Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind

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The finale of the first arc of Pieces of a King sends Grimnar Stormclaw, Nehebka and Muffy deep under the war-torn world of Damerung to destroy The Warmind. They had a celestial warhead and a plan. Instead they found two polite knights of a rival order already there, a corpse-strewn tunnel, and a single finger bone of The Shadow King. That bone left the Dread Fortress’s own agents asking a dangerous question: should anyone get it, their own Grandmaster included?

The Story

The Grandmaster of Shadow

The episode opened far from the fighting, in “the realm of cold light,” a world of eternal twilight. Two knights in polished armor of dark grays and deep blues waited in an antechamber. Glauccous was a human with neck-length dark hair and soft features. Taupe was an ash-gray tiefling who admitted she was “nervous, but excited about this prospect.” Glauccous only grinned: “Never better.”

They were called into a round room lined with bookshelves, old portraits and ceremonial weapons “from realms too alien or bizarre to really fit into human hands.” A man stood gazing over the city below. He told them to rise, then gave them their mission. “We found another echo, a remnant of the Shadow King on the world of Dameron,” he said. They would likely meet “the forces of Grandmaster Skypiercer,” and his orders were clear: “offer them our peace, but do not allow them to take the remnant.” The knights answered, “By your command, Grandmaster.”

When they had gone, his smile faded. On his desk lay a tome open to a portrait of Agdrel, the Shadow King. “Was this your dream, Shadow King? To live, even in death,” he murmured. “What parts of you remain to plague the void even now? And what price will we pay for your folly?”

The Bullet and the Titans

Meanwhile the party rode toward the Warmind inside “a bullet,” a living carapaced digging beast fitted with a passenger canopy. They were caked in dirt, rime and blood. Across from them sat two battered Nightingales, one with a cracked mask and one with a scorched coat, and between them glowed the warhead. The physician reported that the RBA was launching its counteroffensive “following the attack on the solar.” “This next part of the operation rests firmly within our hands,” he said.

Nehebka sat in meditation. She does not sleep and had taken no wounds. In her mind she returned to the battle they had just left, where Titans, giant war machines that left craters with every step, had marched against the RBA’s stone guard, drow elites and hobgoblin commandos. The RBA leader Trissavin had faced one of them head on and been blasted twenty feet by its cannon, landing by Nehebka. Where Nehebka comes from, everyone exists to serve and adore their god-king, and sadness “just does not compute.” She saved Trissavin anyway, with a perfect natural 20 of battlefield medicine. Her sand propped the fallen leader up to keep her airway clear. When Trissavin promised she would be “honored here indefinitely,” Nehebka answered flatly: “I do not care for your honor, nor do I care for your mortal debts.”

Muffy, meanwhile, had taken charge of a green squad of kuo-toa, bugbears and hobgoblins facing ten Warforged. She conducted them like a maestro with her paintbrush, drawing battle plans in the cold air itself: arrows, X’s and little swirling clouds. The line held, and the troops named her their new mascot. When heavy guns toppled a Titan, Muffy finished it by painting a rainbow in which every band was a different kind of destruction, little clouds included. The Titan’s eyes erupted in fire and the troops chanted “Muffy! Muffy! Muffy!”

Grimnar took the last Titan, the one that had shot Trissavin. A hobgoblin commando tossed him a grapple, but Grimnar declared, “I will meet you at the top,” rose on crackling electromagnetic lightning like Magneto, and promptly fell on his face. He climbed it the hard way under fire. Being “a massive white polar bear” made him easy to spot. At the top, a Warforged co-pilot threw the hobgoblin leader off the Titan. “Can’t really worry about that guy,” Grimnar reasoned. “We’re in the middle of a war.” His eyes went black and chaos lightning wreathed him as he leapt onto the Titan’s neck. He took bolt after bolt until the ammunition on its shoulders exploded and the head sheared off. He rode it down, tuck-rolled clear of the blast and struck a hero pose for the cheering troops. Then he asked, “There is still a weapon to deliver, is there not?”

The Warhead and the Question of Chaos

The bullet stopped at the edge of the Warmind’s mountain. The physician primed the warhead, which would give them “a good solid minute” to get clear once armed. He insisted on coming along: “I want to see this through to the end.” The party read him and found both motives true. He wanted the Warmind he had helped create destroyed for all the death it had caused. He also wanted to see his magnum opus at work: a celestial being’s power harnessed as a weapon. Grimnar remained unmoved: “it doesn’t matter how many times you tell me this guy’s on the up and up, I’m never going to believe it.”

Static popped around Nehebka as she told Grimnar not to hold back his lightning on her account: “If I am near, it will not harm me. In fact, it might do quite the opposite.” Grimnar replied, “For it is chaos that flows through me.” The physician asked why anyone would align with chaos after seeing what it had done here. Grimnar answered, “What has chaos done? All I have seen here is that what you have done.” The physician conceded: “Facts be facts, I guess.”

Into the Deep

Past a blast door marked by the 34th Deep Divers, the tunnel was carpeted with Warforged corpses and not one RBA body. Some machines were sliced clean “as if something went through them like butter,” some frozen brittle, some warped by lightning. “We don’t fight like this,” the physician said. “There’s somebody else here.” He remembered two strangers who had come seeking “some artifact of power” and wandered off alone. Nehebka observed that “the Dread Fortress is not the ultimate power in the multiversal space.” For one who bore its markings, the physician found that a curious statement.

Then Nehebka’s tremorsense caught metal limbs in a side tunnel: a hulking Warforged with scimitar fingers and a plumed helmet of serrated blades, followed by six lithe soldiers. When a bolt flew at Grimnar, Nehebka’s body passed through his in a swirl of sand and the two traded places. The bolts tore through her arm, and she barely winced. “You should keep your wits about you, Grimnar,” she said. Grimnar stole a little of the enemy’s protection through the lightning between them, flipping a coin to decide which. The physician drew a misericorde from his coat, conjured a teal blade of light from his fingers and charged. “I’ll see you all very soon.”

