Pieces of a King Ep 2: The War Council

Watch on YouTube

Fresh from the warforged slaughter in The Blastlands, the Void Knights Grimnar, Nehebka and Muffy are escorted into the war camp of the Rust Blood Alliance on Dämmerung. Nobody dies and nobody fights. Instead, the three sit through a tense war council, take a sandy drink or two, get adopted by a squad of fish-men, and face a late-night interrogation by a mind flayer. By the end of the night they know what is eating this world: a war machine made of its makers’ own minds, fed a sliver of black glass that Nehebka suspects is tied to The Shadow King.

The Story

A Shadow in Twilight

The episode opened far from Dämmerung and far from The Dread Fortress, in a realm of perpetual twilight under a shadowed sun. A castle rose above a thriving town there. Inside it, a man in a slate blue tunic stood at a window and spoke to someone unseen. He said that the Shadow King had once been “broken, murdered,” and that his power had been sealed away: “He was trapped within a box. A box. The power to shape reality and the void itself was used for spectator sport.” That power, he said, had now been “flung across this microcosmos,” and it filled him with dread. “When used recklessly, even a fragment of that power will usher disaster.” Then the scene left him and his secrets behind.

Welcome to the War Camp

Back on Dämmerung, Grim, a small goblin leading five more, took the party up a ladder-stairway into the Rust Blood Alliance war camp. It was full of peoples from The Underdark: drow, kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears and Kuo-Toa, the “walking fishmen.” All of them were hauling crates, digging trenches and raising barricades. When the three newcomers appeared, the record scratched and everyone stared.

Nehebka took in everything: matching uniforms, crystal-tipped staves bent into J shapes, officers with gold shoulder stripes. Grim’s own squad stood out in red berets and gas masks. She also caught the mutters: “I’m going to need more than three to win this war,” and, more worrying, “Wasn’t there another knight here already?” Grimnar caught nothing at all, and was proud of it: “I am following the will of chaos. I don’t need to be present.”

The War Council

In a large bell tent guarded by drow halberdiers, officers argued over a map covered in stone tokens. At the centre stood a tall drow in black plate with silver filigree. She was Trissavin Baenerret, war mistress of the drow conclave on Dämmerung. “Hey, everybody, look at what I found out in the Blastlands,” Grim announced. Grimnar introduced himself as “a Void Knight of the Dread Fortress,” and then introduced the silent Nehebka on her behalf, and Muffy, who managed a “Hello.”

A bushy-browed duergar with a hammer and a spiral-braided beard pushed forward and asked whether they could be trusted. Nehebka answered him coldly: “It is not about if we can be trusted. It is about what our purpose is. And we see that you have a problem that is soon becoming ours.” He was Gund Ashbrow, the Alliance’s chief artillerist. He decided they were “far too chaotic to be programmed” to be spies. When Nehebka promised that sand would go down his throat, he bristled. She answered, “I do not threat. Everything I say is a promise.” That ended in a shared complaint about sand: it’s coarse, and it gets everywhere.

Triss then told them that two strangers had arrived a day or two earlier. They wore blues and grays, chain mail and heavy hoods, and carried longswords. They claimed to be an advanced scouting party. They “spoke of chaos,” a word Triss’s people had never had, and said a great accumulation of it was the root of their problems. Then they headed into the Blastlands toward the mountains. Grimnar had served the Fortress for about twenty years, and he knew a second team wasn’t standard. Stolas had sent only these three to Dämmerung. He also defended chaos itself: “it is in itself not harmful or not evil. It is a fundamental force that drives the fate of all of us.”

The Squid and the Angel

The war, Triss explained, was in its tenth year. It had begun when Overworlders raided Underdark homes and temples for treasure. Losing badly, the Underdark peoples united under one banner and built something to win for them. “It stopped regarding us as allies and started to regard us as resources and obstacles.” That was The Warmind, and it now meant to wipe them out. It cast “an umbrella over Dämmerung,” distorting messages and making magic wax and wane unnaturally. Their answer was a desperate operation at a mountain two days south, the Warmind’s lair.

Gund kept grumbling about “that damn squid.” The squids turned out to be illithids, mind flayers, who had helped the coalition build the Warmind: “They were making a brain. Something that could think.” When Muffy innocently said she wasn’t nervous that it was their brain, everyone looked at the floor. Triss cleared the tent and admitted the worst of it: “When I say that we all collectively contributed to this Warmind, it is both literal and physical.”

Nehebka was unmoved. “Forgive me if you thought I cared.” Gund stormed out, and Triss revealed their last hope. Early in the war, with the Warmind’s help, they had struck down “the corpse of an angel, a gargantuan being of light and justice.” Gund meant to turn that divinity into a weapon. Triss invited the party to a meeting about this “armament” the next morning.

Grim’s Tour and a Barracks Huddle

On the walk to the barracks, Grim apologized for Gund’s grumpiness. He said his Redcaps rescued people from the Blastlands, and that if the Warmind ever reached a certain city’s gate, “it could spread everywhere.” The armament had only been started a couple of months ago: “It’s genuinely last ditch, and don’t tell anybody I said that.”

Alone in the nearly empty barracks, the three compared doubts. The council had said almost nothing about the Overworlders, and they had killed an angel to use its power. Grimnar wondered whether “this war is already over and they don’t know it yet.” Nehebka had her own verdict on Gund: “He is the single piece of sand that will break the hourglass.”

The Sands Speak

Grimnar and Muffy went to find food. Nehebka stayed behind, after quietly fixing grains of sand to their clothes so she could track them, because “she is the sand, the sand is she.” She drew a circle and an ankh in sand, chanted in an archaic tongue, and prayed to her god-king about the two strangers. Something inhaled, as if lungs had not tasted air in millennia. A voice answered: “Their steps, their purpose. Shadows link them. Chaos beckons.” It said a new king was rising, and that every king needs a crown.

She asked how this king would find its crown. She felt a distant desert sun on her back, and the voice came again: “When something is broken, its pieces lie scattered. And every piece has a reflection. When bathed in light, oh what shadows it will cast. Look where the darkness gathers.” She came out of the trance to find a young hobgoblin mail courier in the doorway, his heart pounding. “The sands have no feeling, child,” she told him. He still asked for help with the camp’s camouflage wards.

Mess Hall Diplomacy

At the mess tent, Grimnar ordered “three of everything” from a bugbear chef in an apron and chef’s hat. The chef had never heard of the Dread Fortress, or of the Grandmaster. Grimnar was stunned: “You live in the void and you don’t know the grandmaster? Elusia Skypiercer? She is the ruler of all of us.” The chef’s reply: “I don’t remember voting for her.” Grimnar said the Grandmaster had been in power for “like 700 years” and “looks very good for her age.” He admitted, “This has never happened to me before.” Naturally, he and Muffy then tried to recruit the chef for the Deathmatch. “If you win, glory. If you lose, that sucks.” He wondered whether he’d just die regardless. “Sometimes they come back.”

At a nearby table, a squad of Kuo-Toa asked what squad the newcomers were from. “We’re 35th,” Muffy lied. The fish-men were the 34th Deep Divers, a squad that had been shrinking, and they were overjoyed. They slammed the table and chanted “three, five, three, five.” It meant they hadn’t been wiped out. They praised the “Changebringer,” and Grimnar recognized it: “Are you talking about Chaos?” Soon the whole table was pounding out “Chaos! Chaos!” with Grimnar joining in, much to the annoyance of two other squads and the chef.

