Spoiler: Chapter Fifteen: The Backdrop Lifted
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January 1115

Quincy, Sonya, and Feur all see terrifying sights about town. Oily tadpole-shaped creatures hang from building’s eves and stare at them with large unblinking eyes. Faceless, long-fingered, creatures move amongst the crowds. Vivisected corpses hide in alleyways. Some of the buildings, particularly the old casinos, are replaced by blobby monsters that seem to devour those who enter. Strange floating things of impossible geometry weep and scream from the sky. And most horrible of all, Boot Hill has been replaced with a great hole that they all recognize as the burrow of some vast and terrible subterranean god.

Their companions don’t see anything amiss, even Aurora, who is possessed of the second sight, a medium that can view spirits and the ghosts of the dead.

When they go to visit Sammy Whin, he presents Aurora with a spell book, and offers to do the same for Sonya, but the girl sees not a kindly old merchant, but a withered corpse puppeted by dark magic, and refuses to have anything to do with him lest she barters away her soul, and the old man on the giant turtle does his best to hide his hurt feelings.

Krystal goes to Decker, and shows him the ornate crossbow she found in the Gallows Gap on the explorer’s corpse. He identifies it as Screecher, and says that it is enchanted to eat the screams of its victims, allowing its wielder to kill in perfect silence. Further, if one speaks the magic word, it will release said screams in a deafening cacophony, a perfect distraction to make one’s escape.
When Quincy tells Brad of his troubles, he says that he hasn’t heard of any such affliction, but they should go talk to his sister Christine at the old Cathedral.

Christine Weston is a humanist who has turned the Cathedral into a combination library, hospital, and homeless shelter. She is an attractive and athletic woman with strawberry blonde hair, and is well known and well-liked by the locals, and Valentine says that both Raven-Dies-Talking and Tatters spoke highly of her. Unfortunately, she cannot help them, but she gives them access to her library, and invites Aurora to a drum circle that night.

Aurora stays at the Cathedral for some time, researching in the library, and it is not long before she is invited to volunteer there, they require a good doctor, and the elf is shocked by the lack of magic in the city, and that what the fey would consider trivial diseases are allowed to fester and spread.

When she finally discovers a book that sheds some light on her friend’s condition, it is in a fiction story by the horror author Lorenzo Merrick; the events of the story precisely mirror the horrific visions that plague her companions.

Before she leaves the cathedral to report her findings, Aurora is approached by a strange man with outlandish robes and graying temples. He says that he is in the region checking on someone for a friend, noticed her potential, and says in the future he might require her aid with a special job. Naively, Aurora agrees, writing down her information, which the stranger takes with shaking hands.
Meanwhile, Valentine hands over the stone to Nash with his thanks and a promise of more work to come in the future, and then she takes to looking for further contracts.

Her first offer comes from a foreign dignitary, Prince Hakkiel of New Jericho. The large man meets with Valentine and her companions in the back room of an expensive restaurant. He is guarded by a quartet of identical asura, women with golden skin and four arms. The prince has red eyes and greasy unkempt hair; Krystal can tell that he has demonic heritage, that the large leather coat he wears is actually folded membranous wings. To Quincy, he looks like the child of a thousand rapists.

Hakkiel tells them that a woman named Lucia is seeking to take over the town in the wake of the Scourge invasion, and that she has already murdered Mayor Stone and Sheriff Nguyen. He is preparing a little party for Lucia and her companions in the Burning Lands, and he is inviting every competent mercenary in the region to take part.

Valentine asks why he has an interest in this, and Hakkiel reveals a twisted metal claw in place of his right hand, and says that he owes her for past insults and past injuries.

They will be paid double wages for the combat. In addition, should a member of her team manage to land the killing blow on Lucia or any of her companions, they will each be given a bag of platinum as a bonus. Said companions are Kendra, a monk dedicated to Hephaestus with a big gun and a shaved head; Zoe, a wandering messenger and martial artist with the ears of a cat, Silanthous; a powerful child witch with silver eyes and violet skin; Anya, a short curvy girl with the voice of an angel and the hands of a healer; and Cerebwen, a stout blue-haired woman with the armor of a knight and blessed with the vitality of a wild god.

Valentine agrees to his terms, the pay is too good not to, but once they are out of the devil’s sight her companions all complain about how unseemly he is.

Sonya explains that this is a lose-lose proposition; for Lucia is destined to become the Queen of a Thousand Winters, and there is no scenario where they can defeat her at this stage. Valentine is puzzled by her strange insight, but has learned not to question it, and the group toys with the idea of turning on Hakkiel and assisting Lucia and her amazons in the ambush, but they ultimately decide against it.

