What Happened Last Session
A Knight Out of the Snow
The afternoon at 0504 was not over when a shape walked out of the veil: Bray, the Fanged Knight, keeping a promise to be there “during the first snowfall.” He took in the dead, the dying, and Seeli pale on a horse the light went around, and gave his honest verdict: “I don’t know, but I am afraid.”
The company bound the wounded and sealed Solas’s leg with a heated blade while he screamed. Then they talked: the children had told his patrol the blessed bull rode an undead mount, and it had vanished from its keepers nights before. What turned him was not argument. In the last light he laid a hand on Ro’an’s leaf-mail and felt it: “This is no smith’s leaf, nor tailor’s. It grows. What are you?” By morning he was leading them to his council himself.
The Bringers of Sorrow
The calf began to sweat blood on the trail. On the mountain at 0603 waited what the guards called the omen-bringers of sorrow — clumsy, bladed, winged things tormenting a horse beside a man stabbed a hundred times without once being allowed to die. Seeli named the horse for what it likely was: the runaway of Kelwun the Iron Knight. The dead man was Solas’s brother.
Arthur finally got his ring: a diving fiend shattered itself on the invisible circle and lay stunned for Ro’an’s knife. Robin’s flail took a wing off, Bray’s bite showed one a memory that sent it fleeing, and three knights chasing the last rode into each other. The horse could not be saved; Bray gave it a happy memory, then sleep. One fiend escaped north-east — “gone to notify the horde.”
The Massacre of Moss Gate Gardens
The pillars at 0602 stood taller than keeps and green to the shoulder, older than the realm’s name — which, it turns out, nobody has ever asked. Inside the hedge wall of Moss Gate Gardens the terraces were bare of snow and Ro’an’s armor shone. Then the screech came, and the sky filled.
The city put a war band under each knight. Robin’s trebuchet broke three formations before a fiend reached the wall; Bray’s mercenaries and Arthur’s circle-bound spearmen shoved the rest off the ramparts, and the finish was one eight with seven bolsters: fifteen, “as if slicing through butter.” A single enemy blow landed all afternoon, on Seeli, and her armor ate it. Bells, petals, and a Glory for every knight.
Afterward a gardener smiled at Ro’an, and he followed her alone to a place where the sun came out. It was the woman from his vision at the source. She called him blessed one, asked whether he thirsted for more, and when he said yes, told him the truth: eating the fruit meant for the calf had stolen the bull’s blessing, and a thirst like his, unchecked, “will drain the entire world.” He swore to keep his greed in check, and said he was going to marry her. The whole company heard both — Robin still had Arthur’s other ring on.
The Field of Fever Dreams
The feast gave Arthur the Crab Bow, forged overnight from his boar tusk, and the news that no Seer lives north of the Red Seer. A red cloth flickered at the edge of Seeli’s sight as she said it, like a debt clearing its throat.
Then came the mushrooms. Ro’an, connoisseur, pronounced a valley of bright fungus edible and was wrong in the way that dosed everybody. The sky rained bread on him; Arthur saw his own face on every man and horse and had to be tied to his saddle; Solas became a small child; and Bray followed the Iron Knight, always just ahead — straight to the order’s gate, as it happened. Only Robin stayed sober.
The order at 0802, pale and kindly under a castle frozen in time, met the company at its worst: Bray drawing on a guard he took for Kelwun, Robin demanding the manager, Ro’an cheerfully confessing that “the acolytes told me to eat the veggies.” Robin and Seeli locked their three friends in the order’s own cells. Seeli knew the council chamber — the scrubbed circle, the blood, Councilman Harbiger himself — from a dream on the campaign’s first night.
Green Dust
Harbiger forgave the messengers. The order had lived on those spores until the city gave them the bull through a ritual in that circle; then one day every blessed fruit turned grey. He laid the calf on a shelf as a memorial.
In the night Arthur woke in his cell knowing what Respectfulness demanded. The company let themselves out, carried the calf to the circle, and he counted to three. At two the floor lit green and the body came apart into glowing dust that drifted across the chamber and into Ro’an’s mouth. His armor grew into woven leaves; his eyes lit; his feet left the floor. The woman spoke again, to a knight still insisting his power came from the Born Seer: “Very foolish knight you are.” Of the snow she would say only that it is no part of the green and harms it. Of guidance: “the seeds can. Ask your seer who you think gave you this blessing.” Then the bull was gone, and so was she, and every knight took a second Glory.
Looking Ahead
Morning will find an empty shelf and five knights outside their cells, in the house of an order that has forgiven them once already. Ro’an is changed in ways nobody has named, carrying two of the order’s old mushrooms and a riddle about seeds and Seers. The Iron Knight’s horse is dead on a mountain and Bray wants to know why. And the snow is exactly what it was — everywhere, starving Moss Gate behind its hedge — with the best plan being east to Burke Keep for a Seer, and a warning that the answer lies nowhere near the green.
A blessing eaten in haste feeds one and starves the rest — and the hungry will find you long before you understand what you swallowed.