What Chaos Showed Them

Nehebka arrived and shared her omens. She believed the two strangers were “in alignment with what was the Shadow King.” Grimnar charged himself with chaos energy, and Nehebka touched his face to guide him, leaving a hot glass fingerprint behind. He heard a second, distant heartbeat, then saw chaos flowing south to a mountain where a pulsing orb of condensed raw chaos waited. Muffy took out the one sheet of paper she always carries and painted it with a dry brush. The image showed the mountain glowing the same magenta as the warforged, with a small crevice a quarter of the way up as its entrance. The plan was to deny that power to the strangers and to whatever king was rising.

A Night of Sand, Rum and Art

Back in the barracks, Nehebka raised a wall of sand-stone around their cots. “What the fuck?” said the card players outside, who then politely asked how to pass a drink through. Grimnar’s hand shot through the wall, grabbed the bottle and drank. It was sandy, and he choked, then immediately took another swig. “It’s pretty good actually… it’s a nice texture.” The sand he’d swallowed was dead sand now, and would pass through him in a few hours.

The wall came down and the party mingled. A hobgoblin named Calvin of the 23rd Madcaps (Muffy promised to put “Calvin the Hobbs” in a comic strip) explained that the Alliance was “taking a lot more L’s than we are W’s.” Getting captured by the Warmind was worse than dying: “I wish you were dead.” Nehebka sculpted a forlorn glass Calvin. Grimnar rushed over, overjoyed to meet a fellow artist, and whittled a wooden David. Muffy ran a dice game called Cabals and Krakens. She was a horrendous game master, making up the rules as she went and handing a player his opponent’s bones the moment he asked for them.

The Nightingales

Nehebka sensed three heartbeats at the door, “all strangely calm.” Five figures entered. Their leader wore a bloody bladed apron and a mechanical plague-doctor mask, and four others wore blank white masks and veils. “Those are nightingales,” Calvin whispered. They were on the Alliance’s side, and the reason nobody ever came back to tell what the Warmind did with captives: they were the ones who kept the fallen from being taken.

The Nightingales led the party back to the council tent. There the leader unmasked: lavender skin, a pulsing brain and four tentacles. He was an illithid. “What big eyes you have,” said Muffy. “And what large ears you have. Fascinating.” He explained that nothing had left Dämmerung in five years; “We made it. And now it is unmaking us.” Each night his Nightingales destroyed every fallen body they could find, so the Warmind could not harvest them.

Then he told the real story. Years ago a black star had fallen from the sky, and Kuo-Toa had gathered around it shouting about the Changebringer. It was “a tiny finger bone, made of perfectly black glass,” and staring into it felt like being pulled in. They fed it to the young Warmind. Overnight it grew, and overnight they started winning, until they were losing. “The noise, ah, the noise. If only you could hear.” Calling himself one of the last of his kind, he asked for their help: “I believe you three are that punch.”

The Physician’s Inquisition

Before letting them go, he asked to read their minds. If they refused, “Then we will have to ask kindly.” Nehebka stepped forward alone: “what you might find within my mind is not easily comprehensible.” He found her mission, her protectiveness, and then her first master, a dark lord of pyramids and sarcophagi who was “darkness and power itself.” He pulled back shuddering as sand fell from his hands. Her god-king had made it clear that he was watching too. “Well, that was exhilarating.”

He replaced his mask and gave his name: The Physician. His mother had just wanted something long and important-sounding. “Mine just called me Muffy,” said Muffy. Once he left, Nehebka visibly struggled to hold herself together. In the barracks, Calvin stared at them: “People don’t normally come back.” The soldiers brought blankets and bottles, and the three slept before the morning’s meeting.

Notable Moments

• A man in a twilight castle opened the episode by describing The Box of Chaos and the Shadow King’s power, now scattered across the Void.
• A bugbear chef had never heard of the Grandmaster and “didn’t remember voting for her,” so Grimnar and Muffy tried to sign him up for the Deathmatch.
• Muffy’s lie made the party honorary members of the “35th Deep Divers,” and it ended with a mess-tent chant of “Chaos! Chaos!”
• Grimnar bit a sand finger off Nehebka’s hand, then drank sandy rum twice and declared it “a nice texture.”
• The black star: a finger bone of black glass fed to the Warmind, after which “overnight it grew.”
• The Physician read Nehebka’s mind and came away shaking, with sand falling from his hands.

Memorable Quotes

• Nehebka: “I do not threat. Everything I say is a promise.”
• Trissavin Baenerret: “Yes, we made our own problem meant to save us. And now it is our damnation.”
• Bugbear chef: “Was there a memo? Was there a missive? Because I don’t remember voting for her.”
• Grimnar: “Chaos cannot be controlled. It can be wielded. It could be directed. But trying to hold on to too much will lead to ruin.”
• Nehebka: “I was not created to eat. I was created to protect.”
• Calvin: “We’re taking a lot more L’s than we are W’s.”
• The Physician: “We made it. And now it is unmaking us.”

“When something is broken, its pieces lie scattered. And every piece has a reflection. When bathed in light, oh what shadows it will cast. Look where the darkness gathers.” — the god-king’s voice, to Nehebka

Who and What Appears

Characters

Grimnar (Mudcat)

• A bear-like Void Knight of the Dread Fortress, about 20 years in its service, with burned fingers.
• A devotee of chaos (“the wheel of chaos”; Nehebka calls him “the acolyte of chaos”). He holds that chaos is not evil: “It can be wielded… trying to hold on to too much will lead to ruin.”
• Can mimic others’ abilities: he copied Nehebka’s tremorsense and the Physician’s magic resistance. He senses chaos visions and crackles with chaos lightning.
• Whittles figurines; carved David. Eats whole fish. Took a sandy finger and sandy rum without hesitation.

Nehebka (CriticalBard)

• A sand being: “She is the sand, the sand is she.” Has tremorsense (30 ft) that detects heartbeats.
• Rituals with an ankh in sand; prays to and serves the God-King, “the dark Lord she originally served” (pyramids, sarcophagi, desert). “In her mind, she still serves one person only.”
• “I was not created to eat. I was created to protect.” A guardian; meditates rather than sleeps.
• Turns sand into glass and sculpts; casts wall of stone from sand; leaves a glass fingerprint when casting guidance.
• Commander Kaim interrupts her meditations (DM’s improvised image).

Muffy (JustSeum)

• A small fennec-fox creature with large ears; can stretch about three inches taller on her hind legs.
• A painter (“I paint there”) who reveals images with a dry brush on the one sheet she always carries.
• Carries a “call to home” on her back. Ran Cabals and Krakens badly. Her mother “just called me Muffy.”

Trissavin (Triss) Baenerret: drow war mistress of the drow conclave on Dämmerung and leader of the council. About 6’2”, in black plate with silver filigree. Stoic, desperate (per the Physician). Has worked with Gund since the war began.

Gund Ashbrow: duergar chief artillerist of the Rust Blood Alliance. Spiral-braided beard, hammer. Leads the angel-weapon project. Calls illithids “the squid”; hates sand.

Grim: goblin leader of the Redcaps (red berets, gas masks). Rescue and commando work. He found the party and vouched for them.

The Physician: an illithid, “one of the last of my kind,” who leads the Nightingales. He wears a mechanical plague-doctor-like gas mask and a bloody surgical apron with blades and a wand. Mind-read Nehebka and was rebuffed by the God-King.

The Nightingales: four white-masked, veiled medics. Each night they destroy the Alliance’s fallen, brains and bodies, so the Warmind can’t take them (“counting corpses”).

