was made. (Major lead into Heyou's origins.)
NEW (S24): spent the day studying that mechanical heart / motive-core. Then, dropped to the edge of death at the Spire, a voice not his own spoke through him, asking for the Runt God to be brought back. (GM: this was Brathis — whose sigil Heyou bears — taking the opening a marked, downed construct offered. See "Brathis" below. The table heard only "a voice not his own.")
NEW (S25) — the core is in, and it is wrong. He worked Vanco's returned motive-core into his own chest. It did not seat cleanly: it's not his lost heart but something very like him, with another's essence still lodged in it, and it keeps bad time — "one player in the orchestra forever a half-beat off." He's now permanently half-distracted, always listening inward. (GM: whose essence is in that core? does it wake?)
NEW (S25) — Assassin. Absorbed into the Shadow Cast and out again, he takes up the Assassin multiclass (Executioner's Guild; Blade domain) — narratively, a piece of the shadow-craft came back with him.
Carries a Suppression Amulet (from Dean Therion) — suppresses magic both ways; he is slowly learning to cast through it.
Chest sigil and an Otheidas-linked circlet matching it among the artifacts — unresolved. May be key to creating new beings; tied to Kelun and the stone constructs. Absorbed a portion of the Askavir Heart (holy power). Recovered leg marked with the symbol of Brathis — unexplored. Old Syndicate ties (Borek holds part of his essence).

Jamal — the last of Grithmaar Deep

RESOLVED (S16): came home to the drowned dwarven city, fought his risen kin, and watched Sylvie drink them. Emotional climax of his arc.
The Horned Iron Figure's telepathic threat ("you are among those meant to be destroyed… finish the job") — who targeted his people, and is it over? (OPEN.)
The chain of little lights that took to him from the slain Skeletal Dragon (S23) — (GM: what is this?)
Heretic mark (right buttock, see below). The party's anchor and most grounded member.

The Heretic Marks (slow burn — now 20+ sessions)

Both Draz (inner bicep) and Jamal (right buttock) bear concealed marks. What faith/order marks heretics, who hunts them, what was the heresy? Still completely unopened. (Consider seeding.)

Faction & NPC Threads

The Runt God — travelling with the party

The Heart of Stone = the Runt God: the runt of the gods, too small to ascend, that Sylvie once thrust into the sky. Draz gentles it; its reaching can kill; it devoured Casper tol-Otheidas. (What does it want? What happens as it grows and bonds with Draz?)

Ygva — dead

RESOLVED (S19): Ash-begets-Tide's chant turned her remains into two sapling treants; Inola's later resurrection failed. Ygva is gone. Her god-binding plan is leaderless — and her death orphaned Sylvie's missing heart, her cultivated Sacred Tree seeds, and the World Below pyre the titans were building for her.

Kaelyn and Rhys — the Stoneweavers she wronged

Sylvie's former fellow Stoneweavers, blaming her for a Midsummer rite gone violent and for sending them "up into the higher realm with the Runt God." Rhys is undead; wants to wrangle the Runt God to re-ascend. Kaelyn tends it. Sylvie cursed Rhys off ("go and die") at S19. (OPEN — they will be back.)

Inola Wending — the Keeper who walked off with a planar book

Keeper of Splendor. She stole a book of planar passage from the Forbidden Library and used it (S24) to open a Splendor door at the Astronomer's Spire and vanish — the light going with her. (GM: where — the World Above, or elsewhere? And what is she really after? Chasing her is one of the party's onward options.)

Brathis — wants the Runt God- At the Spire (S24), with Heyou downed and bearing Brathis's sigil (and holding Vanco's mechanical heart), the god Brathis (Feral Survival / Loss of Personhood) spoke through him: where is the Runt God — bring it back. Brathis now has a stated interest in the Runt God travelling with the party. (The players heard only "a voice not his own"; whether they name it is theirs to work out.)

The incursion itself had nothing to do with Brathis — it was simply the Sacred Pyre reduced past the point of holding back the dark, and the Umbral creatures surging into the undefended Spire. Brathis merely took the opening a marked, downed construct offered.
S25 — an outside power reads the mark. The faerie wood's Mirror, conceding to Heyou, named him "one bound to Brathis" — confirming his sigil is legible to the fae / to Kreth's servants, not just to Brathis himself. (The table heard the word "Brathis"; whether they grasp what being "bound" to the god means is still theirs to work out.)