Ahead, a great circular door glowed magenta and pressed on the skull like a migraine. Grimnar sensed chaos oozing from it, unlike the chaos he knew. It was “a choked and clogged river” with “something pure and black at its center.” “We must be careful,” he warned. “There is a deep chaos presence here, but it is tainted in some way.” Nehebka: “Are we not always careful?”

Two Knights and a Dead Brain

The Warmind turned out to be a vast illithid-like skull spilling tentacles amid channels of magenta fluid. Glauccous was climbing down from it, cleaning his sword on his cape, while Taupe explained that they would “have to dig it out of the brain.” The party’s sneaking lasted until Muffy announced, “Yoo-hoo, we’re right here.” Glauccous didn’t need long to guess where they came from. Grimnar was literally wearing the skull of The Dread Fortress as a belt buckle.

The knights introduced themselves as Antumbrans of the Order of Shadow. Then Glauccous squinted at Muffy and said, “Meir?” He and Taupe knew her brother, an artist and an ally, who had “gotten a bit bigger now” and spoke of her often. Muffy answered: “But he died a while ago. I even have his paintbrush.” For a moment she turned away.

The knights didn’t want a fight. They explained that a remnant of the Shadow King lodged in the Warmind’s brain had caused this whole war, and their order existed to lock such remnants away. The party recalled from the Fortress’s books that the Shadow Knights had once been The Dragon Knights and had changed after Agdrel’s defeat. “We serve the Grandmaster. We don’t serve the Shadow King. The Shadow King is dead,” Glauccous insisted. He did not mean Grandmaster Skypiercer. “There is only one Grandmaster,” said Grimnar and Muffy. Taupe shrugged: “well, there are currently two… The Grandmaster of Shadow.”

Each side’s orders forbade handing over the remnant. Glauccous drew a smoking black blade: “Please do not make me do this. I would rather you be able to meet Maier alive.” He offered to take them to Umbracor to meet his Grandmaster. Nehebka had seen many “offers” made with weapons drawn, “and they all have died.” Grimnar settled it: “our orders are from the highest authority in the void. So it does seem like we must let chaos decide.” “Always with chaos,” Glauccous sighed, and saluted.

Chaos Decides

Grimnar moved first. He reasoned they were asking him to commit treason “in the first five minutes of knowing him.” He knelt, dragged his hands across the floor and sent twin walls of lightning up both knights to fry their minds. Both were left twitching and helpless. Muffy charged Taupe, her brush’s bristles turning to piercing quills. When Taupe pleaded “this isn’t what he’d want,” Muffy plugged her ears: “Sorry, I can’t hear you.”

Nehebka saw real care between the two knights, a mirror of her own party, and chose not to strike the helpless. Glauccous demanded, “Is this the way of the Dread Fortress? Violence over peace?” She answered, “The way of the Dread Fortress is chaos, and you have chosen it.” When he asked whether she even had the capacity for empathy, she said, “Not unless the God King commands it.” Notably, she did not say the Grandmaster.

Taupe tried once more. Meir was one of them, and he missed Muffy. Then, under her breath: “I don’t want to die here.” Muffy dropped her hands, genuinely curious: “Where would you like to die?” Taupe smirked through the pain: “preferably on a beach with a drink.” Muffy then put her in a pro-wrestling headlock, apologising all the while and whispering, “It’ll stop hurting when you go to sleep,” until Taupe went limp. “I put her to sleep,” Muffy told Glauccous. He laid out his cause: “No more senseless violence… The Shadow King is dead. He failed. Where he failed, we can prevail and do something better.” Nehebka answered, “It’s not what I want.” She lifted his chin with one finger, which turned to sand and forced its way into his mouth until it ran through his blood and nerves. Glauccous relaxed, suddenly their friend, and asked about grabbing drinks afterward. “Is, is he on our, are you on our team now?” asked a baffled Grimnar.

A Finger of the King

Digging into the hot “brain soup” left Grimnar’s arms numb with static, so Glauccous took over cheerfully: “it’s pretty gross. But you get used to it after the first time.” His order held at least five remnants at Umbracor. Its leader, he said, was Grandmaster Payne: “sort of like a father to us all.” His knights all came from the lawless periphery of The Void, where few Void Knights keep the peace. “He just wants us all to not have to live in fear, not to be afraid of the dark.” Searching the sleeping Taupe, Nehebka found a cylinder ringed with wards, built to contain remnants. It was artifice worthy of The Arbiter’s collection. Why hadn’t Glauccous mentioned it? “You didn’t ask. You just told me to dig.”

Grimnar insisted on handling the remnant himself. The cylinder kept him from falling under its sway, but a vision still took him. The remnant was a literal finger bone of Agdrel. In it, Agdrel appeared in plain clothes, studying how to master chaos within himself. His notes wondered whether mastery might require sacrificing planes, a civilization, or kin, “maybe somebody like his niece, the Grandmaster, Elusia Skypiercer.” He never did those things. Instead he learned to dilute chaos into his own marrow, and this bone was among the first places it began to change him. “Nobody who has this kind of power just puts it away,” Grimnar said, shaken. “We cannot let their master have it. But I’m not sure that we can let our master have it either.”

Muffy proposed that Grimnar’s lightning and Nehebka’s sand make glass, so she could paint it. “That’s us, team stained glass,” Nehebka agreed, and took his hands to commune. Their shared vision struck true: one body, Nehebka’s right eye and Grimnar’s left. Through it they understood that this tiny bone had turned an Elder Brain into the rampaging Warmind. Grimnar also sensed Nehebka’s own reason to keep the pieces from both sides: her deepest wish was to return home, or to fix what had been broken and shunted into the Void. When she asked what their Grandmaster would do with the bone, Grimnar admitted, “I don’t know her mind anymore than I know yours.”

So they made a plan. Nehebka had once guarded her god-king’s pyramids, where other elements made from her guarded specific pieces, like canopic jars. She tore open her own chest and hid the cylinder inside. “I am not human. I am not humanoid. I am merely a vessel. You cannot corrupt me.” “I’m glad you’re on our side,” said Muffy. They would go to Umbracor to learn more. As Muffy put it, “They also might have my brother.” She had kept arguing with Glauccous that there was only one Grandmaster, and painted Elusia for him with a mustache. “Our Grandmaster has a beard and a mustache,” he replied, so she added a beard. She also wrote Meir a note with his own brush, little more than her name, and Glauccous promised to deliver it if she let him and Taupe live.