Calvin: hobgoblin of the 23rd Madcaps, with a high-and-tight haircut. Subject of Nehebka’s glass sculpture and Muffy’s planned “Calvin the Hobbs” comic.

The 34th Deep Divers: Kuo-Toa tunnelling squad, seven at the start and fewer now. They worship the “Changebringer”/“flux bringer” (chaos, “many names”). Salute is two chest slaps and a gargle. They adopted the party as the “35th.”

Unnamed NPCs

• The bugbear chef: never heard of the Grandmaster; a Deathmatch recruitment target.
• The young hobgoblin mail courier: asked for help with the camouflage wards.
• The drow guards.

The two strangers: in blues and grays, chain mail, heavy hoods, longswords and one shield. They claimed to be an advanced scouting party, knew about chaos, and headed through the Blastlands to the mountain. Nehebka believes they are aligned with the Shadow King.

The man in the slate blue tunic: an unnamed figure in a twilight castle realm who knows the Box of Chaos history and dreads the scattered power.

The God-King: Nehebka’s deity. Answers via breath and desert sun.

The Warmind: an elder brain built by the illithids with the coalition, literally from the peoples’ own contributions. It turned on its makers, grew from the black star, blocks communication and travel, and builds Warforged and Titans.

Mentioned: Stolas (gave the mission); Elusia Skypiercer (“ruler of all of us”); the Shadow King.

Places

• Dämmerung: the war world. The Underdark peoples fled to its surface.
• Rust Blood Alliance war camp: bell tent, barracks (ten cots), mess hall, watchtowers, camouflage wards.
• The Blastlands.
• The mountain, about two days south: the Warmind’s lair, with a crevice entrance about 25% up and a pulsing chaos orb.
• The city with “the gate”: if the Warmind reaches it, “it could spread everywhere.”
• The twilight castle realm: shadowed sun, perpetual twilight.
• The Underdark: dwarven bastion cities, drow conclaves, goblin warrens, kobold dens.
• The Dread Fortress (mentioned).

Items

• The black star: a metacarpal-sized finger bone of perfect black glass that “pulls you in,” given to the Warmind.
• The angel corpse and Gund’s “armament” (the “divine bomb”).
• Crystal-tipped J-shaped staves and wands.
• Muffy’s ever-same sheet of paper and dry brush; her “call to home.”
• Grimnar’s wooden David; Nehebka’s glass Calvin.
• Homemade molasses rum.

Lore statements

• The Shadow King was murdered and his power boxed and used for spectator sport. That power is now “flung across this microcosmos” (cold open).
• The Warmind’s chaos source jams messages and travel. The Physician says for “these past five years”; Triss says the war is in year 10.
• Void Domain knights patrol the Void and have reports of illithid voidcraft (“tentacled vampires”).
• Some peoples of the Void have never heard of the Grandmaster or the Dread Fortress.
• Grimnar says the Grandmaster has been in power “like 700 years” (hearsay; see Continuity).
• Divination omens: a new king rises; every king seeks/needs its crown; broken pieces lie scattered, each with a reflection; “Look where the darkness gathers.”

Full Round-by-Round

Every beat of the episode, with timestamps (click to expand)

Cold open — the man in the slate blue tunic

1. 0:00:45 Far from Dämmerung and from the Dread Fortress lies a realm “wreathed in cold light” in perpetual twilight. A castle stands above a sprawling, thriving castle town that runs out to raw earth.
2. 0:01:18 Inside the castle, a man in a slate blue tunic stares out a window at the city, the twilight sky and a shadowed sun. He speaks to an unseen listener.
   • He says that at one point in the Void’s history the Shadow King “was broken, murdered,” and his unparalleled power was “trapped within a box… used for spectator sport.”
   • He says “Manipulating the raw stuff of Lux [?] itself was no easy task.”
   • “Now that power has been flung across this microcosmos, and I am filled with dread at the possibilities.”
3. 0:02:27 He warns that “even a fragment of that power will usher disaster.” He says the power “should never have been used in such a way to begin with. Not when there is so much to be done,” and hopes his listener will “in time… see the truth of the matter.” The scene leaves the realm.

Arrival at the Rust Blood Alliance war camp

4. 0:02:56 The view crosses the cosmos and passes Void lifeforms back to the party. Grim, a small goblin leading a squad of five other goblins, takes them up a ladder-stairway into the Rust Blood Alliance war camp.
5. The camp is full of Underdark peoples: drow, kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears and Kuo-Toa (“walking fishmen”). They carry crates, dig trenches and raise barricades. When the party appears, “the record scratches” and everyone stares. Grim hurries them along.
6. 0:04:19 Perception checks:
   • Nehebka rolls a nat 20 (33 total).
   • Grimnar rolls a 6: “I don’t see shit. I don’t hear shit. I’m just here to have a good time… I am following the will of chaos. I don’t need to be present.”
7. 0:04:49 Nehebka notices the following:
   • Everyone wears a standard uniform: short or long coats, leather boots, some armour, a few masks and helmets.
   • Weapons include pikes, swords, and staves bent into an L or J shape with a little crystal tip, plus J-shaped wands.
   • She overhears: “Who the hell are they?”, “I’m going to need more than three to win this war,” and, most notably, “Wasn’t there another knight here already?”
8. 0:06:12 They pass a mess hall with grilled vegetables and a giant pot of slop. The smells are “at best, nauseating,” with possibly cooked leather in the mix. They arrive at a large off-white bell tent guarded by two drow in full regalia with halberds. Grim: “I want to introduce you guys to the big wigs.”
9. 0:07:58 More of what Nehebka sees:
   • Some soldiers wear ornate versions of the uniform with gold shoulder stripes and harder elbow and knee armour. From her time “as a Knight of the Void Domain” she reads them as officers or specialists.
   • The various unit insignias seen last episode appear on coats. It is one army with different markings.
   • Grim’s squad wear spiked boots, heavier plated armour, thick metal-plated gloves, gas masks and red berets. No other squad wears red.
10. 0:10:01 Grimnar asks what shape the forces are in. The camp is active and tired but not haggard, with a constant flow of supplies. The camp is pristine and well defended, with undamaged battlements and watchtowers.