Vanco & Zevin — gone deeper

Draz's father and brother; back down finishing their own heist. Vanco wears a token of Heyou's old Syndicate. (GM: their heist, and their return.)

Kelun and Divine Judgment (dormant, owed)

Kelun promised consequences for the destruction of the Sacred Tree (sacred to Caranthalis), and views the party as "useful components." Unseen since the Grithmaar arc. (When does the bill come due?)

Borek and the Syndicate (dormant)

Robbed and wounded; holds part of Heyou's essence; the Askavir-egg bargain never closed. The party has teleported far out of his reach — unresolved, not closed. The eye-patched katari among the Verrow's Span refugees may be his.

World Threads

Why the gods left- The gods left on a migratory impulse, not a choice, and do not know why; each has rationalized it after the fact, and any resentment at being called back varies by god. Full note: [Author's Notes → Why the gods left](../gm/design-notes.html). (OPEN: what did each god rationalize, and are the stories shared or divided? The deeper question behind Sylvie's reach toward godhood.)

The Elect and the World Above

The Athenaeum's doctrine: only the Elect may ascend through a door to the World Above; the rest are left to entropy and the dark. Ygva named two candidates — Sylvie and Heyou. Otheidas tried to ascend his whole people and failed. (Central cosmology — where does this lead?)

The road onward — where to next

The teleport is live and has been used (S25): Sylvie has the Amber Reach "true faces," and reads them by looking for still-present Splendor-motes in the painted scene (the anchor that survives the centuries). She jumped them to the coastal faerie wood first. Remaining painted vantages she could still reach: the archipelago / archway-city, and the craggy pilgrim's-path peaks. Candidate destinations:

The faerie wood on the shore (current) — the party holds the fae's hospitality; unspent leads here (Kreth, a Blessed-Branch source, Draz's home coast).
Thistleglass — still unspent. The encounter prepped for it was reskinned into this coastal wood; Thistleglass itself ("Faerie's Guard," Kreth) remains a separate named lead. (Logistics: Sylvie would need a true face of it, or another route.)
The Amber Reach (west) — Draz's lineage, Heyou's-origins lead; true faces already in hand.
After Inola / the World Above — follow the Keeper through wherever her planar door led.
The Eye (below) — whatever the Spire was built to watch.

The expedition log Inola gave Heyou (60 of 80 lost) warns what waits in the far places.

The Eye in the hole in the sky

The Astronomer's Spire was built to point through the gap between worlds — and when Draz looked through the observatory helmet (S24), a vast eye looked back, watching. (GM: what is it — a god, a titan, a thing of the World Above, the same order as the Library's Floating Eye? What does being seen by it mean?)

The failing pyres & Drosven's Gate (dormant original quest)

The original mission — rekindle Drosven's Gate's pyre — was never completed; the party teleported away and never returned. Drosven's Gate is overrun, its people gone; Dolm's Break's pyre also failed (30 refugees at Verrow's Span). Whether the pyre-failures are coordinated is still unanswered. (Dormant, but the debt is unpaid.)

The World Below (dormant)

Titans building a colossal pyre under Ygva's (now dead) direction; the binding plan's fate uncertain. A dead island-city glimpsed through the luminous hole. Sylvie's lunar power is stronger there.

Sarru & Savel (loose — likely lost)

Captured, Umbra-mutated, and being transported back when the party still travelled overland. The party has since teleported across the world twice; their fate is unaddressed. (GM: abandoned at Grithmaar? Resolve or reintroduce.)

Dormant / Background

Bob and You Bastard — lost. You Bastard (the mount) drowned and Bob the Living Fortress sank, too great to move, in flooded Grithmaar Deep (S17). Heyou salvaged only the Blessed Branch and the Guardian's collar.
The Blessed Branch — still carried. The party's last branch; leverage for the abandoned pyre quest and a thing of value in itself.
Mellon and Yuki — spectral. Dead ranger and cat, now permanent spectral forms. Role unclear.
Pinchie — companion. Jamal's crab, collared at the Stoneheart Peaks; the party's mount since You Bastard drowned.
Refugees at Verrow's Span; Lila & Bufa. Thirty Dolm's Break refugees; Draz's great-aunt Lila and her west-ranging grandchild Bufa (intended future guides).

The Threads, Session by Session

Dangling threads from the chronicle, still unresolved. Maintained through the stylistic rewrite — add threads as they open, and note (or strike) them as they close.

