The Fifth Crusade
For over a century, the demon-haunted wasteland of the Worldwound has bled into the world of mortals. As the magical Wardstones that hold back the tide begin to flicker and fail, a new generation of crusaders must take up the sword. But this war requires more than steel; it requires the power of Myths.
Paladin / Wizard
Monk / Paladin
Inquisitor / Rogue
Paladin / Oracle
Intelligence Report: The Marchlands
Held. Its commander keeps a dwarven axe on her table that has not said a word in days, and half her engineers are far to the west, working out how to bring a silver bell home. The knights have gone southwest, with a demon to show them the way.
A lost house of Irori that put itself back together when the last cultist fell. Its ghostly keepers are gone, and a handful of pilgrims from the crusade camps tend it now. The knights rested here a night, then walked west for a week after a voice in a dream.
The heretic still lies in her crystal with her grave goods untouched. Then, on an ordinary evening in Drezen, four crusaders saw that crystal melt away at the same instant. Nobody knows what it meant. Nobody has gone back.
The only place along the escarpment a wagon can climb, which makes it the only western road. Reported to have demons living in it. Scouted, and nothing found — a thing that flies leaves nothing on the ground to read.
The supply road’s gate, and quiet for the first time in months. The clan that raided it now camps beside it and takes whatever work it is given, under a leader who answers to a dwarf.
Empty. A windowless stone hall whose chieftain is ash outside the door, and whose people have gone east to the Ford.
A river of lava, four days from Drezen on foot. The Templars were holding prisoners in a cavern above it, and there was an Abyssal rift burning at the far end of that cavern at midday which was simply gone by dark.
The demon told them everything she knew in one night, and pointed to a blank place on the map southwest of the citadel: the Green Gate, where the Ivory Sanctum hides. Twenty of Drezen's people have gone west to the Bell of Mercy to bring it home. The knights rested one day, made something of their weapons on the forge floor, and left with her at dawn.
"The dwarf laid his axe on my table and told me it talks, in Dwarven, in several voices, and that I am not to hold it by the haft. He said I was not to let it think it had been left. It is lent, he says. He is coming back for it. I have hung it where it can see the door. If anything comes over my walls while they are gone, I will find out what it has to say."
The Worldwound
Session XXIX — No More Games
The house had kept its best things out of sight. Behind a robing room and a locked door was a lead-lined chamber full of runes, with a dead thing rising out of the water there, and on shelves that only Caleth could see, the plunder of a lifetime: the armor of the paladin Yaniel, whose sword he carries, and the stolen books of the Blackwing Library. At the foot of the stair the master was waiting for them in his long black hall, with the woman they had been hunting since the Molten Scar beside him. He offered them terms. Caleth refused him before he could finish them. The woman turned out to be something far bigger than they had believed, and Nageru sent her home. Then the worms came for Caleth, and he spoke two sentences to the thing they made up and set himself on fire, and when the smoke cleared, all that was left of Xanthir Vang was a heap of empty robes.
Fallen Guardian
Silver Dragon · Protector of Kenabres
“She had a hoard, as dragons do, and nobody in Kenabres ever saw it. What she left instead was a single silver scale to each of the few who were with her at the end, with a little of her in it and no instructions. She did not tell them what to save it for. She trusted them to know. A year on, the dwarves still spend theirs on the least heroic thing imaginable, drifting down cliffs they would rather not climb, and she would have laughed at that, the knights think, and called it exactly what it was for.”
The Center of the Fire
Paladin / Wizard
He was the only one who could see the invisible shelves, and on them he found Yaniel’s armor; Radiance knew it before he did. On the landing a mark on his shoulder started burning and would not stop, and everyone saw. When Vang offered to stop if one of them stayed, Caleth cut him off: you will stop because you will die. He put Radiance through him. Buried in worms, he said: you killed my father, you killed my mother. Then the fire came out of his whole body, and after that he dropped a fireball on the floor for good measure.
The One Who Shouted
Monk / Paladin
He was inside the thanadaemon’s reach before it could turn around, and he finished it with four blows to the ribs. In the long hall he was fighting two blue horned demons when he saw a giant’s jaws close on Caleth’s shoulder. He rolled between their legs and ran the length of the hall with his fists blazing, shouting for the first time anyone could remember: you will not get away again. The thing they had called Jerribeth did not get away. He sent her home.
The One Who Read the Joins
Inquisitor / Rogue
With a mason’s stick of charcoal he took apart a wall of necromantic runes, marking not the runes themselves but the seams between them. He crept to the edge of the light at the foot of the stair and looked into the hall first. At the height of the fight he put the arrow from the platinum box on the string, breathed, let it go, and missed Vang by a hand’s width. He swore in Dwarven. Afterward he walked down the hall and picked it up, still true. Then he looked at Caleth for a long time, like a lock he means to come back to.
The One Who Wouldn’t Come Apart
Paladin / Oracle
His shield stopped every claw the shadows threw at it. On the top shelf he found a plain staff bound in silver, said Oh in a voice nobody had heard from him before, and held out his hand for it. When Vang’s spell tried to unmake him one piece at a time, he refused to come apart. He felt Caleth’s mark burn down the life link and said nothing. Then he stood squarely inside his friend’s fireball, picked roasted worms out of his beard, and gave the only verdict that mattered: Rooms.
Current Status
The master destroyed · The mark gone quiet · The front door still to come
The knights are still inside the Ivory Sanctum, standing in a long black hall where nothing moves. Vang's templars are dead, his minotaurs are dead, and his demons have been sent back where they came from for a hundred years. Caleth's bag is heavier by a dead paladin's armor and a stolen library. Nobody can say for certain that a thing made of worms is finished, and Caleth least of all, but nothing on that floor has moved, and the mark on his shoulder, which had ached every night for weeks, has gone quiet. Arueshalae says there are still several rooms they have not seen, and still the one that guards the front door.
Retrieving field report...
A visual record of the Worldwound and the souls caught in its wake
End of Record