Instead, they look for other work. Father Gennaro at the Immaterium will pay them to stand guard over their hospice at night, for since the battle with the Scourge, they are short-staffed. One of their patients houses a powerful demon, and he is nearing the end of his life, once he goes, the demon will be free, and someone with the power to bind or banish it needs to be there when it happens. They agree, but propose an alternate solution, to simply move him to the Immaterium’s main base, the Bastion of Resolute Splendor. Father Genaro says he would never survive the journey in his state, and Kim asks if she could incase him in crystal, much like she protected herself for the last hundred years. Father Genaro says it might work, but images the demon will fight like a Saint trying to ride a nightmare. Aurora steps in and casts a ritual to sap his will and sink his soul into the doldrums of despair, and thus Kim can complete the ritual and claim the group’s pay as the Immaterium ships the calcified demoniac off.

Feur, meanwhile, has noticed a new addition to the city’s skyline, a strange hazy castle on one of the hills overlooking Golgotha that wasn’t there when he left. He tries to approach it, but can never quite find the right path. When he gets close, it looks to be constantly in motion, shifting slightly as the architectural style changes from moment to moment between one blink and the next.

Eventually, he realizes that this castle, which was previously invisible to him, must be slightly out of sync with the timeline, and that the changes in structure represent different timelines holding sway over it as it falls from one future to another. Consulting the Scroll of Aeons, he finds a ritual to push himself out of the time stream, and he invites his companions to come with him to what he believes to be the Castle Outside Time which the blind monk told him to visit in his vision of Tatter’s death.

Feur invites his companions with him, all except for Sonya, whom he has a sense of cosmic foreboding about bringing into the castle, and who he is unsure if he could affect with his magic anyway due to her soulless condition.

They approach the castle, now stable in form, built from bloodstone, dark but with veins of red throughout. They knock on the massive door, and a moment later a burly man with a bushy grey beard answers. He is clad in the armor of The Scourge, but decorated with strange symbols and adorned in the teeth and claws of wild beasts. In a booming voice, he demands their business, and Valentine stammers, but Kim says that they are here to meet with Nathaniel Bloodborne, and they are escorted inside.

Upon entering Nathaniel’s chambers, Kim demands an explanation. Sir Bloodborne explains that this nightly order is indeed The Scourge, or rather, what the Scourge will one day become. Here, within
Castle Rhys, they are outside of time, and protected from the constant ebb and flow of fate. For time is an endless web, and always in motion, a river that flows in both directions at once, never knowing its course. Everyone here is dedicated to their cause, but has lost everything for it, for just like you can never step into the same river twice, if they spend enough time in this castle, they will find themselves in a completely different timeline than they left, the history they knew completely washed away. Thus their life is gone, with everyone and everything they ever knew having never existed in the first place.

So, they do what they can, to preserve the world. Finding people and objects that are unique to one timeline or another, and pulling them from realities before they can collapse. So was the case with Tatters, and also with Kim herself.

Kim replies that Tatters is dead, and Nathaniel nods solemnly and says that it is a tragedy, but he has no tears left for her after the magnitude of loss he has already suffered, for only that which exists within these halls is real to him.

When asked about their ultimate goal, Bloodborne says that it is known only to their leader, the Old Wolf. She asks if she can speak to him, and though Nathaniel is hesitant, he agrees.

They are taken to a sequestered hall, where a tall man of about eighty, with steely eyes and a classic Atlantean visage, sits uneasily upon an aged throne. Valentine can tell just from looking at him that he is the most confident and practiced warrior they have ever encountered.

In a regal voice that commands attention, he tells them that he was once known as King Arthur Pendragon, but all that is gone, only the Old Wolf remains. In one splinter of possibility, he fell to despair, pledged himself to a dark and terrible god of the void, and was transformed into Kain; the Black King. Though impossibly unlikely, this abomination of darkness, and the master it serves, has been steadily at work, pruning every possibility which does not end with his blasphemous ascension. Thus, the Old Wolf is the last true and mortal king, and only because he was taking refuge here, in the Castle Rhys, whose eldritch enchantments protect it from all changes to the timeline, like a lighthouse in the ocean of time. And here he, and his chosen champions from across all possibilities, will wait, until the time when he can strike back at the Black King and those mockeries who serve him.

Kim falls to her knees and pledges herself to the Once and Future King. He tells her he will accept her service, but it is not yet her time.

Before they depart, Feur seeks out Kava, the blind watcher. Once found, Kava explains that he was a member of the Illuminated Templar, and a master of chronomancy. He worked with Lucia once upon a time, and years after they parted ways, she wound up fracturing the timeline, stranding herself in an alternate reality where Merlin had never taught Arthur wisdom and the Imperium had become a cruel totalitarian state that would choke the life from Pangaea for all eternity. He sensed her distress, and rescued her, but in setting time right, he was in an orphaned and collapsing future. He was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, both to save his friends and to put history right, but it was not to be, for he was rescued by these agents of The Scourge that will be.