The cold pyre of Drosven's Gate. Still dark. It needs a Blessed Branch before the town becomes another Larrow. Three branches were won beneath the mountain — but the Askavir carried Jamal and his two up to the peak instead of down to the town, and Ygva seized all three there. The pyre remains unlit. (S1, S5–S6)
Savel and Sarru, parted from the company. The escort to Drosven's Gate broke when the Askavir snatched Jamal and Draz off the road and up to the peak; the giant sorcerer and the pyre-keeper were left behind on the way down, their fate untold. (S5–S6)
Heyou's scattered self. His true parts are somewhere in the world; he means to find them and learn why he is unlike his kind. Borek knows where one lost limb has gone — the price is Askavir eggs. One leg came back to him at the peak, summoned out of the world by Ygva to strike him; reattached, it keeps a mind of its own. (S1–S2, S6) — A leg recovered from Borek's hoard (S12); and at the bottom of the vaults Vanco returns the CORE drawn from his chest — the thing that first gave him motion — making him whole. Vanco and Zevin were sent to the Athenaeum to learn how he, a Syndicate-made clinker, was built. (S12, S23)
Ygva's price. Never coin. At the peak it came clear: she takes magic, and hearts. (S2, S6)
Sylvie's heart, taken. Ygva tore it from her chest at the peak, and she lived without it — Splendor gone out of her, Dread come into the empty place. She is the witch now, and heals by drawing the warmth out of other things. (S6)
Ygva's design. The world is a spent egg, she says; the departed gods are monsters that hatched and left the rot behind. She means to force them back down and bind them here — and Sylvie's magic is a lure that draws them. She named Sylvie "of the moon." (S6)
The traps in the titan's tunnels. Set and reset by a careful hand — almost certainly goblins. A people once lived and traded down there; they fell silent some twenty years ago. (S2)
Tamros, lost below. The ribbit guide went into the ruins with Ygva and found the thing she carried up the mountain; he did not return. (S2)
Mellon's glass. Shrapnel driven the deeper into him by mistake at the fire. (S2)
The approaching moon. Sylvie feels a piece of it drawing slowly nearer. Meaning unknown. (S2)
Sylvie's lost power. A sorcerer once, now a wizard relearning her craft. On the road the Moon came reversed, pulling her back toward the Stoneheart Peaks she fled. On the giant stair her old earth-power stirred — stone rippling under her feet — and she hoped Ygva could name what her magic was becoming, she who had once been bound to the stone and the lines of quartz. (S1, S5)
The branded runes. Three brands cut into the Umbra-warped brute, made to compel or empower; they lit before it rose from death. Heyou carries the flayed skin. What they command is unknown. (S3)
Mellon, passed into stone. He ran at a sealed rockfall and went through it, insubstantial, and walks now as a ghost beside Yuki — clearer against the world since Caranthalis's tree burned. The glass Draz drew from him in town had been drawn back into his body. (S3–S5)
Kelun's reckoning. For the destruction of Caranthalis's tree, the construct-mouthpiece compels Sylvie and Heyou up the mountain to Ygva at last. (S5)
Savel and the witch. Jamal marked hints that the giant sorcerer has ties of his own to Ygva. (S5)
The Askavir's errand. The titan-raptor did not hunt Jamal and Draz — it was sent to find and deliver them, and set them down on separate peaks. By whom, and to what end, it did not say. (S5)
The door shut from this side. Kelun named the departed gods and their domains, and said the way to them seems closed; he does not know whether they can return. (S5)
The witch's sealed jewelry. Circlet, glassy-stone necklace and signet ring from Ygva's moon-locked box — unnamed by anyone yet. Tamber suggested the Celsian Athenaeum might know their make. (S7)
"Vessels." In Tamber's books Heyou found the word, beside shrines drawn to Brathis and Tlellic he had seen before, and a mandala that locked his limbs until she shut the book. What a vessel is for — and whether Sylvie's hollow chest is one — is unsaid. (S7)
North points up. Draz's compass keeps to no earthly north, only to a pole straight up past the sky. The moon hangs like a black window with something moving behind it, and Tamber's map shows the known world a mere corner of the whole. (S7)
The unopened lockbox. A keyed iron box from the witch's camp, still shut; Heyou carries it. (S7)
The coded road. The mile-high Mountain Pictographs repeat the order of the twenty-three carved stones from the witch's camp; a moon-sign is cut into the way with no door beneath it. (S7)
The Askavir's heart. A Splendor-saturated heart, cut from the fallen bird; Heyou holds it, Sylvie fears to use it, Ygva will return for it. She says one dead Askavir cannot summon the gods — but its bones might, and Draz's kin at Verrow's Span keep them against the party's return. A forged heart (ichor from the bird's eye) is planned as a decoy. (S8)
Draz's blood. An elder of Verrow's Span is his great-aunt: his mother is dead, his father and twin siblings went west to the Amber Reach, and he was given up to the Wilds on purpose while the twins were kept. (S8)
