Date: September 30, 2026
Attendance: Sandy, Lucia, Thalan, Korath, Varys, Elunia
Six Guild recruits answered engraved summons from the Baronet Sorrel, a minor noble of Godshome, and travelled there in borrowed luxury aboard the airship Indomitable. Sandy’s letter was different from the rest. It said only: I know where she is. Come visit me. The Baronet was the man she had once guarded, and walked away from.
On the last morning of the cruise, as Mount Irae rose out of the desert with its temples stacked up its flanks, the party was joined at breakfast by Lady Rose Larkspur, a pink-haired heiress with a towering construct servant, Mr. Cogsbottom. She was on her way to Bitter End to look into the business her late brother had left behind. Her spectacles and gown were the work of Hugo Syro, the man who took credit for Lucia’s discovery, and she shattered one of the gown’s crystals to set loose an illusory dove.
The sky-dock tower gave the party tickets for the lift; everyone else had to take thirty flights of stairs in the heat. Thalan gave his ticket and Elunia’s to a pilgrim couple who needed to reach the ground before their child was born. Lucia gave hers to a frail old woman, who straightened up and strode to the lift the moment she had it. Varys let a maimed soldier keep his pride and make his own way down. Sandy, Varys and Korath rode the lift. Thalan, Lucia and Elunia took the stairs, and Thalan paid a water-seller to hand out water to the pilgrims behind him.
At the foot of the stair a goblin boy had a gang of children lift the party’s purses, then had the coins handed back and offered his “protection” for a fee. Thalan traded blows with a giant orc priest of Gruumsh who had called him worthless, catching him on the jaw and shrugging off his answer, and Elunia’s invisible imp stole the orc’s holy medallion. Sandy’s threats, in the Baronet’s name, sent the goblin running.
At his palais the Baronet laid out the job. He had made his fortune selling water, married into the Sorrel title, and now wanted a seat on the conclave of the temple of Zehir. To buy it he wanted a relic: a glowing green rod of a serpent-and-poison god, lost since the Sibling Wars. It now lay in the Dungeon of Lost Things, somewhere in the Valley of Lost Bearings, which only the lost can find. He read them a riddle from the journal of the Mad Monk Alistair. His price was a fist-sized diamond, plus one piece from his collection for each of them on their return. He also offered transport by his own airship to Bitter End, the town at the valley’s edge, and the loan of two camels.
His bodyguard, Greta, was a hulking armoured figure who smelled of chemicals and had yellow eyes with slit pupils. Thalan’s god told him she was not undead. The Baronet had also named a thirteen-year-old girl, whom Sandy had never seen before, as his heir, calling her his bastard from an old affair. As they left, he quietly offered Sandy a different payment: instead of a piece from his collection, he would promise to leave alone the girl Sandy had once carried out of his house.
While they shopped, Sandy sent a message to the girl she had once saved. The answer was cheerful: everything was fine, and her birthday was in two days. Thalan recognised the rod from temple lore. It gives its bearer power, it has killed the people who used it, and it belongs to no single god.
On the way to the airfield the crowds pushed the party into a dead-end alley. The orc priest was waiting there with a band of self-scarred berserkers and a chain of captive pilgrims, and he paid off the goblin boy, who ran. Korath called spectral wolves and took the shape of a mechanical sabre-toothed tiger. Elunia filled the alley with a darkness full of tentacles. The berserkers fell one by one. The orc’s last words came from inside the dark: “Help me, you dishonourable fiend! I don’t mind dying, but not like this!” When the darkness lifted, there was nothing left of them but blood.