The war council tent

11. 0:11:29 Inside the tent:
    • A round table holds a parchment map covered in stone tokens. Some are shaped like the Titans from the last fight; others are triangles, ovals and squares, some stacked to mark fortifications.
    • Officers bicker: press the attack, fortify, or tend the wounded.
    • At the centre stands a tall drow woman (about 6’2”) in deep black plate with intricate silver filigree. Her arms are folded and her face is stoic.
    • Silence falls when the party enters. Grim: “Hey, everybody, look at what I found out in the Blastlands.”
12. 0:13:15 Grimnar introduces himself as “a Void Knight of the Dread Fortress.” Nehebka says nothing, so he introduces her (“Not chatty today”) and Muffy (“Hello”).
13. 0:13:44 A stocky, bushy-browed male duergar pushes forward. His beard is in a spiral braid balled at the top, and he carries a large hammer. He asks: “Can these people be trusted?”
14. 0:14:51 — Nehebka speaks. She clocks the duergar: “It is not about if we can be trusted. It is about what our purpose is. And we see that you have a problem that is soon becoming ours.”
    • Her persuasion succeeds (18).
    • Muffy’s insight on Triss fails; Triss gives nothing away.
15. 0:16:29 The duergar introduces himself as Gund Ashbrow, “chief artillerist here for the Rust Blood Alliance.” “Your mannerisms are far too chaotic to be programmed. So I guess you’re not spies. I’ll buy it. For now.”
    • Muffy: “have you encountered very, uh, programmed people? Often?”
    • Gund: “you’re not made of metal. So that’s a start.” Part of him wants to “poke and prod and see if you’ve got a little metal underneath there.”
16. 0:17:08 — The sand threat. Nehebka threatens that sand “will go down your throat and you will never be able to breathe again.”
    • Triss smirks. Gund: “You dare? What insolence…”
    • Nehebka: “I do not threat. Everything I say is a promise.”
    • Gund: “I’ll be watching you… I hate sand anyway… It’s coarse.” Grimnar: “It gets everywhere.” Gund: “It’s everywhere.”
17. 0:18:32 — Grim vouches for them. “They were neck deep in Warforged by the time we got to them.” He describes each:
    • Nehebka: “total mastery over the earth.”
    • Grimnar: “lightning from the sky.”
    • Muffy: “One of the most dexterous and nimble things I’ve ever seen.”
    • “This could be our chance, guys.”
18. 0:19:27 Grimnar says they were sent by the Dread Fortress to investigate “dark happenings.” Gund: “Dark happenings? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re at war.”
19. 0:20:11 — The two who came before. Nehebka asks whether more of them are coming, since “one has already come.”
    • Triss: two others came a day or two before the party, claiming to be “some sort of advanced scouting party.” They made no mention of the Dread Fortress.
    • The party knows nothing of them. Stolas had told them other groups were going elsewhere, and only these three were going to Dämmerung.
    • Grimnar has served the Dread Fortress for about 20 years. His history check (12) says a dispatched squad normally keeps its region until it asks for help. A second team isn’t standard, but it isn’t impossible.
20. 0:23:03 Triss: “Perhaps we do need to tighten up on security.” She describes the two:
    • Dressed in blues and grays, in chain mail and heavy hoods. Each carried a longsword; one carried a shield.
    • No discernible heraldry. They kept close together with “an air of nervousness.”
    • They knew the enemy’s force composition, and “They spoke of chaos.” Triss’s people had no name for this energy before.
    • They said “a large accumulation of chaos… is the root of our problems here,” and offered to help solve it.
21. 0:24:53 Nehebka looks straight at Grimnar, whose (bear) ears figuratively perk up. Grimnar: “Sure, chaos can be used for nefarious purposes, but it is in itself not harmful or not evil. It is a fundamental force that drives the fate of all of us.”
    • Triss: the only fundamental force driving them right now is “the amount of shells that we can put up per day.”
    • Triss: “if all of this falls, it’s over for all of us.”
22. 0:26:29 Which way did the two go? Triss’s scouts followed them into the Blastlands, toward a large mountain range where most of their troubles come from. The party “should count yourselves very fortunate” to have landed in the Blastlands and lived. Muffy: “Very dextrous.”
23. 0:27:41 Grimnar asks how the war began. Gund slaps the table: “where’s that damn squid? They’ll tell him.” Triss gives him a dagger-sharp look.
24. 0:27:56 — The war’s history (Triss).
    • “This is year 10.”
    • It began as Underdark against Overworld. Overworlders invaded their homes and temples for treasure and adventure.
    • Losing badly, every Underdark people formed one coalition “under one banner” and made something to help win.
    • “It stopped regarding us as allies and started to regard us as resources and obstacles. As it stands, the Warmind means to bring us to extinction.”
    • Nehebka: “So you created your own problem.” She glances at Gund, the chief artillerist.
    • Triss: “we made our own problem meant to save us. And now it is our damnation.”
25. 0:29:54 Grimnar asks why no one has heard of a ten-year war. Nehebka: “Are we to know about every ground conflict…?” Muffy: “once that involves mentions of chaos, maybe.”
    • Triss: they called for aid once the Warmind turned on them. By then “The Warmind seemingly casts an umbrella over Dämmerung.” It intercepts and distorts messages. “Magic wanes and waxes… it is unnatural.”
26. 0:31:39 — The plan.
    • The chief mountain lies about two days’ travel south. A long-prepared, “desperate operation” will be staged there.
    • “We’ve managed to harness another power. You might call it divine intervention.”
    • The aim is to destroy the Warmind’s lair, either by bringing the mountain down on it or by going into its caverns.
    • This is the same direction the two strangers went. Nehebka: “It would seem we are aligned.” Triss: “Good.”
27. 0:33:12 Triss asks them to “engage with the camp and see what needs to be done,” to lift spirits.
28. 0:33:56 — The squid. Grimnar asks how they know they aren’t repeating their mistake.
    • Gund: “because the squid’s not involved. It’s my specialty.”
    • “They got the tentacles on their face. They eat your brain.” Illithids, “Mind Flayers.” This is the party’s first time hearing of them.
    • Muffy’s history check (14): as Void Domain knights patrolling the Void, they have seen scattered reports of “tentacled shell-shaped… voidcraft” and void knights attacked by “tentacled vampires.”
29. 0:36:27 The Warmind was built with the illithids. Nehebka needles Gund: “you believe that you alone… now have the means to your salvation.”
    • Gund: “Everybody here contributes… even the squids.”
    • The illithids “told us they were making a brain. Something that could think,” to out-strategize the overworlders. “Their culture is all about brains and eating brains… We were desperate.”
30. 0:37:58 Muffy: “I’m not nervous that it’s your brain.” Everyone looks down. Triss clears the tent except herself, Gund and Grim.
    • Triss: “We made sacrifices that we felt were necessary to survive.”
    • “When I say that we all collectively contributed to this Warmind, it is both literal and physical.”
31. 0:39:17 Grimnar senses omission. Kyle confirms they are getting “an abridged version.” There has been no mention of the overworlders since the first comment.
32. 0:40:31 Nehebka: “So you gave a part of yourself… now the very part that you gave seeks to destroy you.”
    • Triss: “Cruel irony.”
    • Nehebka: “Is it ironic? Or is it just a natural consequence to action? Too many, how do you say, cooks in the kitchen.”
33. 0:41:08 Gund cracks his knuckles: “You weren’t there… It was us or them… what was the other alternative, huh? Just let them wipe us out?”
    • Nehebka: “Forgive me if you misinterpreted. Forgive me if you thought I cared… Your feelings are not the important part.”
    • Gund: “Tris, I’ll let you do this.” He walks out.
34. 0:43:08 — The angel. Triss puts her hands on the table.
    • In the early war they fought summoned powers.
    • With the Warmind’s help they struck down “the corpse of an angel, a gargantuan being of light and justice.”
    • Gund plans to “harness that literal divinity… and weaponize it,” just as they made the camp’s munitions.
    • The weapon (“armament”) is Gund’s project. Its construction site is under heavy guard.
35. 0:45:53 Triss and Gund have worked together “since the beginning.”
    • When the Warmind turned, there was “an exodus” from the Underdark to the surface.
    • “dwarven bastion cities were crossing with drow conclaves, Goblin warrens, kobold dens… There wasn’t enough space for all of us and the walls were closing in.”
36. 0:47:09 Triss offers the barracks (“less populated than they have [been]”). She invites them to a meeting tomorrow morning about the armament.