Treason on a Tuesday

Before they left, Grimnar asked chaos whether he was making a mistake. A shiver up his spine told him Umbracor held answers. His heart said go, while his mind and loyalties said stay, and Grimnar is chaos first. Nehebka felt the bone burn in her chest and glimpsed, in a kaleidoscope of worlds, that somewhere the God King still lived. Muffy pointed out that they could just go home and get paid. “This could possibly be treason,” Grimnar warned. “I just want to make that clear.” “Well,” said Muffy, “it’s just a regular Tuesday.”

They found the physician alive but missing an arm, the plumed Warforged’s wreckage around him. With the Warmind dead, its remaining soldiers stood inert. He decided to dismantle the warhead, since “Gund would probably put it in a cannon and fire it off for fun.” When he thanked them and said he didn’t think they’d have survived without them, Muffy answered with a stanky smile: “Oh, yeah, you wouldn’t have. You’re welcome.” The war was officially over, and they passed a victory parade on the way to the planar gate.

At the gate, Nehebka asked whether she should make things “more permanent just to be safe.” The sand inside Glauccous clenched as she bound him for thirty days as their ally, and the charmed knight chose not to resist. At the table, her player admitted, “I’ve never said Nehebka was a good person.” Glauccous raised his brooch, the gate flashed, and partway along the planar vein their path branched into the raw stuff of the Void, toward the heart of the Order of Shadow: Umbracor.

Notable Moments

• Muffy killed a Titan with a rainbow in which every stripe was a different kind of destruction, and the troops chanted her name.
• Grimnar announced “I will meet you at the top,” floated majestically, then fell flat on his face, before riding a Titan’s severed head down in a blaze.
• Muffy asked a dying-scared enemy, with sincere curiosity, “Where would you like to die?” and then gently choked her to sleep.
• Nehebka charmed Glauccous by pouring sand down his throat, and he immediately suggested drinks.
• The party learned the remnant was a literal finger bone of the Shadow King, and saw him once consider sacrificing his niece Elusia to master chaos.
• Nehebka ripped open her own chest to become a living canopic jar for the remnant.

Memorable Quotes

• Grimnar Stormclaw: “What has chaos done? All I have seen here is that what you have done.”
• Muffy: “But he died a while ago. I even have his paintbrush.”
• Glauccous: “Is this the way of the Dread Fortress? Violence over peace?”
• Nehebka: “The way of the Dread Fortress is chaos, and you have chosen it.”
• Muffy: “Where would you like to die?”
• Taupe: “Preferably on a beach with a drink.”
• Nehebka: “I am not human. I am not humanoid. I am merely a vessel. You cannot corrupt me.”

Grimnar Stormclaw: “This could possibly be treason. I just want to make that clear.” Muffy: “Well, it’s just a regular Tuesday.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Grimnar Stormclaw (Mudcat)

• A massive white polar bear and acolyte of the Grandmaster. He wears the Dread Fortress skull as a belt buckle.
• Chaos lightning blackens his eyes. He floats like an electromagnet, and his mimicry trait copies an opponent’s trait (here, necrotic resistance) through chaos energy.
• Believes in being a vessel for chaos, not controlling it. He knows the Shadow King’s face from his recent return, at the Deathmatches and the Dread Fortress.
• Saw Agdrel’s memories through the finger bone. Chose to go to Umbracor (“chaos first”) and admits it may be treason.

Nehebka (QR0WNTV)

• A sand being created to guard the god-king’s pyramids, possibly from “Hardicure” (spelling uncertain).
• Doesn’t sleep, has tremorsense, takes sand form (a tornado lower body) and swaps places with allies through sand.
• Serves the God King, not the Grandmaster, and feels no empathy “unless the God King commands it.” Her first desire is to return home or repair what was shunted into the Void.
• She now holds the remnant cylinder inside her chest as a living canopic jar.
• Charmed Glauccous by forcing sand into his mouth, then placed a 30-day Geas on him. Sensed that the God King lives.

Muffy (JustSeum)

• Paints in the air with her dead brother Meir’s paintbrush, which makes ink without paint and has quill-like bristles.
• Rallied an RBA squad as its “mascot” and killed a Titan with a damage-type rainbow. Choked Taupe unconscious.
• Cheerful and cold-blooded (“Where would you like to die?”). Carries a waystone.
• Learned that Meir may be alive at Umbracor, and sent him a note.

Meir (Myer/Maier; not present)

• Muffy’s brother, an artist (paint, mixed media, many portraits). Muffy believed him long dead.
• Glauccous and Taupe say he is an ally at Umbracor who speaks of Muffy often and “misses you.” They saw him a couple of days ago.

Glauccous, Knight of the Order of Shadow and “Antumbran”

• Human, neck-length dark hair, soft features. Fights with a black blade trailing smoke.
• From the periphery. Under Charm Person, then Geas for 30 days, he is now the party’s guide.
• Carries the brooch (planar relay) and the waypoint rune to Umbracor.

Taupe (Toph?), Knight of the Order of Shadow and “Antumbran”

• Ash-gray tiefling with ink-black hair and an arcane stave.
• Carried the remnant containment cylinder and an obsidian crown-and-shield brooch.
• Wants to die “on a beach with a drink.” Choked unconscious by Muffy and carried out by Glauccous.

Grandmaster Payne (the Grandmaster of Shadow)

• Leader of the Order of Shadow, “like a father to us all.” Bearded and mustached. Not big on formality.
• Wants dialogue with Grandmaster Skypiercer, and peace for people “not to be afraid of the dark.”
• The cold-open Grandmaster is inferred to be Payne: the knights call him “Grandmaster” (0:02:51) and later name their Grandmaster as Payne (2:45:01).

The physician

• An illithid scientist who helped create the Warmind, and the Warmind’s would-be destroyer.
• Fights with mind-breaking force, a misericorde and a teal light blade.
• Lost an arm holding the tunnel. Will dismantle the warhead.

