What Happened Last Session
The Stranger Who Carried the Answer
Bray the Fanged Knight rode south from Dowell through a faint fog, carrying an old scroll that named a tower — Hynere Towers — when a shimmer in the water caught his eye. He reached in bare-handed and pulled out a flat gold coin stamped with a city nobody in the realm has ever seen. He bit it to test the metal. It gave.
Following the noise into the cave, he found four strangers at a hole in the ground, holding a rope. Ro’an the Leaf Knight let go of his end to strike a pose and introduce himself, dumping the whole weight onto Seeli the Seal Knight and Arthur the Ring Knight at precisely the wrong moment.
Twenty feet down, Brave Sir Robin the Mock Knight had found what the water came from: a jet blasting out of a circular hole with a dim light behind it. He put his eye to it, at a cost, and saw a shop window in a city he had never visited — shelves of felt-skinned, wooden-boned figures dressed as knights, and one shelf with a gap in it. He surfaced saying the hole was the size of a coin, and a stranger he had never met reached into his pocket.
What Ro’an Brought Back
Ro’an dived too, because a vision sounded worth having. He reached the bottom exactly as his breath ran out, and what he saw was no shop at all: a garden of impossible growing things, and a woman in loose clothes who noticed him, waved, and handed him a fruit, then a vegetable with a paring knife stuck in it.
From Robin’s vantage, Ro’an simply went limp and floated. Robin drove the coin into the hole — the jet stopped — caught him under one arm and shouted up a rope only Arthur could hear. Ro’an came out not breathing, still holding all three things. Arthur breathed for him until he coughed, at which point the lungful of river water went into Arthur’s mouth.
Two great newts came up out of the well behind them. Arthur fought from inside a circle nothing with only teeth could cross; Bray sank his fangs into the second and put it to sleep where it stood.
Resolved Enough
They surfaced into the afternoon to find the hex drowned and the water no longer rising. After a long and honest argument the company agreed: the flood was stopped, the realm protected, the X on the Seer’s little map marked the ground they stood on.
The River is resolved. One Glory each — the first any of them has earned — and 1110 is a lake now, permanently, the size of the whole hex. Whatever else the river wanted, it will have to want it underwater.
The Gold Season
They went home and let the months turn. Ro’an returned from the pale country north with a name — the Grey Lakes — and two warnings: a graveyard for those who seek their own ends, and a curse called the Lost Dead Forest. Seeli attended Abran the Free Knight, learned he fears his rival at Hynere Towers, then smelled something wrong in a dish at his own table and saved his life. Robin built a road where the realm had none. Arthur built bridges that are also dams, and became the name people say when they wonder who the next Steward might be. Bray befriended a coastal merchant named Valamont, the only man alive who laughs at his jokes.
Two eggs hatched: Newton, who decided Arthur was his parent, and Isaac, who came out ugly and now travels muzzled.
At the Feast of the Stars, Wattle the Willow Knight crashed the party to thank Robin for a road he never asked for, then asked how a man works day and night without sleeping — and got an answer smooth enough to make him feel small for asking. Seeli drank him under the table and he took her down with him. Ro’an fed the whole town fruit grown from his vision in Dowell’s own soil.
Three Strange Days
Then northwest, into the grey. The first morning was a heat wave, and the way north was blocked by a canyon nobody remembered. The hex they diverted to had grass like wire bristles and ground warm to the touch — warmer than the sun could explain — as though something underneath were breathing. That night they dreamed of snow, and woke shivering to find the heat gone and the ground itself turned white.
The next morning brought hot thunder and a storm coming on, and in all that dead forest, one willow over one small pond of startlingly clean water. A young man knelt at it, humming, washing clothes. He startled when they hailed him, crumpled what he was holding, and hid it. Then he smiled and told them everything they asked: that his people are boggers, that their village lies northwest, that this pond is the only clean water they have, and that the elder forbids anyone to go west into the Lost Dead Forest.
Then came the question that mattered. If nobody comes back, who tells the story?
Looking Ahead
Nobody comes out of that forest, which means every word anyone knows about it came from somewhere else. So before the company walks in, they are walking northwest to ask an elder how he came to be so certain.
They carry strange cargo into strange country: two newts, one badly behaved, and a knife engraved with a city that does not exist. The coin that fell from the sky is holding back a lake. The fruit from the garden is growing in Dowell. And three separate wrong things happened in two days of walking, none of which anyone has thought to lay side by side.
The story everyone repeats and no one can source deserves more attention than the one with a witness.