Grim’s tour

38. 0:49:16 Grim: “don’t let Gund get you down. Dude’s grumpy. He’s always been grumpy. And Triss, love her to death. But she’s got a lot of stuff on her shoulders.”
39. 0:50:01 Grim describes his squad and the stakes.
    • “me and my red caps” rescue folks from the Blastlands and run commando operations. “this is our home.”
    • There is a city with a gate: “if the Warmind gets through, then it has access to the gate… it could spread everywhere.”
40. 0:50:47 Nehebka asks whether the Warmind, made of pieces of everyone, already knows what they know.
    • Grim thinks it doesn’t know about the armament, which was only begun “maybe a couple of months ago. It’s genuinely last ditch, and don’t tell anybody I said that.”
    • “I don’t think that the warmind can put skin on a warforged and have it act like a person yet… But I also don’t want to be proven wrong.”
41. 0:52:39 Grimnar scans the crowd for anyone watching them “in more than a novelty kind of way.” He keeps his doubts private because there are “too many ears.”

The barracks — the party confers

42. 0:54:00 The barracks are nearly empty:
    • Ten cots, five per side, with gear staged for quick equipping.
    • Tables with liquor bottles, cards and dice.
    • A pinup on the wall and books lying around.
43. 0:54:57 Grimnar checks the tent flaps for eavesdroppers; nobody is there. The players had separately wanted Muffy to look under the beds.
44. 0:55:42 — Their doubts.
    • Grimnar: “there was a specific lack of information on these overworlders.” Muffy: “Also a lot of information given to us.”
    • Grimnar: “out of chaos comes order. Perhaps this is the wheel of chaos and they should reap what they have sown.”
    • Nehebka: “too many strings lead to the same location… our job will inevitably benefit them, but their plight is not ours.”
    • Grimnar: “If they’re willing to kill an angel and use its power for themselves, what else are they capable of?”
45. 0:57:28 — On Gund.
    • Grimnar: “Kind of an asshole.” Muffy: “I’m glad you said it.”
    • Nehebka: “He is the single piece of sand that will break the hourglass… his actions shall be the ultimate downfall of Dämmerung.”
    • Muffy: “there’s irony in him showing up right as this was beginning.”
46. 0:58:23 Nehebka: the drow, duergar and illithids are “all of the same land underneath… What strikes me is how far they are willing to go.” She asks what new feeling drives this “divine bomb.”
    • Grimnar: a giant brain made of brains “is probably pretty intelligent… perhaps this war is already over and they don’t know it yet.”
    • Nehebka: the two strangers are the problem, “Especially if the power that the Warmind is now using is of the Shadow King.”
47. 1:00:55 Nehebka: “I will consult the Sands… Something tells me that this is going to be a test. For all of us.”
48. 1:01:22 The barracks smell musty, of socks, mud and sweat (“not you Mudcat, like mud mud”). Outside, Muffy sniffs out the cooked meat.
49. 1:03:09 Nehebka stays behind; Grimnar (“He’s really just interested in the food”) and Muffy head to the mess. Nehebka attaches sand particles to their clothing so she can find them: “She is the sand, the sand is she.”

Nehebka’s divination ritual

50. 1:04:08 Nehebka’s ritual:
    • She sits in the middle of the barracks and chants in an archaic language.
    • From an empty hand she draws piles of sand into a circle around herself, and draws an ankh in it.
    • A dome of floating particles surrounds her as she meditates and casts divination as a ritual.
    • The sand forms hieroglyph-like signs.
51. 1:05:46 She prays to “My god-king”: “These two wandering travelers. Where do their feet take them? What is their purpose in this ruined land?”
    • (Table: Kyle jokes “What if these two are Cabals? No!”)
    • She hears a sudden inhale, “as if air has just filled lungs that… haven’t tasted air in like millennia.”
    • The voice: “Their steps, their purpose. Shadows link them. Chaos beckons.”
    • Kyle re-reads it as “shadows lengthen, chaos beckons,” then adds “a new king rises” and “every king eats [seeks?] its crown.”
52. 1:09:23 She recasts (the 25% failure roll passes) and asks: “How is this king seeking to find its crown?”
    • She hears another exhale and feels “the heat of a distant desert sun against your back,” “wind snaking over dunes long since lost.”
    • A radiance moves over her head to directly in front of her, “as if this presence is now regarding you in earnest.”
    • The voice: “When something is broken, its pieces lie scattered. And every piece has a reflection. When [one is] bathed in light, oh what shadows it will cast. Look where the darkness gathers.”
    • The sand rushes back into her skin and hair.
53. 1:12:31 — The mail courier. Coming out of the trance (perception 18), she senses someone at the door. Her tremorsense picks up a heart rate “going through the roof.”
    • A young, bulky hobgoblin mail courier: “Are you okay?” Nehebka: “The sands have no feeling, child.” He: “I’m just a mail courier.”
    • She “dusts herself off”; the sand only runs to her feet and is sucked back in. “Do your job, as I have done mine.”
54. 1:15:46 The courier asks whether she’s a magic user.
    • Nehebka: “If that is your primitive way of asking, can I affect the world around me? Yes.”
    • He asks for help reinforcing the wards that keep the camp camouflaged. “I will see what can be done.”
    • She tags him with sand too. He is too shaken to notice: “there’s this crazy sand woman in the barracks. What’s going on here?”
55. About 20 in-game minutes pass for the two rituals.

The mess hall — Grimnar, Muffy and the bugbear chef

56. 1:17:47 They follow smells of grilled meat, vegetables, star anise and cinnamon to a big mess tent. A bell rings: “Mess is up! Mess is up! We’re on break!”
    • Muffy: “what better way to conduct some investigation than starting with their food?”
    • Grimnar: “we must live like them… practice their customs.”
57. 1:19:17 Diners gawk at the huge Grimnar and the little Muffy.
    • At the counter, a bugbear in an apron and chef’s hat offers Muffy help.
    • She stands on her hind legs and “grows suddenly, maybe like three inches”: “as long as I can reach here, I’ll be fine.”
    • The menu: ribs, steamed gourds and roots, and a fresh fish-bone stock.
    • Grimnar: “I will take three of everything.” Muffy: “We have a guest coming with us later, so save the line.”
58. 1:21:14 The chef asks for names and squad designation.
    • Grimnar says they were sent from the Dread Fortress. Chef: “What’s a Dread Fortress?… it sounds rather dour and rather grim.”
    • Grimnar: “Oh no, it’s very fun.” Muffy: “I paint there.”
59. 1:21:47 — “Who is the Grandmaster?”
    • Grimnar: “You live in the void and you don’t know the grandmaster? Elusia Skypiercer? She is the ruler of all of us. All places and all peoples.”
    • Grimnar and Muffy rattle it off back and forth: “Of you.” “And me.” “And her.”…
    • Chef: “was there a memo? Was there a missive? Because I don’t remember voting for her.”
    • Grimnar: “I don’t know if there was a vote. Unless I heard she’s been in power for like 700 years.” Chef: “It’s a long time to be in office.” Grimnar: “She looks very good for her age.”
60. 1:22:45 Muffy’s insight (nat 20): the chef genuinely has no idea who Elusia is.
    • Kyle explains that these Underdark peoples lived “literally… under a rock,” busy with their own lives; overworld news never reached them.
    • Grimnar: “This has never happened to me before.”
61. 1:24:39 The chef asks whether they are the Grandmaster’s emissaries. Grimnar: “We’re just soldiers. Same as all of you.” Chef: “anybody willing to fight those metalheads out there is a friend of mine.”
62. 1:25:16 — The recruiting pitch.
    • Grimnar: “if you’re lucky, maybe someday you can come to the Dread Fortress and fight to the death.” Muffy (with the “widest… fennec fox grin”): “it’s very entertaining.”
    • Chef: “we gotta fight death here every day.”
    • Grimnar: “It’s a spectacle. You have thousands of people watching, millions even.” Muffy: “And if you win, glory.” “If you lose, that sucks.”
    • Grimnar: “you find out something about yourself if you lose.” Chef: “Wait, I just die regardless?” Grimnar: “Sometimes they come back.”
    • The chef hands over the trays: “we’ll have more of the conversation later.”
63. 1:27:09 They plot to sign him up for the D20 Deathmatch.
    • Grimnar: “He looked pretty strong.” Muffy: “He could pour hot chili on someone.” Grimnar: “he could pop him on the head” with a ladle.
    • Muffy: “We should actually pitch this.” Grimnar: “Do you think the Grandmaster would listen to us?… we’d have to get in the same room as her first.”
64. 1:27:50 Break (cut). Kyle’s recap mentions “Trissavin Baenerret… Gund Ashbrown, chief artillerist… Grim, leader of the Redcaps squadron.”