The Nightingales: the physician’s two battered attendants. They heal the party and guard the bullet.

Trissavin: one of the RBA’s greatest leaders. Blasted by a Titan’s cannon and saved by Nehebka. Promised that Nehebka will be honored “indefinitely.”

Gund: an RBA figure (inferred from 0:24:28 and 2:56:01) who would “put it in a cannon and fire it off for fun.”

The Warmind: an Elder Brain (illithid skull with tentacles) warped by a finger-bone remnant of Agdrel into a rampaging Warforged commander. Glauccous and Taupe put it down; it died once the remnant was extracted.

Agdrel, the Shadow King (in a vision)

• Studied how to master chaos and considered sacrificing planes, a civilization, or kin such as his niece Elusia.
• Learned to put diluted chaos into his own bone marrow.

Others

• The 34th Deep Divers, who dug the tunnels to the mountain.
• The hobgoblin commando, thrown off the Titan.
• The bladed, “plumed” Warforged leader, killed by the physician.
• Titans (giant Warforged walkers).
• The God King, Nehebka’s creator, who is alive somewhere.

Places

• The realm of cold light / “world of eternal twilight”: the Order of Shadow’s seat, overlooking a city. Inferred to be Umbracor.
• Umbracor (Umbracor/Lumbercore/Umbricor): Payne’s monastery-fortress. It holds at least five remnants and Meir. It is reached by a hidden branch off the planar veins.
• Damerung (Dameron/Damrung), with the site of the solar, the RBA tunnels and the Warmind’s mountain chamber.
• The periphery vs the interior of the Void. The periphery is “pretty lawless,” with few Void Knights.
• The planar gate, and the planar veins between realms.

Groups

• The Order of Shadow / Order of Ascendant Shadows / Order of Shadow Ascendant / Shadow Knights: once the Dragon Knights. They call themselves “what remains of the Shadow King’s forces” but disown him. They hold the books and materials, and gather remnants.
• The RBA (with its stone guard, drow elites and hobgoblin commandos), the Warforged, and Void Knights.

Items

• The remnant: a finger-bone-shaped stone that is a literal finger bone of Agdrel. It is now sealed in the cylinder inside Nehebka.
• The containment cylinder: ringed wards that can hold and dispel any magical item; artifice worthy of the Arbiter’s collection.
• The celestial warhead: powered by a celestial being. Never used; the physician will dismantle it.
• Glauccous’s brooch / planar relay and waypoint rune. Taupe’s obsidian crown-on-shield brooch.
• Meir’s paintbrush. Muffy’s waystone. The bullet transport.

Lore statements

• There are currently two Grandmasters: Skypiercer in the interior and Payne on the periphery.
• Remnants of the Shadow King are scattered across the Void and “plaguing” it. The order holds at least five.
• Agdrel put chaos into his bones; this finger bone was one of the first parts changed.
• Grimnar says “Many [of us] saw him defeated by the Arbiter” and that the Shadow King “returned… not that long ago” to rule.

Full Round-by-Round

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

Cold open: the Order of Shadow

1. 0:00:43 The scene opens in “the realm of cold light”, in an antechamber. Two knights in polished armor of dark grays and deep blues wait there:
   • Glauccous, a human male with neck-length dark hair and soft features.
   • Taupe, a tiefling with ash-gray skin and ink-black hair.
   Taupe admits she is “nervous, but excited about this prospect.” Glauccous grins: “Never better.”
2. 0:01:15 The door opens into a large circular room. It is lined with bookshelves and paintings of “bygone figures from previous ages”, and holds ceremonial armor and weapons “from realms too alien or bizarre to really fit into human hands.” Lit candles bring “an alien warmth to this world of eternal twilight.” A voice says, “Enter.”
3. 0:01:47 The knights kneel before a man who is gazing out over a city below. He thanks “Knight Glauccous, Knight Taupe” for answering his summons and tells them to rise: “There’s no need for that here.”
4. 0:01:54 The mission.
   • He says: “We found another echo, a remnant of the Shadow King on the world of Dameron. I would ask that you both venture there and retrieve it.” Both knights tense up.
   • Glauccous asks whether there have been “ripples from the Dread Fortress.” The man says they will very likely meet “the forces of Grandmaster Skypiercer.”
   • His orders: “offer them our peace, but do not allow them to take the remnant.”
   • The knights answer “By your command, Grandmaster.” So this man is a Grandmaster. He is inferred to be Grandmaster Payne, who is named later.
5. 0:02:51 Once they leave, his smile fades. At his desk lies an open tome with a portrait of the Shadow King Agdrel. He says: “Was this your dream, Shadow King? To live, even in death. What parts of you remain to plague the void even now? And what price will we pay for your folly?”

The bullet

6. 0:03:50 The party rides inside “a bullet”, a modified living creature: a large, smooth, carapaced digger with big digging arms and a canopy fitted for passengers.
   • It burrows through a vast tunnel network. The air is warm and stale, and the party is covered in dirt, rime and blood.
   • Two Nightingales sit opposite, also battered. One has a crack through the center of its mask; the other’s coat is scorched and punctured.
   • The warhead gives off a faint blue glow.
7. 0:04:46 The physician reports that the RBA is launching its counteroffensive “following the attack on the solar.” “This next part of the operation rests firmly within our hands.”
   • Grimnar asks how long until they are in range. “A matter of moments.”
8. 0:05:35 Nehebka sits in a meditative state. “They say healing, but she took no damage. They say rest, but she does not sleep.”