Ygva the apostate. She and Tamber were initiates together at the Celsian Athenaeum; Ygva was expelled for "depletion" — draining a thing's whole essence — which the Celsians forbid. Tamber holds full-initiation techniques Ygva never learned. Ygva calls her "sister"; Tamber calls her "apostate." (S8)
The spreading dark. Dolm's Break's pyre went out and Umbral beasts overran it; thirty refugees fled to Verrow's Span. The failing of the pyres is widening. (S8)
The eye-patch katari. A freelance operator once tied to the Dimmers, arrived among the Dolm's Break refugees; Heyou does not trust the coincidence. (S8)
The world below. Through a hole of pale light in the cavern floor lies a dead giant-scale island city, ringed by water, lit by a false sky — the "moon behind the moon," a world beneath their own. Ygva's trail runs down through it. The party must choose: call her up, or descend after her. (S9)
Draz's amulet. A relic made at God-King Otheidas's asking to shield lesser mages from the gods; it turns a god's power (even the Askavir's) but nothing of the Umbra Ygva works. (S9)
Heyou down, the heart spent. He traded into the Askavir Heart for one god-bright smite and fell unconscious; the heart is now cold and spent, and the Living Fortress went inert with him. (S9)
The dragged titan. The river-ravine below Salthewn was gouged by a titan sliding down the mountain headfirst; its open-mouth basin catches the falls. Titans move, or moved, through this country. (S9)
Ygva's pyre. Her whole design, laid bare in the World Below: gather the remnants and totems of the eight gods to eight altars, heap a colossal pyre (forests' worth of blessed branches, and Sylvie's own heart likely among them), draw the departed gods back down, and bind them here with the titans — before the rot above finishes the world. The party has thrown in with her. The Askavir Heart sits on Tlellic's altar; the piles for Kreth, Brathis, and Mollthain are still thin. (S10)
The price of the pyre. Every branch carried down to Ygva's pyre is a pyre going dark above — towns left to the cold and the Umbral beasts so the gods can be chained below. Sylvie has named this cost aloud. (S10)
The three leads. God-totems still wanted: the fairies' guard at Thistleglass (Kreth); the digging thing in Grithmaar Deep (Mollthain, which Jamal once glimpsed); and the Celsian Athenaeum west, which Ygva will raid herself. Party assigned Grithmaar Deep. (S10)
The moon is a door. The pale disc above the World Below is the luminous hole the party fell through — a road to the next world out, closed to Ygva. Sylvie's lunar power runs stronger down here; she is "of the moon." (S10)
Heyou's arm-band. Among God-King Otheidas's relics, an arm-band bearing Heyou's own sigil, twin to the mark pressed into him at his making; it might build a new being if powered. (S10)
Ygva's lost apprentice. She made one apprentice before, who went west and was lost; the thread between them is cut. (S10)
The stone seat that endures. In dream Ygva tells Sylvie the seat of stone she once shared with two fellow stone-weavers — on the cleft of her ruined homeland — still stands, and can be "called back" if she remembers how. Two former stone-weavers she fell out with recur in the dreams. (S11)
Sylvie's homeward pull. Her meditations bring dreams of the Stoneheart Peaks cleft and of falling upward into daylight; she means to return to her origins after the quest. (S11)
The heretic marks. The empowering sigils Ygva cut into Draz, Jamal, and Heyou must be hidden — to be seen with them is to be named a heretic. (S10–S11)
Borek's essence of Heyou. The Dimmers fixer claims to hold a piece of Heyou and once wanted Askavir eggs for it; the party plans to burgle his rooms for Heyou's missing parts. (S11)
The mount, You Bastard. Jamal collared a great moose-like beast (fungus-terraced, arrow-wounded) with the Guardian's collar, meaning to make it a companion. (S11) — Collared and led to camp; it spurns grass for thorns. (S12)
The binding rune on Draz. Borek exposed a coercive mark on Draz's arm that bonds a company and clouds memory. Who bound them, and why, is open. (S12)
Sarru and Savel, come back wrong. The two families who left Drosven's Gate with the party and the Blessed Branch never returned — Jamal now sees them among the mutated townsfolk marching on Ulmira's Step. The failed branch-bearers are turning into monsters. (S12) — Ambushed on the road; Heyou's Blades Everywhere downs them non-lethally, and Heyou binds Savel and Sarru senseless and alive, to carry. (S13)
Sylvie's Umbral Raven. A smoke-born corvid, larger than a crow, coalesced from the Umbra and heeds her thoughts — her emerging familiar. (S12) — It speaks in her mind in a young man's voice, asking whether her companions hold her back and which would make the best "apprentice" or "patsy," and names itself a part of her. (S13)
Drosven's Gate's pyre, and no priest. The town is now full of non-human monsters, its people gone; the party has a Blessed Branch but no priest who knows how to light the Sacred Pyre. They skirt the town. (S13)