But his past self recognized Feur, an interloper from an alternate future, and sensed his potential and their connection, and now, if Feur has a few moments, he would like to pass on his wisdom.

Feur agrees, and Kava casts a spell that puts them in a time loop, repeating the same hour over and over again, endless lessons until Kava has taught Feur everything he knows about the nature of time and how to manipulate it. He is not a patient teacher, and several times he has to threaten Feur with a thrown shoe, but in the end, Feur comes away with a newfound understanding of his art.

And thus they leave the Castle Rhys with an expanded outlook.

That night, they are summoned before Lady Abasinia, who tells them that it is finally time for their last task.

Thanks to the vertial astronomer they contacted last year, she has finally found a source of the exo-metal they will need. An asteroid that was once an idol and now orbits the Earth, built by a people far older and stranger than even she has ever known. Bathed in cosmic radiation, it is exactly what they need. Their mission is simple, Feur will use a synchronicity spell so that they will arrive at the asteroid at precisely the right time, plant explosives upon it to disrupt its orbit, and let it crash down where the dwarves of Tahrr can harvest the crater.

Valentine wonders how they will get into orbit, and Lady Abasinia shrugs, that she doesn’t have all the answers, and their resourcefulness is part of the reason why she has come to rely on them.

Valentine calls together Feur and Jeremy Butler to plan this operation, to calculate timelines and explosives and orbital mechanics, but Feur is distraught and distracted; for while everyone else remembers meeting with Lady Abasinia, he recalls only a cephalopoid horror stretching its tentacles forward from the dawn of time and filling their heads with false dreams. Clearly, he is still suffering from the strange affliction brought about by the spores under the Gallows Gap.

Meanwhile, Valentine casts about for a powerful conjurer who can open a gate beyond the sky. She writes a letter to Samuel, who tells her he knows of only one, the keeper of the Illuminati library, a man named Herbert Branson. Valentine arranges a meeting with him, saying that she is a friend of Kava’s; a half-truth. But, Branson doesn’t really care what she needs or why, he is willing to open the gate in exchange for her gold.

The asteroid is a vaguely humanoid idol, built by some unknown ancient people and somehow catapulted into the heavens. It is made from a strange golden metal, and covered in blue-green crystalline growths. Half of it is in scorching sunlight, and the half in freezing shadow, and it is dense enough that it retains the vestiges of gravity and an atmosphere, but this is not a place they can dwell for long.

The companions are paralyzed by wonder and terror at the naked cosmos above and the entire curve of the Earth below, and those who are afflicted by the hallucinogenic spores see the sun as the half-lidded eye of the great cosmic dragon, and the stars as the souls of dead heroes looking down on them.

But they are knocked from their reverie by the shrieking approach of a strange guardian, an impossibly tall and lanky humanoid figure that vaguely resembles a woman, all sanity gone from her hungry eyes. They think that it might once have been a troll, but can’t be sure.

It lurches toward them, and Aurora, thinking it might be a vampire of some sort, conjures a liter of fresh blood in its path to distract it. The ploy does not work.

The castaway grabs Sonya and attempts to get away with her, scuttling to the far side of the asteroid.

The fight is brief, but alien, they are not used to fighting in an environment with so little oxygen, and where the recoil of a gun can send you flying into the great black oblivion. Nor are they used to a world so small that one can hide across the horizon and then come at you from any direction.

They play cat and mouse for several moments, the castaway striking at them and then moving out of their line of sight, it knows every crack and crevice of this strange environment and how to move about on it. At one point Kim tries to trip the haggard creature, but it grabs her chain and pulls, and she comes within a hair’s breadth of tumbling down and being lost forever.
In the end, they deal enough damage to the Castaway that it is still; it doesn’t die, but it stops being ambulatory. They hope that it will be burned up on reentry, its strange and pitiful life finally brought to a merciful end.

Jeremy plants the explosives on the back of what passes for the strange idol’s neck, and then they return through the gate, hoping that Feur’s spell worked, that they will detonate at the precise moment required to send it rocketing to the ground ay the borders of the dwarven lands.

After having completed their contracts in Golgotha, the group sets out for Lorenzo Merrick’s ranch at the borders of the Imperial Heartland to learn more about their companions strange visions. There they find the reclusive author, at the end of a shaded looping road, on the porch of a large wooden ranch house with many rooms capped by conical roofs. At first, he mistakes them for obsessed fans, and tries to dissuade them, but when they explain the situation in detail, he invites them inside.