The 34th Deep Divers

65. 1:28:56 Muffy: “this is delicious.” Grimnar: “I’ve had better… but barely.”
    • Grimnar eats a whole fish, bones and all. Muffy gnaws hers down “like a dog chewing a bone,” then throws it.
66. 1:29:27 Some Kuo-Toa ask, “What squad you from?” (Muffy: “why does everyone keep asking us this”).
    • They are the “34th deep divers.” Muffy: “We’re 35th.”
    • Their deception succeeds. The Kuo-Toa slam the table twice: “The bringer of change provides… 35th squad,” and chant “three, five, three, five.”
67. 1:30:57 “The flux, the flux bringer, the changer has provided. We were only 34th squad. Now there is 35th squad… It means we’ve not been wiped out.”
    • Grimnar: “This just happened, like, five minutes ago.”
    • The 34th started with seven; now “this many.” There were also a 33rd and a 32nd squad, with “less than 35.”
    • Are they dead? Every Kuo-Toa nods: “the change bringer has changed their lives.”
68. 1:32:23 Grimnar: “Perhaps it was the Will of Chaos,” as he shoves down another fish.
    • A briny finger points at him: “you know the name… The Changebringer. It has many names.” Grimnar: “Are you talking about Chaos?” “He knows the name.” “She knows the name.”
69. 1:33:09 Grimnar: “the wheel of chaos binds us all and directs our paths it is no accident that you and i are talking right now.”
    • Everyone beats the table chanting “Chaos! Chaos!”, and Grimnar joins in.
    • He pounds so hard that crickets (part of a Kuo-Toa’s salad) scatter: “Sorry, that’s a part of my salad. Quick, quick, good tasty.”
    • Two other squads: “oh my God, shut up.” The bugbear: “Chaos is good and all… hey now.”
70. 1:34:04 Grimnar: “some people are not ready to accept the truth.” Kuo-Toa: “they are not ready to accept the change bringers… We appreciate you as 35th Deep Divers. We welcome you.”
    • They watch him eat fish in front of fish people, then one eats a fish too. “Some fish eat fish. That’s how the ocean works. The change bringer wills.”
71. 1:34:59 Nehebka arrives, recalling her sand from them, and bypasses the food. “You have made friends.”
    • Grimnar garbles the designation (“30 feet diver… dividers”) until he gets “deep divers.”
    • The 34th salute: slap the chest twice, then gargle (“their little like Battle Brothers”).
    • Muffy tries to mimic them.
72. 1:36:35 Nehebka: “Would you mind giving us some space?” The Kuo-Toa simply stare at their plates without moving. Grimnar: “Sorry, I love these guys.”

Pooling the omens

73. 1:37:02 Nehebka: “The two that have come before us, I believe that they are in alignment with what was the Shadow King.”
    • She recites the omen as “shadows, length[en], and chaos, and new king rises and every king needs a crown.”
    • She doesn’t know whether “the pieces” act alone or seek each other. “What happens if one finds a crown within the Warmind? Do they all vie to be the king?”
    • Grimnar: “if this king is rising, it would be a great threat to the Grandmaster.” Nehebka: “which means we must deal with this war mind too.”
74. 1:40:53 — Grimnar listens to chaos. Nehebka asks what Chaos has told him.
    • He closes his eyes. A balloon-like static raises the hair on their arms as he charges his body with chaos energy.
    • Nehebka casts guidance by stroking his face; her fingerprint is left in glass, hot to the touch.
    • Kyle describes the vision:
      • The hall’s noise fades. He hears his own heartbeat, then “another heartbeat. Distant… beating with intensity.”
      • Multicoloured chaos energy flows around him, dips into the earth and “rockets off south.”
      • On a large mountain peak, “a pulsing orb in the distance of raw chaos, condensed.”
    • Grimnar: “chaos has shown me the mountain… I believe that is where my path lies.” Nehebka: “the sands lead me there as well.”
75. 1:44:51 — Muffy paints the map.
    • From her bag she takes the one plain sheet of paper she always carries (“never changing it. It’ll just change paintings”).
    • She paints with a dry brush. The image reveals itself like invisible ink or corrosion: watercolour edges, oilier toward the centre, then becoming 3D and solid.
    • Muffy is “a little bit of both” on chaos: she taps into it as a primal force and is not fully religious about it.
76. 1:48:33 The painting (performance 7) shows the following:
    • The mountain, with a tiny black crevice about 25% of the way up: the entrance.
    • The mountain glows in the same magenta as the attacking warforged.
    • The whole skyline has the oil-slick sheen of chaotic energy. Nehebka: “Then we have our destination.”
77. 1:50:16 Grimnar: “Chaos cannot be controlled. It can be wielded. It could be directed. But trying to hold on to too much will lead to ruin.”
    • Nehebka: “You are the acolyte of chaos. What would you have us do…? To understand, to deal with, to contain.”
    • Grimnar: keep it out of the two figures’ hands, “or for this king… the first step is to deny it to them.” Nehebka: “Then we are of one accord.”
78. 1:52:16 — The chip. Muffy offers Nehebka a chip with hummus.
    • Nehebka: “I was not created to eat. I was created to protect.”
    • Muffy: “are people ever created to eat? That sounds like a great life.” Nehebka: “in some domain of delight they are.” Muffy: “Unless they’re created to eat to become then fodder.” Grimnar: “Like pigs led to the slaughter.”
    • Grimnar bites the chip out of her hand: “More for me.” The percentile comes up sand, so he bites off a sandy finger.
    • Nehebka briefly “unjellifies” and then pulls the sand back out of his mouth. “I feel like that’s going to be a weird sensation.”
79. 1:55:22 At sunset the chef wraps up for the night shift.
    • Muffy: “We might need that bugbear in the D20 Deathmatch… I’d put my money on him… sometimes not being the brightest leads to the best fights.”
    • Grimnar: “I’m not sure that he would play well to the crowd.” Muffy: “he gave you all of the meats you asked for.”
    • They plan to “circle back in the morning and try to convince him.” (“Bud?” “Yes, Brad.”)
80. 1:56:34 Does Nehebka sleep? She enters a meditation so deep it looks like sleep, but she is “not actually sleeping.”
81. 1:57:09 Every time anyone said “chaos,” the Kuo-Toa flinched toward them while trying to respectfully not listen.