Flashback: the Titans

9. 0:06:07 In her meditation the story returns to the earlier battle.
   • Titans stride in, leaving craters with each step and towing waves of infantry and cannons.
   • RBA stone guard, drow elites and hobgoblin commandos rush to meet them amid bolts of magic, repeating bolt rifles and detonations.
10. 0:07:14 Trissavin falls. Trissavin stands face to face with a Titan. A cannon discharges with a red flash, and her body flies about 20 feet and lands by Nehebka.
11. 0:08:08 Nehebka’s view of death. Where she comes from, “everyone has been assigned and or created for one purpose, and that is the protection and adoration of the god-king that they serve.” Sadness “just does not compute.”
12. 0:09:42 Nehebka saves Trissavin.
    • Nehebka rolls a natural 20 on medicine. Trissavin took the full brunt but is alive, perhaps through a last-minute shield or a miracle. She “will not die in this battle,” though she will soon be unconscious.
    • Trissavin pleads: “Please, please finish this for us. We can only do so much.”
    • Nehebka splays a hand, and her sand props Trissavin up so her airway stays clear. “We will do this with or without you. But I hope someone hears a prayer for you and that you survive this.”
    • Trissavin: “Nehebka, you will be honored here indefinitely.” Nehebka: “I do not care for your honor, nor do I care for your mortal debts.”
13. 0:11:43 Muffy takes command.
    • A squad calls Muffy over. It is a mix of kuo-toa (“Kuwatoa”), bugbears and hobgoblins facing ten Warforged.
    • Muffy conducts the squad with her paintbrush like a maestro. She uses no paint. Instead she draws battle plans in the air out of the cool, dense air itself, with little swirling clouds, X’s and arrows.
    • The inexperienced squad rallies and the line holds. A soldier says: “you’re going to be a hero. Hey, you’re going to be our new mascot.” Muffy: “Yes.”
14. 0:15:39 Muffy kills a Titan.
    • Heavy guns and battle mages topple a Titan. As it rises, a soldier shouts “finish it.”
    • Under the grime it has a glowing red eye and a humanoid head and jaw, and it groans and mumbles.
    • Muffy paints a rainbow in which each band is a different damage type, adds little clouds at the end, and pushes it forward.
    • The rainbow overloads the Titan’s optics and brain stem. Fire erupts from its eyes and it crumples. The troops chant “Muffy! Muffy! Muffy!”
15. 0:18:15 Grimnar kills the last Titan.
    • This is the Titan that shot Trissavin. A hobgoblin commando throws Grimnar a grapple: “we’re going to have to climb it.”
    • Grimnar: “I will meet you at the top.” He starts to float “like Magneto” on electromagnetic lightning. Then he fails his athletics check and falls on his face (“Oh, Gnar”).
    • Smoke canisters go off and the squad charges while Grimnar lags behind in the fog. He scales a lifting leg, but infantry below shoot him: “you are a massive white polar bear.” Several climbing goblins are shot down.
    • At the top, the hobgoblins fight two Warforged co-pilots. The leader tells him: “you got to take down the neck.” Moments later a Warforged throws that hobgoblin off the Titan. Grimnar: “Can’t really worry about that guy… We’re in the middle of a war.”
    • His eyes go black, chaos lightning surrounds him, and he leaps to the neck in a superhero landing. He is struck by bolt after bolt until the metal under his feet turns white-hot. The ammo stores on the shoulders explode, and the head shears off and plummets.
    • He rides it down and leaps clear in a tuck and roll (“Dark Souls”) as it explodes. Duergar (“Dwargar”), drow and goblins cheer his hero pose.
    • Grimnar: “There is still a weapon to deliver, is there not?”
    • Nehebka: “While we still are here.” The party leaves.
16. 0:25:25 Back in the bullet, the physician and Nightingales have healed them. Had they not intervened, “that site would have been lost” and casualties would have been far higher.

Priming the warhead

18. 0:26:33 The bullet stops: “We’re here. Please exit.”
    • The warhead sits in a contained cylinder with celestial energy flowing around it and a small rune keypad. The physician primes it.
    • Once armed, they will have “a good solid minute” to get back to the bullet. The Nightingales will guard the transport, and the physician will come along: “I want to see this through to the end.”
19. 0:27:41 Insight on the physician (a 31; who rolled is unclear). Both motives are true:
    • He wants the Warmind, which he helped create and which caused so much death, destroyed.
    • From scientific curiosity or morbid fascination, he also wants to see the result of “harnessing a celestial being’s power for a weapon,” his magnum opus.
    • He does intend to help. “You all are not a literal suicide squad.”
20. 0:30:00 Nehebka questions him. She asks whether being unable to escape concerns him. “Our lives are my concern… Everyone’s.”
    • Sand forms between the three party members: “Our lives aren’t your concern.”
    • He replies: “I would wish for the three of you to return triumphant heroes… I’m not going to simply have you take out the trash and do the dishes.”
    • Nehebka: “These idioms do not mean much to me.”
    • He offers to stay with the bomb if time runs short.
21. 0:32:13 Grimnar: “it doesn’t matter how many times you tell me this guy’s on the up and up, I’m never going to believe it.”
22. 0:32:26 Static pops around Nehebka. She tells Grimnar: “Do not be afraid to use your full elemental force. If I am near, it will not harm me. In fact, it might do quite the opposite.”
    • Grimnar: “I have no intention of holding back… For it is chaos that flows through me.”
    • Nehebka: “Chaos.” Muffy: “Chaos.” Somewhere in the distance, the 34th Deep Divers all snap their heads toward the word.
23. 0:34:18 “Why chaos?”
    • The physician asks: “Here, you’ve seen what chaos has done. Why do you align yourself with it?”
    • Grimnar: “What has chaos done? All I have seen here is that what you have done.”
    • The physician concedes: “Well, can’t argue with that. All right. Facts be facts, I guess.”

The trail of corpses

24. 0:35:23 They reach a blast door bearing RBA iconography and the insignia of the 34th Deep Divers, whose tunnels reached all the way to the Warmind’s mountain.
25. 0:36:23 What lies beyond. Muffy rolls a natural 20 on perception.
    • There are Warforged corpses everywhere, but not a single RBA body.
    • Some cuts are perfectly clean, “as if something went through them like butter.”
    • Some bodies are brittle and pale from a rapid temperature shift.
    • Others show heat-warping from lightning.
26. 0:38:42 The two visitors.
    • The physician: “we don’t fight like this. There’s somebody else here.”
    • Grimnar suggests “the other two visitors.” The physician explains that two strangers spoke to Trissavin about needing “some artifact of power.” They were promised it if they helped defeat the Warmind, but they never accepted aid and “just trundled off. I honestly considered them dead.”
    • Nehebka says the sounds in her visions told her that some had walked these lands searching for the same thing.
27. 0:40:44 The Dread Fortress isn’t everything.
    • Nehebka: “the Dread Fortress is not the ultimate power in the multiversal space.”
    • The physician: “A curious statement from one that bears their markings.” Nehebka: “That I do.”
    • QR0WNTV explains that she isn’t anti-Dread Fortress; she has simply seen more than it.
    • On his own fighting skills, the physician says: “I am more than adept at breaking apart the minds of my opponents as I break apart their bodies in tow.”
28. 0:42:27 Five or ten minutes deeper, the physician stops near the main chamber to fully arm the warhead. Nehebka would rather they all go in together.