Merrick offers them coffee, but seeing how agitated they are, decided tea is a better choice. He gives them cornbread and gravy in his parlor while he gathers his notes. He explains that he too was once exposed to the same spores, which he came to heard called Mu. He learned of a cure, but it was made from the pupating carcass of a monster called Gloomwing, and he never dared to retrieve it. Instead, he learned to live with the visions, and was able to put what he saw to words, and make a fortune weaving them into his yarns.

Aurora knows of the Gloomwing, a giant poisonous moth who dwells in a shadowed thicket under the protection of the Erlking, lord of the dark fey. Each generation, it mates with its own parent and then dies, only to be reborn as the product of the cursed union. Quincy scoffs and claims that is impossible, he knows a bit about animal husbandry, and Valentine concedes his point, but says that the Gloomwing likely lives less in reality and somewhere between the border of legend and fairy magic.

They set out for the dead forest, and Quincy hears a deer stalking them through the dried leaves. His companions bid him to hunt it, and he tries, but he is startled by the grimacing face of a cannibal spirit in his scope, and the shot goes wide, the deer fleeing into the shadowed banks.

They find the Gloomwing’s grove, a massive warped tree with a huge pulsating chrysalis stuck to its side. The massive moth, noticing their presence, descends from the foliage, which provides just enough cover to shield it from Quincy’s opening volley.

Kim moves to block it, and it hovers above her, attempting to chew through her armor, and crushing the flesh beneath. It is about forty feet across, and hideously misshapen, even more alien than one would imagine an insect blown up to that size had any right to be.

Feur attempts to flank it, but is sickened by the toxic scales that drop from its wings, and Kim erects a magical circle that blocks any poison from entering.

As they fight, none of them see the assassins stalking them. Darts fired from a blowgun strike Sonya and Aurora, and Krystal hides. She spots her assailants, a pair of identical cambion women, who look very similar to herself save that their skin is a dark and ashen blue. They engage with Quincy, wielding crooked daggers, but when Krystal begins to shoot at them from hiding with her enchanted crossbow, the pair disappears from sight.

Valentine goes to tend to the wounded, but finds that they are paralyzed by magic runes carved into the darts. She does her best to nullify the magic with a vial of holy water she keeps on hand for just such an occasion, and then pulls the darts free.

Once they are united against the Gloomwing, it doesn’t stand much of a chance. Anani blinds it with her shadow magic, and Aurora exsanguinates it with her blood magic, leaving it weak and disoriented long enough for Quincy to take aim and deliver the kill shot.

They remain on their guard, but the half-demonic assassins do not reappear, and Feur comments that they must have bugged out.

They cut open the cocoon, and it screams, bleeding milky white fluid full of sickening black chunks of unidentifiable matter. Sonya takes a sample in one of her alchemical vials, and is guided by the voice of Anani to the alchemist at Morton’s Watch who still owes her a favor. Using Lorenzo’s notes, he can whip up a cure, which the companions, afflicted and healthy alike, gulp down eagerly.
While in town, Valentine hears word of the Battle of the Blasted Lands, that the mercenary coalition was routed by the Amazon war band, and Hakkiel himself was lost, presumed killed.

They bring what they have left of the cure to Lorenzo Merrick, and he declines. They urge him to take it, saying it's time for him to rest and to retire, that he will rest easier without the visions. And he says that, if anything, it will probably be worse, that he will always be terrified of things he can’t see but still knows they are there.

Sonya is puzzled, and asks him why he has cause to be so scared of hallucinations, and Lorenzo, explains that she doesn’t understand. The Mu spores are not hallucinogens, they are soporifics, and they work by anesthetizing the part of your brain that filters out the true nature of reality.



This was a longer and much less narratively focused session. Basically, I wanted to wrap up all of the loose threads before we broke for summer vacations so that we can focus on the final arc now that we have resumed.

The players did good, and managed to stay focused and get a lot done.

It was also a bit of a stranger session; there was lots of deep lore, revelations, and unreliable information being thrown about. I hope my players absorbed most of it. As for you readers, I am told that people are following along and enjoying this, but sometimes I wonder if there is anyone here because I get so little feedback on these long form stories, but regardless; if you have questions about the above, feel free to ask away!

So, we have had four sessions with the new player now. She is mostly working out well, she seems to enjoy the game and pays good attention. On the other hand, her dice rolls are super hot, to a statistically impossible degree, which kind of makes me feel suspicious, and I have always preferred a more open honor system when it came to dice rolls. She also has a habit of backing up other players whenever they challenge my calls which, while it shows solidarity with the other players, stresses me out as I feel like I am being dog-piled over every little disagreement.

Next week, the largest combat I have ever run.