You Bastard named. Draz's Nature's-Tongue learns the beast's own kin call it "You Bastard"; it favours spiny thistles. A night dragon later spooks it into bolting. (S13)
Mollthain's Warden. The ancient monster beneath Grithmaar Deep, Mollthain's pet/avatar — the power the party came for. It felt Sylvie's Umbral Raven scouting and tore it out of the air. It waits below, past the barricade. (S14)
The stolen Splendor made flesh. The hollow iron wardens of the deep are empty armor lit from within by Splendor — the god-light torn out of Sylvie. Broken open, it billows out and fades; she means to capture the next of it into a vessel, the Living Fortress. (S14) — At the Warden's fall she drank the geyser into herself instead, via Damnation, and came away coated in radiant Splendor. (S15)
Mollthain's Warden broken but standing. Fought at the light it stewards (all Grithmaar Deep here is Splendor-saturated, a "fallout zone"). Crumbling and unfallen at session's end — a cliffhanger; the Flaming Skull sentinel left frozen in Sylvie's time-lock nearby. (S15)
Draz's ancestral visions. Marked for death by an astral assassin and then, pleading with the Warden, taken into a lucid ancestral dream (out of his own hands for hours); his Elder warns that sheltering under the great powers is real but fickle. (S15)
The rift between Jamal and Sylvie. In drowned Grithmaar Deep — Jamal's own dead city, its people risen undead — Sylvie siphoned the animating umbra from a dozen of his neighbors (a woman he once loved among them) to heal herself, and Jamal struck her for it. Something is broken between them. (S16 — narratively UNVERIFIED, no transcript; facts left as the Archivist gave them)
Sylvie suffused in Splendor. Since drinking the Warden's light she carries a radiance that unsettles the Umbral undead even as she wields umbra against them — a walking contradiction. (S15–S16)
You Bastard drowned; Bob lost under the water. The mount drowned escaping the Grithmaar flood; the Living Fortress (Bob) sank, too great to move — Heyou salvaged only the Blessed Branch and the Guardian's collar. (S17)
Sylvie's returning power. She can teleport now; working her rites on her torn-out mountaintop, the old Arcana and Splendor she had lost come back into her memory. The "piece of sky" she calls down onto the Stoneheart Peaks = the moon itself. (S17)
The two who will not forgive her. On the peak, two former stone-weavers she fell out with scry her as she sleeps — "she will regret calling us back." And Ygva appears in dream, above flooded ruins, looking past her: "help me." (S17) — They are Kaelyn and Rhys: Kaelyn holds the leash of a vast eldritch creature; Rhys is now undead. The old wound is a Midsummer rite gone violent, and Sylvie's reported death. (S18)
The Runt God. The Heart of Stone the upper realm drew power from is the runt of the gods — too weak to ascend, until Sylvie thrust it up into the sky in that past rite (the act that cost her). Kaelyn learned to coax it into coexistence. Now: Rhys would wrangle it to re-ascend; Draz would save this world; Heyou would draw the power back down. No agreement. (S18)
The Amber Reach chamber. Reaching Ygva in dream, Sylvie sees a lavish chamber (long table, attendants, petitioners) she knows from a childhood picture-book, somewhere in the Amber Reach west; she means to teleport there. (S18) — It proves to be the Celsian Compound, where she teleports the party. (S19)
The Elect and the World Above. The Celsian Athenaeum holds a way up out of the dying world — but only The Elect may ascend, the rest left to entropy. Ygva brought two candidates, Sylvie and Heyou; Draz and Jamal are excluded. Sylvie refused a salvation bought by abandoning everyone else. (S19)
Ygva undone. Found held captive at the Celsian Compound and revived by Sylvie — then chanted over by Ash-begets-Tide until two sapling treants grew out of her body. Past saving. (S19)
"The heir." Someone named the heir arrived at the Compound with a garrison that fills the Abandoned Southern Wing; "heir to what," since there is no seat of power? (S19)
The Runt God at the Athenaeum. It erupted up through the audience-hall floor as Dean Therion Calanthe fell — come up after them into the Celsian Compound. (S19) — Bound in stone, then calmed by Draz's Nature's-Tongue: a lonely god that kills by accident, reaching for kin. The party holds a thin thread to it (through Draz and Sylvie). FOUR ROADS, unresolved: kill it to fuel an Ascension; cage it to widen the Athenaeum's shelter; or carry it and its power down to the World Below for Ygva's plan — which they're warned will demand a life. (S20)
Ygva truly dead. Inola's level-ten Resurrection over her guttered and failed. Her plan outlives her only as one of the party's roads. (S20)
Draz's Splendor-sight. Casper tol-Otheidas's circlet, off the dead heir's brow, lets Draz see Splendor as light and aura; the Sacred Pyre scepter deepened it to a "symphony." Inola blessed him "my son." (S20)
Draz gold-marked. He reached into Casper tol-Otheidas's corpse to draw its Splendor, lost the pull, and came away with a slick of gold and blood crawling up his arm. (S20; retcon — was Heyou)