Ambush in the tunnel

29. 0:43:40 Through tremorsense, Nehebka hears metallic limbs in a side tunnel.
    • One is large, nearly as bulky as Grimnar. It has scimitar-blade fingers, gorilla-like forearms, a barreled chest of segmented plates, and a “plumed” helmet made of a fan of serrated blades.
    • Six lithe Warforged follow it.
30. 0:44:38 / 0:46:53 Nehebka takes the shot for Grimnar. A bolt is about to strike Grimnar’s arm, and Nehebka spots the arm raising down the hallway.
    • Sand surrounds both their feet and her body passes straight through his as they switch places. The bolts pierce her arm up to her pectoral and pass out the other side.
    • She shimmies, sand flies everywhere, and she barely winces: “You should keep your wits about you, Grimnar.”
31. 0:45:48 The physician: “Well, this simply won’t do. The warhead is ready. Go. Go to the warmind, and I will handle this.”
32. 0:48:40 Grimnar copies a resistance. Through the electricity connecting them, Grimnar uses his mimicry ability on the bladed Warforged to take one of its traits. Offered necrotic or poison resistance, he flips a coin and gets necrotic.
33. 0:50:10 The physician’s weapons. Unseen force fans the dust outward and lifts rocks around him. He draws a misericorde from his coat (“misery chord”), and with hand signs and arcane runes a teal-blue light blade shimmers out of his fingers. “I’ll see you all very soon.” He charges.

The door of tainted chaos

34. 0:52:50 A large circular door is flanked by plinths, and circuitry runs outward from it. A magenta glow and a faint migraine-like pressure fill the area.
35. 0:53:49 Grimnar reads the chaos.
    • Arcana: chaos is “oozing from this room,” forming a thick miasma that the circuits drag outward.
    • Religion (rerolled with a sorcery point): this is not the chaos he feels outside, at the Fortress, or in “the planar veins on the way to Damerung.” It is “a choked and clogged river,” warped and distorted. “There is something pure and black at its center.”
    • Grimnar: “We must be careful. There is a deep chaos presence here, but it is tainted in some way.” Nehebka: “Are we not always careful?”

The Warmind’s chamber

36. 0:57:55 The Warmind. It is a massive illithid-like skull with tentacles spilling out, sitting among channels of magenta fluid, vaulted ceilings and geometric pillars. Warforged corpses lie everywhere and the room has an acrid, amniotic stench.
    • Glauccous climbs down from the skull, cleaning his sword with his cape: “that should handle things here, Taupe… Just gotta extract that remnant.”
    • Taupe: “we have to dig it out of the brain.”
37. 0:59:41 The party fails stealth. Muffy: “Yoo-hoo, we’re right here.”
    • Taupe: “oh shit.” Glauccous stands beside her, sword drawn but not attacking: “you all don’t look metal and you don’t look like RBA. So I’m going to make a guess here. Dread Fortress.”
    • Grimnar is “literally dressed in the skull of the Dread Fortress as a belt buckle.”
    • They introduce themselves as “Antumbran Glauccous” and “Antumbran Taupe”, apparently a rank or title (spelling uncertain).
38. 1:00:51 Meir.
    • Glauccous squints at Muffy: “Meir?” Muffy: “Oh, you must be talking about my brother… Great artist.”
    • Taupe agrees: “he’s a exquisite artist… One of our allies. I can see the resemblance.”
    • They saw him “a couple days ago. He speaks about you a lot.” He’s “small guy… gotten a bit bigger now,” and works in paint and mixed media.
    • Muffy: “But he died a while ago. I even have his paintbrush.”
    • Taupe: “I think he might be your Meir.” Muffy turns away for a moment.
39. 1:02:44 Grimnar proposes they need not quarrel. Glauccous doesn’t want to fight either, “considering we just fought through all of that.” He explains: “Our job as Antumbran’s is, uh, we need to extract the remnant from this here giant brain. It was a hell of a thing to put down, but goddamn, we did it.”
    • The Warmind “ended up having a piece or a remnant of the uh shadow king stuck in his brain and it’s caused all of this mess.”
    • Their duty “as… Knights of the Order of Shadow” is “to retrieve it and put it safely away so that it can’t cause harm to the people of the Void any longer.”
40. 1:04:48 What the party knows of the Shadow Knights (investigation, from books at the Dread Fortress):
    • The Shadow Knights were once called Dragon Knights. After the defeat of Agdrel the Shadow, the organization changed.
    • There were occasional sightings, and Void Knights reported activity linked to the Shadow King or “this shadow cult.” The order was never pinned down.
    • The gray and blue armor matches, but these knights don’t behave like the Shadow Knights in the books.
41. 1:06:18 Two Grandmasters.
    • Grimnar: “the Shadow King is gone. Dead, some would say. Many we saw him defeated by the Arbiter. So, tell me, who is it that you are fighting for?”
    • Glauccous: “We serve the Grandmaster. We don’t serve the Shadow King. The Shadow King is dead.”
    • Grimnar: “you can’t serve the Grandmaster because we are serving the Grandmaster.” Glauccous: “We do not serve Grandmaster Skypiercer. No, we serve our Grandmaster.”
    • Grimnar and Muffy: “There is only one Grandmaster.” Taupe shrugs: “well, there are currently two… The Grandmaster of Shadow.”
42. 1:07:28 What their Grandmaster wants.
    • Taupe: “He wants peace. These things, these remnants, are plaguing the Void… Our goal is to gather them and contain them in one place, back where they belong, back in our monastery, our fortress.”
    • Glauccous has orders to offer peace. “Our Grandmaster does not wish for violence between both orders… he would prefer to have an open dialogue with Grandmaster Skypiercer.” But no one else may have the remnant.
    • Taupe: “Would you like to come with us?”
43. 1:09:48 Impasse.
    • Grimnar counters: give us the remnant and come to the Dread Fortress for that dialogue. Glauccous: “The Grandmaster gives explicit direction.”
    • Nehebka: “our fortress has given us ours, so it seems that we are at an impasse.”
    • Glauccous: “You could just let us go. Without the remnant.” Muffy: “Yeah, the remnant is ours.”
44. 1:10:43 Glauccous draws. He holds out a cool black blade trailing smoke: “Please do not make me do this. I would rather you be able to meet Maier alive.”
    • Nehebka looks at her own sand-wreathed scimitar: “If you would like to fight, that is your prerogative. But understand, you make threats that you cannot keep.”
    • Glauccous suggests “Rock, paper, scissors,” then tells Muffy “You are very like him.” Muffy: “Stop that.”
    • Glauccous makes the full offer. They need not renounce allegiance; others have offered the same to Void Knights before. “Come with us to Umbracor and you can meet our Grandmaster.”
    • Nehebka can’t be bothered: she has seen many in her realm make such “offers” with weapons drawn, “and they all have died.”
45. 1:13:17 Grimnar: “our orders are from the highest authority in the void. So it does seem like we must let chaos decide.”
    • Glauccous: “Always with chaos.” He raises his sword in salute, and Taupe raises a stave with arcane force building around it.
    • Glauccous: “if we must, then as a Knight of the Shadows, I will have to stop you.” Muffy: “Well, good luck.”
46. 1:15:48 Break (cut). On return, Kyle calls the knights “two knights belonging to the Order of Ascendant Shadows.”

