Date in-game: 14th of Kythorn, 1491 DR (with flashbacks to the night of the 13th)
The night the masquerade burned was now a morning, and the morning did not belong to all of them at once. Strom woke into it alone, with the others still underground.
The Cart on the Golden Mile
Strom woke in the tortoise-shell cart on the Golden Mile with his head full of mushroom, and was sick in the gutter before his eyes adjusted. He was bare to the waist. His horse, his jewellery, and his companions were all gone. The last thing he could put his hands on was a memory of riding shirtless with a sword over his head, and then nothing.
A damaged airship was being roped in at The Skyport, its hull scored with long claw-marks. He had one plan he could still remember — the docks, at dawn, to get Danton out by cart — so he took it, working down past Cynders toward the harbour.
Flashback — Lux’s Fine Gems
The day before, the Dragonblood crew had taken Luxor’s shop. A heavyset dragonborn ran the work and turned the Hunderthrawl loose to find the party’s scent, the creature going over the carpets and walls and desks on all fours.
They had bagged the visible riches already. What they wanted was the safe, and it did not give — not to chisels, hammers, or a hand-drill. When the night was gone they boarded the windows, drank Luxor’s cabinets dry, and passed out. The Hunderthrawl slept in the rafters, hanging head-down, waiting for morning.
Flashback — The Stand of Zog Ironheart
Back in The Sanctum, Zog Ironheart made his stand. Already a pincushion of Reaper bolts, he took the veiled portal-keeper off her feet and could not break her concentration. Mammon put the pitchfork through his back; Bronn threw Sanctuary over him and the gold of it turned most of the next volley away.
Zog Ironheart kept going past the point where he should have stopped. He drew on the divine power Bronn’s blessing carried until Bronn felt his own connection to Talos go out. Mammon drove the pitchfork into his sternum; he took hold of it, snapped two prongs off, dropped to nothing, and did not die. Too angry to die, weapons gone, he hit Reapers with his hands and went out of the chamber on his own feet — alive, fate unwitnessed.
The Long Climb and the Silent Crossing
The four who were left climbed the cramped spiral stair behind the sealed door — Barnaby leading, still invisible, then Bronn, Blastran Starweave, and Benny LeBeau. They took a short rest on the way up; Benny LeBeau’s recovery was poor. The submarine-latch door at the top opened onto the inside of Luxor’s shop — the drunk dragonborn snoring on the floor, the Hunderthrawl hanging from the rafters above him.
They had to cross without a sound. Benny LeBeau went first, invisible and scentless, and spotted three more dragonborn in the next room. Bronn crossed in plate at half speed, holding his armour still, a Command spell readied as the Hunderthrawl took a long suspicious breath that did not wake it. Blastran Starweave followed. Barnaby worked the front padlock open with the tools from his kit and caught the shackle before it could ring.
As the door clicked shut behind them the shop came apart — the Hunderthrawl shrieking, the dragonborn roaring up, and the Reapers arriving out of the tunnel into the middle of them. The two sides tore into each other in the dark, and the party walked away while they did.
Strom Collects His Debts
Strom reached the docks, where Tessa the tattooed dockworker was glad to see him — wearing a ruby necklace he had apparently given her the night before. She loaded his horse aboard herself and wished him well.
He went back to Cynders for his things. His weapons were where he had left them, his bloodied shirt under a bench, his rusted chainmail among broken glass. The proprietor of The Spunny greeted him as a celebrity and paid out his pit winnings — a hundred-gold wager returned at twenty gold of profit. In the sand he found one ruby ring, all that was left of the six thousand gold in jewellery he had thrown to the crowd the night before.
The Docks Close
The party came back together near the harbour. The King’s guard had stopped all sea travel by decree after the night’s chaos, and Henrik, Barnaby’s contact, was made to unload the cart off the ship. Tessa carried the horse back ashore.
Henrik would not risk a smuggling run that day, but offered passage in a few nights and a squalid dockside warehouse to lie low in at ten gold a head. Bronn had gambled his coin into armour and could not pay; the others covered him without much grace. They went to ground in the storage locker and took stock.
The Debrief and the Doomsday Clock
Barnaby caught Strom up on what he had slept through — the book taken by The Dawnbringer, the palace burned, Luxor dead, Cynders turned into a slaughter, the Ghostwalkers turned against them, and Zog Ironheart most likely dead, though Bronn still felt a thin thread of connection that said otherwise.
Then Barnaby gave them what he had read of the book before it was taken. He did not have all of it — a ritual gathered at a crater he could name, Arastand, where, rubies, and channels of blood would make the working ground. He could account for some pieces and not others: the rubies in a pattern, the blood of innocents, a dwarven-forged weapon of thunder lost in the mountains — Strom half-remembered stories of dwarves digging too deep at Hammerholm — three relics that had to be bound into one, and a final piece gone with the book.
Bronn tied “Dawnbringer” to a title of Lathander, a god sometimes shown as a dwarf with a mace, which fit the cult Godfrey had raved about. Strom kept his own quiet arithmetic to himself: the fall of the city now called Firefall had a date, and so did his banishment, and the gap between them was not as wide as he would have liked.
The shape of it was plain. The Dawnbringer had the book and the rubies and somewhere else to be, and the party was shut inside Godmere with the docks closed and only the watched, costly airships left. Their options were thin — lean on a patron, get into Eldritch College and its library, hunt The Dawnbringer, or leave the city in disguise. For now they would lie low and let the wreckage cover their trail.
Somewhere under or beyond the city, Zog Ironheart might still be walking. Too angry to die.
Session ended in Henrik’s dockside warehouse, the party lying low and weighing how to get out of Godmere.
- Strom — back with the party, caught up on everything he slept through, one ruby ring and twenty gold to his name.
- Benny LeBeau — out of the Sanctum, his brother Danton safely away, his father’s last words still owed to Strom.
- Blastran Starweave — out, still in the gold serpent mask, his teacher’s name still poisoned.
- Barnaby — out, carrying the bag with a well inside it and what he could remember of the ritual.
- Bronn — out, his connection to Talos gone dark since the Sanctum.