Dean Therion Calanthe, possessed then drained. Possessed during the audience-hall fight (projecting an aura of fear); Heyou stabbed him down UNCONSCIOUS, not dead (S19), and the party kept him for leverage through S20. In S21 Sylvie drains the life and the Godshard out of him — killing him and taking the Godshard. (S19–S21; retcon — he does not die in S20)
Sylvie's Godshard. Draining the possessed dean, she drew the raging thing inside him into herself — a fragment of a god (NOT a demon), angry and confused, that leaves her fear sharper and more dangerous. She is its vessel now. (S21) — CAST OUT in the Forbidden Library: it came out of her mouth as shrieking imps and hurled itself at the great eye. She is free of it. (S23, RESOLVED)
Sylvie's Speaker. In the dark below the library she tried to wake a faceless stone construct with Splendor first (it would not take), then with a piece of her own Umbra (it did). The thing woke, named ITSELF Speaker, and followed her up — an Umbra-animated servant (no glow), the same faceless kind as Kelun. (S23)
Sylvie's teleport needs a true face. She can blink to far, powerful places only if she has first seen them — in a true painting. She still needs paintings of the Amber Reach and the Ashen Seas to travel abroad. (S23)
Inola vanished. The party's guide and the Keeper of Splendor slipped away in the library chaos and cannot be found. (S23)
Sylvie cleanses Umbra. A new power: she tore the Umbral corruption out of transformed students like black smoke, restoring rather than killing them. (S21)
Draz's Otheidas blood and Beast form. Inola says the heir's crown and the Beast both accept him — "it is in your bloodline too." Struck by a mote of the Runt God's power as he fell, he took the shape of a great bird and flew. He relit the Sacred Pyre with the scepter. (S21)
The Athenaeum breached. Pulling the scepter dropped the Umbra-bulwark; monsters flooded in, Casper tol-Otheidas was absorbed by the Runt God (gone for good), the pyre-tower toppled (fire sputtering in the plaza), and the Runt God is loose in the ruins. The Stacks = the Athenaeum's vast artifact/knowledge vault, plundered by Heyou. (S21)
Draz's frozen kin. In the lowest vault, past a skeletal dragon, Draz finds two frozen simiah — his father and a sibling he never knew. FAMILY (Jordan-clarified): three children — a pair of TWINS (of whom Zevin is one) and Draz, the youngest; only the twins went west with the father (per Verrow's Span, S8). A ghost names Draz a survivor of "the basement below." (S22) — Named: Vanco (father) and Zevin (a twin — NOT Draz's twin), both Syndicate agents. Vanco admits necessity split the family, each parent taking one child; owed a reunion. They turn back to their own unfinished heist below, vowing to return. (S23)
Sylvie's stoneweaving is instinct. A focus-stone answers her hand where her own dead stone will not; she learns her lost stone-craft runs on instinct, not the wizard's book-knowledge she drilled. Meanwhile the Godshard wrecks her mind and blocks her dream-contact with Ygva. (S22)
Draz in triplicate. Bonding with the Runt God, he moves as three out-of-sync copies of himself; his shapeshifting (bird, wolf) deepens. (S22)
Inola's far-sites offer. The Athenaeum can predict where power clusters geometrically; under the Runt God's shield the party might reach the far guarded sites the archivists never could (one expedition lost 60 of 80). The Stoneheart Peaks records were found stripped near bare. (S22)
Damnation. Reaching Ygva in a dream, her answer woke in Sylvie a latent power (not a gift bestowed): to take a thing's whole essence with the killing blow, at heavy cost. Untried. (S14)
Borek's grudge. Burgled, thrown through his own wall, and throat-torn by Sylvie's Horror, the Syndicate fixer fled — and knows their faces and the witch among them. (S12)
The Keeper's planar door. Inola finished a ritual at the Astronomer's Spire, stole a book of planar passage from the Forbidden Library, and stepped through a Splendor door — the light going out of the Spire with her. Where she went, and to what end, no one knows. (S24)
The Eye between the worlds. With the Spire's observatory cranked open on the gap in the sky, Draz looked through — and something vast looked back. (S24)
The voice through Heyou. Downed at the Spire, bearing Brathis's sigil and holding Vanco's returned core, Heyou spoke in a voice not his own, asking for the Runt God to be brought back — the god Brathis taking the opening a marked, downed construct offered. The table heard only "a voice not his own." (S24)
The faerie wood on the shore. Sylvie teleported the company by a painting to a coastal fae wood (not Thistleglass), and they won its hospitality by out-witting the Moonshadow's Mirror. Its fae wear the Eyes of Kreth and see the world as a radiant past with the intruders as the monsters; Kreth "went away to fetch something." (S25)
Speaker takes the eyes. In the fight the Moonshadow set two Eyes of Kreth into the mute construct; it rose, spoke a warning in a borrowed voice, and went still — a god's perception now lodged in Sylvie's servant. (S25)
Sylvie weighs godhood. Reading the paintings and the library, she asks whether the world might be mended by a new source of Splendor — herself, made a god. (S25)