The fight with the Shadow Knights

47. 1:16:24 Grimnar opens (natural 20 initiative). His reasoning: “They’re asking me to commit treason… in the first five minutes of knowing him.”
    • He twin-casts a psychic lance on both knights. Taupe rolls a natural 1 on the save; Glauccous fails too.
    • Flavor: he kneels, drags his hands across the floor (“nothing personal”), and sends two walls of lightning up their bodies to “fry their brains.”
    • Both are badly hurt and incapacitated, twitching with aftershocks. Glauccous desperately grips his sword.
48. 1:20:05 Muffy’s first turn.
    • She dashes in. Taupe tries to mouth “We don’t have to fight like this.” Muffy: “But I want to!”
    • Her paintbrush’s bristles become fine threads that pierce like quills. She rages and stabs Taupe twice.
    • Taupe, gritting her teeth: “this isn’t what he’d want.” Muffy: “Sorry, I can’t hear you,” and plugs her ears.
49. 1:23:16 Nehebka’s first turn.
    • She takes sand form: her lower body becomes a tornado.
    • Insight (21): she sees genuine care between the two knights and recognizes them as mirrors of her own party. Their missions conflict, though, and they refused Grimnar’s counteroffer, which “she won’t forgive.”
    • She chooses not to attack the helpless knights, and waits.
50. 1:27:19 Glauccous pleads (still incapacitated).
    • Glauccous: “Is this the way of the Dread Fortress? Violence over peace?”
    • Nehebka: “The way of the Dread Fortress is chaos, and you have chosen it.”
    • Next, “We stand for order in the madness of the Void” (speaker uncertain; probably Glauccous).
    • Glauccous: “You live here, don’t you? You serve her. Do you even know what happens here in the void? Do you know what these people go through? You choose chaos.”
    • Nehebka: “Is this your attempt at attempting to sow empathy upon my farm?” Glauccous smirks: “Do you even have the capacity for empathy?”
    • Nehebka: “Not unless the God King commands it.” QR0WNTV notes: “she did not say the Grandmaster.”
51. 1:29:22 Taupe and Muffy.
    • Taupe: “Your brother, Myer, is one of us, and he misses you. He’s not here, but if you surrender and come with us, we can show him to you.” Muffy: “I can’t read your lips! Sorry.”
    • Taupe, under her breath: “I don’t want to die here.”
    • Muffy drops her hands: “Where would you like to die?” She is genuinely curious. Kyle: “Muffy is the most cold-blooded.”
    • Taupe smirks through the pain: “preferably on a beach with a drink.”
52. 1:31:59 Grimnar goes for the remnant.
    • The Warmind isn’t moving, so the remnant must be dug out of the brain mass. Grimnar dashes for it: “You hold them off and I will go for the remnant.”
    • Kyle: “Imagine him sprinting is very like… This is very big.”
53. 1:35:00 Muffy chokes Taupe out.
    • The knights recover their reactions. Muffy grapples Taupe pro-wrestler style, getting under her arms and throwing her down into a headlock. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
    • She goes for a non-lethal knockout “so that it’s, you know, she’s not getting hurt anymore,” whispering “It’ll stop hurting when you go to sleep.”
    • She uses action surge. Taupe’s eyes roll back, she goes slack, and she falls unconscious. Muffy pats her cheek to check.
54. 1:40:13 Muffy and Glauccous.
    • Muffy lunges at Glauccous, but he repels her “like a bull off the cape.”
    • Glauccous: “What’d you do to her?” Muffy: “I put her to sleep.… I’m sorry, mom.”
    • Glauccous: “We don’t have to do this… I can’t fail here the same way that neither of you can fail here.” Muffy: “This can be the same both ways. It’s your choice though.”
    • Her persuasion fails. Glauccous: “If we’re going to stop chaos, I have to make sure that order prevails.” Muffy: “Well, we’re not stopping chaos. All right, Nehebka, he’s yours.”
55. 1:42:44 Glauccous explains his cause.
    • Nehebka: “So that’s what you wanted to do. You wanted to stop chaos.”
    • Glauccous: “And bring peace to the Void. No more senseless violence. [No] more people pulled out of their homes for sport, for entertainment. The Shadow King is dead. He failed. Where he failed, we can prevail and do something better.”
    • Nehebka: “That’s just one problem with what you want. It’s not what I want.”
56. 1:44:39 The Warmind is near death. Its eyes are cold and empty, and the only light comes from the remnant in its head. It is “on death’s door… The remnant is the only thing that’s actually still keeping it fully alive.”
57. 1:45:15 Nehebka charms Glauccous.
    • She smiles, puts a finger under his chin: “I told you though, I do not need to kill you. We will get what we want.”
    • Her finger turns to sand, crawls over his face, peels back his mouth and forces its way inside him. She casts Charm Person (Kyle had removed the drow Fey Ancestry from his stat block). Glauccous fails the save.
    • The sand infuses with his blood and nervous system. His pupils dilate, then relax, his grip loosens, and his heart rate slows.
    • “He is one with the sand and the sand wants that peace and to come back to the Dread Fortress.” His objective is to get the remnant and come back to the Dread Fortress.
58. 1:50:18 Charmed Glauccous helps.
    • He dashes to the Warmind, treating them as friends: “So after we get this thing out of here, uh, what do you want to do next? Grab drinks?”
    • Grimnar is baffled: “What the? Is, is he on our, are you on our team now?” Now and then sand tendrils show around Glauccous’s mouth, likened to The Last of Us cordyceps.
    • Grimnar: “maybe you just tell us a little bit more about your Grandmaster. Would you boost me up here, please?” Glauccous does.
59. 1:52:51 Behind the door, the physician’s battle rages on: he hasn’t lost, but it’s giving him “a run for his money.” With Taupe asleep and Glauccous charmed, the party leaves initiative. Kyle: “you’ve solved my Shadow Knight puzzle… achievement unlocked.”