Night in the barracks — the wall, the rum, the art

82. 1:57:48 The barracks now hold a few drow and hobgoblins, tired after a long day, playing cards. The soldiers are hesitant at first, then reason the party “wouldn’t be here if [they] weren’t already vetted.” They wave and raise bottles.
83. 1:59:07 — Nehebka’s wall.
    • For privacy and protection, she kneels, presses a hand to the floor, and sand rushes over to form a wall of stone partitioning off their three cots in the back.
    • The card players freeze: “What the fuck?”
    • Then a hobgoblin asks: “do you want a drink? … How do I, do I put it in the sand?”
84. 2:01:14 — The sandy rum.
    • Grimnar’s hand shoots straight through the wall, takes the uncorked bottle and brings it to his mouth “in one fluid motion.”
    • It comes up sand again (“Sandy Hoops. Two for two”), like the cinnamon challenge. His Con save is a “dirty 20.”
    • The drink is homemade molasses rum: brown sugar and spice, with a sludge first like Turkish coffee, now “a wet, grainy, spicy sludge.”
    • He chokes, then immediately takes a second drink. “It’s pretty good actually… there’s something extra… it’s a nice texture.” Muffy: “He’s a seasoned sand.”
    • The swallowed sand is “dead sand now” and will pass “in a few hours.”
    • Muffy jokes: “your organs didn’t look very good… She left one in your brain.” Grimnar: “Just the one.”
85. 2:05:05 Grimnar offers the bottle to Nehebka, then passes it to Muffy. She fishes out a last bit of grit with her finger and drinks.
86. 2:05:42 Outside the wall: “you don’t got to be strangers.” Muffy: “We’re not.” Grimnar and Muffy (snout first) poke their heads through the wall. The soldiers jump back.
    • They invite them to cards and stories. Nehebka lets the wall collapse back into herself (“Why am I bothering?”).
87. 2:07:39 A drow: “that’s a pretty cool trick. Could you do that for the entire barrack?” Nehebka: “This is no trick. And if I wanted to, yes.” The table nods: “they can protect us.”
88. 2:08:16 Squad designation? “Thirty-fifth… deep dibs… Three, five.” “I didn’t know there was a thirty-fifth squad.” “Today, promoted.”
    • Grimnar: “I get deeper than anyone ever.” Muffy: “I’m an expert diver. I’ve taught people how to deep dive.”
    • Nehebka has no idea what they’re talking about.
89. 2:09:36 A soldier: the deep divers are “always talking about like a change bringer, and they’re slamming on tables.” Grimnar: “Oh, the chaos.” Somewhere in the camp: “Chaos.”
    • “They’re great in a fight… the sort of tunnel networks that they come up with… wouldn’t want to be in this fight without them.”
90. 2:10:23 — Calvin.
    • A hobgoblin named Calvin, of the 23rd Madcaps (named live: “thank you family IT dude”), sits down: “name’s Calvin. Let’s just put that on the record.”
    • Muffy: “Calvin the Hobbs… I will put you into a comic strip.” “We bring back the classic Calvin the Hobbs.” (“He’s a hobgoblin. He’s not a tiger.”)
91. 2:12:02 — How they fight (Calvin).
    • The duergar brought heavier armour, cannons, artillery and “even a couple vehicles.” The drow brought magic; the goblins numbers; the kobolds trickery, sabotage and mine-laying.
    • “the war mind kept adapting, so we had to adapt.”
    • Whispered: “We’re taking a lot more L’s than we are W’s.”
    • Grimnar: “And what is an L?… Why didn’t you just say that then?… It’s the same amount of syllables.” Calvin: “Why are you checking me on syllables right now?” Muffy: “Grimnar is so smart.”
92. 2:13:40 The Warmind’s forces:
    • Regular Warforged have “elven legs and… human arms”; they outrange and outrun the Alliance.
    • The Titans are “everywhere”: one raises an arm, fires a flare, “and then it’s war horn central.”
    • The Alliance lays traps and mines. The deep divers dig escape tunnels, and the duergar “rain fire on everything.”
93. 2:14:41 Muffy: “How many have you lost from them?” Calvin: “It’s not intentional… sometimes it’s just easier to get overrun… You have to be the target marker, then I guess you’re the target marker. Better that than getting taken by them.”
    • What happens if you’re taken? “Oh boy… I wish you were dead.” No one has come back to tell. Muffy: “Maybe they’re having a party.” The room chuckles.
94. 2:15:50 — The two artists.
    • Nehebka warms sand in her hands into molten glass and sculpts a small glass statue of Calvin, with a forlorn face, thinking of those lost. Making sculptures is one of her pastimes.
    • Grimnar drops the conversation and rushes over: “You’ll make statues? I also like to make figurines.” He pulls out a block of wood he’s been whittling. Whittling figurines of people is in his backstory.
    • (Table: Kyle’s questionnaire asked what brings each character joy, and all three picked art.)
    • Grimnar’s performance roll is excellent, despite his big bear hands: he produces a wood carving of David. (“Piece of the… king.”)
    • Nehebka’s glasswork with guidance also hits 24. “We have really beautiful sculptures here.”
95. 2:19:48 — Cabals and Krakens.
    • Muffy runs a dice game called “Cabals and Krakens” (“5e edition”) for the barracks, with big arm gestures. It is the highlight of the night.
    • She rolls 7 on performance: “she’s a terrible DM. Horrendous,” making rules up as she goes.
    • Players ask: “can I just like punch him in the face and like knock his head off?” Muffy: “Yes… You get advantage.” “You rolled an 11.” Their AC is “what’s an AC? Of 10?”
    • “I want to take his bones.” “They’re yours. In your pocket already.” “My bones.”