The core that will not keep time. Heyou set Vanco's returned motive-core into his own chest; it holds another's essence and beats a half-step off, and now a part of him is always turned inward, listening to the wrongness. (S25)
The wood is named Talis. The coastal faerie wood has a name at last. (S26)
The gods answer only as recordings. Both Kreth (through the night-mote and Speaker) and Brathis (through Speaker at the ember-garden) speak only as residue — true-but-not-present echoes of what they were before they left, serenely insisting they never left at all. There is no reaching the living gods this way, only their answering-machines. Sylvie worked this out the hard way. (S26)
Kreth meant to return. His memory, spoken over Sylvie in the night: he crossed his threshold on some errand, left his eyes as surety ("if you are in doubt or fear, use them"), and intends to come back — he does not know how long. A god does not leave his eyes unless he means to fetch them. The intent read as sincere, even from the god of lies. (S26)
Splendor's gravity, and Sylvie's pull. Brimming with Splendor, Sylvie has begun to feel an involuntary bodily pull up and out of the world — no external magic, a gravity from within, that she can suppress but also raise at will. Draz's ever-upward compass holds the same bearing. Theory (Heyou): this is the same summons that emptied the world of its gods, and she is filling toward the edge they went over. How far it goes is open. (S26)
Heyou wears the Shadow Cast now. Through the woken Talis sigil he body-jumped out of his construct into the great benevolent shadow (over the mirror-fae) — ~18–20 ft, amorphous, bearing the Eyes of Kreth and its radiant-past sight. He dismantled and left his old body (time-locked first). Whether the change is permanent, and what the fae-sight now shows him of his companions, is live. (S26)
The Talis sigil matched Heyou's mark. The buried-fire sigil Retta tended was, to Sylvie's eye, the closest thing she had seen to the sign on Heyou's chest; Speaker raised Brathis's three-stone sign over it and woke it. The Brathis–Heyou thread (his sigil, his lost parts, the "vessels") deepens. The sigil itself is now burned out — Sylvie fireballed it. (S26)
Draz is "afflicted." A failed reaction against Retta left Draz with a status condition the GM has not yet explained; it becomes relevant "once you start doing things." Unresolved. (S26)
The fire in Talis. Sylvie's fireball detonated the buried-fire garden and may have set the whole dry island alight; the company has a Portal door out, the wood's fae may not. A reckoning with her teammates is owed at the top of next session (and her fireball book eyed with suspicion). (S26) — Resolved, and worse than feared: seen from above the next day, the whole island is ablaze — the fae society and beasts of the wood gone by the thousand. Water should keep it off the continent. (S27)
Blowing the sigil was a net loss. Destroying the ember-garden cleared the wood of every hostile thing (a "holy hand grenade" — anything that shuns a Sacred Pyre was burned out of being), but consumed the power that was gathered there rather than harvesting it. They detonated the garden; they did not reap it. (S27)
The World Above — the moon is a hole. The southeast "wobble" was a soft place in reality; stepping through it put the company in the World Above, a Splendor-drenched realm of no Umbra and vast, deadly megafauna, where space and gravity bend (non-Euclidean; distance grows as you chase it). At its edge Sylvie found a precipice and looked down through the moon — the "moon" is a rupture in the membrane between worlds, the same hole the Runt God came through — onto their own world far below. This is the world the gods kept before they came down; their leaving was an "Ascension," up and out (the very way Splendor pulls). Mirrors Sylvie's earlier descent into the World Below, inverted. The company is still up there. (S27)
Sylvie's pull points at the hole. Unstuck from reality in the World Above, she felt the way "forward and up" as a strong draw — where home is now — confirming her skyward pull bears on the moon-rupture. She also reads as more attuned to the Umbra (the power she earned and made her own) than to the Splendor that flooded back to her unbidden. (S27)
Sylvie's world-eye teleport. Standing at the moon-rupture with the whole world laid out small beneath her, she can now set a Portal door anywhere she can picture clearly and accurately — a world-scale teleport reach. (S27)
Heyou's heart feeds on Splendor. The heart he carries and studies (the one Sylvie lacks) reads, through Kreth's eyes, as organic and floral — a knot of vines with dormant buds — not a machine. Ambient Splendor motes drift to it like a magnet; the buds open and it yields concentrated Splendor essence as an ongoing process. He gathered a vial (gave one to Draz) and floated giving the heart to heartless Sylvie. (S27)
Two painting-leads from the books. Sylvie's reading turned up two places her teleport-paintings might reach: a mountain waterfall tied to a vault-map site, and the Amber Reach as a living city (its flourishing past). (S27)

Earlier Thread Notes

Primary Quest: Rekindle the Sacred Pyre

Progress

☐ Return to Drosven's Gate
☐ Rekindle the Sacred Pyre

Complications

Sylvie's transformation and new allegiance to Ygva
Party is now involved in Ygva's plan to bind the gods
Sacred Tree destroyed by goblin explosion

Ygva's Divine Binding

What Ygva Needs

Remnants and totems of the gods
God-essences from various sources
Sylvie's assistance as a fellow Umbra witch

Party's Role

Sylvie accepted Ygva as "sister" and learned summoning
Heyou negotiated for artifacts
Party possesses Askavir heart with Splendor magic
Trading pinecone seeds with Ygva

Open Questions

What happens when gods are bound?
Where is Sylvie's heart?

The Heretic Marks

Details

Draz: Mark on inner bicep
Jamal: Mark on right buttock
Both conceal their marks
Sylvie made Draz a sweater to help hide his

Heyou's True Nature

Clues Gathered

Sigil on chest indicates specific origins
Kelun sensed connection to him
Ygva could summon his detached leg
Circlet among artifacts matches his sigil
Absorbed Askavir heart portion, gained holy power

Potential

May be key to creating new beings
Connected to stone constructs and divine order
Dimmers membership may be incidental to larger purpose

Sylvie's Transformation

Changes

Heart removed by Ygva but survived
Shifted from Splendor to Dread domain
Gained Umbra witch powers
Can communicate telepathically
Healing magic replaced by essence siphoning

Goals

Understand her new nature
Find her heart
Return to her origins
Navigate relationship with Ygva

Dangling Hooks

The Dimmers Operations

Heyou's criminal connections
Borek's role in Ulmira's Step
Trade in Askavir eggs and other goods

Refugees from Dolm's Break

Arrived at Verrow's Span
Tall katari with eye patch among them (suspected ulterior motives)
Settlement crisis from Askavir attack