The Nightingales and the Physician

96. 2:22:12 Nehebka’s tremorsense (30 ft) picks up three heartbeats at the tent front, “all strangely calm.”
    • She stops sculpting and looks up. Muffy follows her gaze.
    • Grimnar mimics Nehebka’s tremorsense: lightning flashes in his eyes as he adapts it and hears the heartbeats too.
    • (The party gets a short rest here.)
97. 2:24:29 — The lead figure.
    • About six feet tall, in full medical gear: a double-breasted apron covered in blades and stabbing implements, long leather gloves, a medic pack, and a wand holstered on the right.
    • A huge mechanical gas mask with two bulbous eyes and a long snout down to the sternum, “almost like a plague doctor mask, but more mechanical, more alien.” It has a bulbous rear and breathing tubes to the chest.
98. 2:26:27 — The other four.
    • Two more enter, then more, until five are in the room. The other four wear blank white masks shaped like an elf or human visage, with white veils.
    • Their boots are caked in mud, with blood on gloves and chests and red splatter on the white masks. They stand at attention.
99. 2:27:14 Muffy wraps up the game: “In your next game, you get quadruple advantage. Now shut up.”
    • Nehebka coats her scimitar in sand and readies Shillelagh. The leader sees it: “There is no need for that. [Lay] your weapon. Disarm your spell.”
    • Grimnar keeps small chaos-lightning crackling around his burned fingers.
    • Muffy palms her long-handled paintbrush inconspicuously.
100. 2:30:26 Calvin, shaking: “those are nightingales. They’re on our side, but… I don’t know why they’re here.”
101. 2:31:27 The leader: “newcomers, if you would so kindly follow me… I’ve been sent by the War Mistress, Trissavin Baenerret. She’s told me so much about you… I wish to tell you all more about what it is that you’re facing.” - Insight: not a lie, but too cold to tell whether violence is coming. Muffy: “I love your masks.”
102. 2:33:36 Calvin: “The reason that we don’t know about people coming back is because of them… They’re the ones who keep us from getting taken.” Muffy: “Oh great, I trust him even more then.”
103. 2:34:01 Nehebka: “We have no reason not to trust you, if you were sent by the War Mistress.” The leader: “Likewise… Please, come with me.” - Muffy follows eagerly. Grimnar is uneasy but won’t make a scene as a guest. - Nehebka keeps “a ping on every single last heartbeat.”
104. 2:35:44 At night they are led back to the central bell tent past torches, night patrols and tripwires. - The leader unclasps his helmet in a hiss of gas: lavender skin, a bulbous pulsing brain, a heavy brow, sunken eyes glowing “the yellow of a harvest moon,” and four tentacles where the mouth would be. Three come from the mask tubes and one from the central tube. - “Oh, that’s better. Well, so nice to meet all of you.”
105. 2:37:18 Muffy: “What big eyes you have.” He leans down: “And what large ears you have. Fascinating.” She tucks behind Grimnar. - Grimnar: “the squid.” Illithid: “Oh, is he still saying that? Squid. Oh, Gund. Absolute dolt.”
106. 2:38:01 Nehebka asks why this couldn’t wait. He says Trissavin mentioned they seek “some sort of… power.” Muffy adds “Or comic books.”
107. 2:38:43 — Leaving. “Wait. Can you, young one, leave right now?” - Muffy instinctively reaches for the “call to home” item on her back that would pull them out. - He: “for these past five years, every single signal, every attempt to leave this place has been rendered moot by our warmind. Well, we made it.” - It can be stopped only if the Warmind is defeated. He smiles “as only an illithid could,” with a purr-like vibration of the tentacles: “We made it. And now it is unmaking us.”
108. 2:40:43 — The Nightingales’ duty. - “Unless you all fall in battle and me and my nightingales have to remove you as potential future threats.” - “We cannot allow our fallen to fall into the hands of the Warmind. It needs materials and knowledge. And if you all fall and are taken back and reconfigured, you all know a great deal.” - Nehebka: “It would be the unmaking of the Dread Fortress.” - “every night [we] wander those battlefields. And we destroy every body we can find and leave nothing.” - Muffy: “would you come and destroy us?” “Your brain and your body, yes.” “Are you threatening us…? Or are you promising?” “That’s not a promise.” - He bets they could “easily take down a Titan or two… you all… might be the missing key, the missing piece. Infantry and artillery can only get so far… I believe you three are that punch.”
109. 2:42:59 — The black star. - “so many years ago, a black star falling from the sky.” - The Warmind was then “a juvenile, an elder brain just freshly made.” - Kuo-Toa surrounded the fallen star yelling “change bringer… chaos, chaos,” so the council judged it important. - “It couldn’t have been any larger than a metacarpal. It looked like one, too. A tiny finger bone, made of perfectly black glass. Staring into it… it was trying to pull you in.” - “we gave it to the Warmind. And overnight it grew. And overnight, we started to win.” Then victory turned to defeat. - “it is causing it to grow at an exponential rate. It’s messing with everything.” Even if Muffy could leave, “I’m not sure you’d know where you’d be ending up… The noise, ah, the noise. If only you could hear.”
110. 2:45:46 Nehebka: “yet again, we learn that reckless actions have consequences.” He: “we didn’t know. We saw a tool and an implement… I offer you this as one of the last of my kind. Help us to destroy this war mind and that stone and our lives are yours.”
111. 2:46:38 Grimnar asks whether the four companions have anything to say. “Not unless they’re spoken to. But they are tired… Many brains had to be broken. Many bodies had to be burned. All under cover of darkness, mind you, lest we end up on the pyre.” - Nehebka: “this war mine must fall too.” He: “For the good of us all.” - He tells them to sleep on it and “Keep it close.”
112. 2:48:35 Grimnar’s insight (7): the illithid’s expression is unreadable. His voice has a rhythmic, almost springy cadence, but the bloody work is simply duty to him. - Grimnar drops the tremorsense and feels out the threads of chaos between himself and the illithid, adopting its magic resistance. It feels like the ley lines dulling, “isolating… a heavy coat,” with “warmth and knowledge of protection from the arcane.”
113. 2:52:20 — The inquisition. - “I would ask you all to submit willingly to a brief inquisition… I wish to read your thoughts… There will be no brain eating.” - His reason: “Trissavin is experienced, but she’s growing desperate… I’m here to make sure that your intentions are good.” - Grimnar: “And if we refuse?” He looks at his four Nightingales: “Then we will have to ask kindly.”
114. 2:54:12 Nehebka steps forward alone, leaving Muffy and Grimnar their own choice. “Probe within… but I warn you, what you might find within my mind is not easily comprehensible.” - Speaking as if through water (a “Zoidberg bit”), he traces mind-runes around two fingers: “this won’t hurt a bit.” He touches her forehead and casts detect thoughts. - Muffy whispers to Grimnar: “And we just put our whole heads through her…”
115. 2:57:10 — What he finds. - Surface thoughts: purpose, the job, dealing with the Warmind and “the black star,” and protection over Muffy and Grimnar. He says: “Oh, so a job it is… A job, but from who?” - He presses deeper (Nehebka fails her save willingly). He sees flashes of sand, the fortress, and “Commander Kaim interrupting your meditations frequently” (Kyle: “I would like to imagine”). - Then “The first thing she thinks about is the dark Lord she originally served.” It hits like a sandstorm: tall pyramids, sarcophagi, “this entirely imposing figure who is darkness and power itself.” - Only after that does he glimpse that they come from the fortress with a job, not who gave it. “in her mind, she still serves one person only.” - “what mind does she have?” Kyle: he is “looking into like a force… how do you understand the logic of a storm?”
116. 3:00:39 Everyone sees the Mind Flayer shudder and pull back, staring at his hands as flecks of sand fall off and return to Nehebka. - “I see… Well, that was exhilarating. We have a purpose, as do you.” - Nehebka: “We are here for one reason and one reason only. You need to know what you need to know. That is all.” He: “Then consider my curiosity satisfied.” He bows. - She projects an almost physical force nudging Muffy and Grimnar back; she was “a guardian” and doesn’t trust the Nightingales.
117. 3:02:52 Kyle describes the illithid’s state of mind: - He wants to probe more after glimpsing “a whole nother plane of existence,” but hesitates. - The god-king “rebuffed this mind flayer to… let him know, hey, you can dig, but I’m also here. And while you dig, I will be digging right next to you.” - Muffy senses Nehebka’s message: she won’t let him probe.
118. 3:04:28 Grimnar gives Nehebka a look (“I want to try something. But it may be a bad idea”). Her eyes say not now: they need rest first. He restrains himself.
119. 3:06:00 — The name. He reattaches his helmet with a lock: “My name is a mouthful, but you may know me as The Physician.” - Muffy: “Who would name you that?” He: “it was a trend… My mother just wanted to have a very long, important sounding name.” - Muffy: “Mine just called me Muffy.” - Nehebka (speaker uncertain whether in character): “My name is Anti-Distance Elementarianism.”
120. 3:07:22 The Physician: “I hope that you’ve received a warm welcome from the rest of my companions… I think I will be seeing you all in the morning. Good night.” He leaves, the four Nightingales following two by two.
121. 3:07:49 Once they’re gone, Nehebka visibly struggles to hold herself together: “that took a lot… Rest.” Muffy hums “Sing sweet nightingale.”
122. 3:08:26 Back at the barracks it’s “as if time itself stopped.” Everyone breathes out in relief. - Calvin: “People don’t normally come back.” - No one has seen the Nightingales alone; “They’re always on night missions… They call it counting corpses.” - Grimnar: “Something about them doesn’t feel right.” - The soldiers bring extra bottles and blankets. The night ends as a long rest, with the morning meeting next. “Welcome and good night.”