Digging out the remnant; Grandmaster Payne

60. 1:54:34 The brain soup.
    • The brain is hot “brain soup.” The deeper Grimnar reaches, the more a static, pins-and-needles numbness spreads up his forearms.
    • Wary, Grimnar has Glauccous take over. Glauccous: “it’s pretty gross. But you get used to it after the first time.… We’ve got a couple of remnants back at Umbracor.”
61. 1:56:16 The remnants.
    • Glauccous: “We’re planning to take them from the Void so that they can’t do stuff like this… We’re locking them away. That’s our job… They’re parts of the Shadow King.”
    • Why them? “Because we’re what remains of the Shadow King’s forces? I mean, we have the books, we have the materials. This has been our goal from day one. Gather the remnants. Bring peace to the Void.”
    • Grimnar: wasn’t the Shadow King the one who brought disorder in the first place? “He’s dead, and that’s why we don’t follow him anymore.” A change of heart after his death? “That’s something you’d have to ask the Grandmaster about.”
62. 1:57:40 Grandmaster Payne. Glauccous describes his leader:
    • “I don’t know, I just work for the guy. Pretty cool, though… Not really big on formality.”
    • “Grandmaster Pain[e] has been sort of like a father to us all. We’re all from the periphery… out there it’s pretty lawless. Not many Void Knights come walking through trying to keep the peace.”
    • “He’s got a vision… When he talks, you just, you sort of get it. He just wants us all to not have to live in fear, not to be afraid of the dark. I think you’d like him.”
    • Grimnar: “I’d have to meet him first… Are you there yet?” Glauccous: “oh, sorry, got distracted.”
63. 1:59:20 Taupe’s belongings. Taupe is unconscious but stable. She carries a staff and wears simple finery and robes.
    • Her brooch: an obsidian crown resting atop a shield, decorated with sapphire and silver. It is her order insignia.
    • Muffy offers Nehebka something to eat (“I worked up quite an appetite. Would you like one?”). Nehebka: “No.” (The item isn’t named.)
    • Nehebka searches Taupe for anything important. She isn’t stealing; she is doing her job.
64. 2:02:26 The containment cylinder. On Taupe’s belt is a cylinder with two brass knobs, ringed with sigils.
    • Arcana (23): each ring is its own inlaid protective ward. It is built to contain remnants for safe transport, and can hold and dispel any magical thing that fits.
    • It is the highest-caliber artifice she has seen, something that “would maybe be in the Arbiter’s collection.”
    • Nehebka understands magic but not artifice (“not really what they did back in Hardicure”). A sandy hand floats it to Grimnar: “This could contain the remnant.”
    • Grimnar to Glauccous: “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?” Glauccous: “You didn’t ask. You just told me to dig.” Grimnar jiggles a chunk of brain in his other hand.
65. 2:07:02 Grimnar touches the remnant. “Let me do this part. I want to learn.” He fails his wisdom save even after a sorcery-point reroll.
    • His vision fades and static overtakes his body, but the cylinder keeps him from falling under the remnant’s sway. Without it, touching the remnant would have been “like being blackout drunk.”
    • The remnant is a tiny finger-bone-shaped piece of stone that is literally a finger bone of Agdrel, overflowing with raw chaotic energy.
66. 2:08:05 The vision of Agdrel. Grimnar knows the Shadow King’s face “during his return, which was not that long ago… he would have seen him at the Deathmatches and around the Dread Fortress.”
    • The vision shows Agdrel in plain clothes, not as a shadowy behemoth, studying photos and books on how to manipulate, control and contain chaos within oneself.
    • His notes ask: “What does one have to do to master the unmasterable? Do you have to sacrifice a couple of planes? Do you have to sacrifice a civilization?… Maybe it involves sacrificing kin. Maybe somebody like his niece, the Grandmaster, Elusia Skypiercer.”
    • None of these were fulfilled. But he did learn to dilute chaos so it could live in the marrow of one’s own bones. “As he would learn at great cost,” this finger bone was one of the first places where chaos began to change who he was.
67. 2:11:35 Grimnar, shaken. He sees it as a physical piece of the Shadow King, still holding some memory or consciousness.
    • To Glauccous: “Nobody who has this kind of power just puts it away.”
    • Glauccous: “You have no idea.” How many do they have? “At least five. But who can say how many more are out there?”
    • Grimnar to the party: “It is the defilement of chaos. We cannot let their master have it. But I’m not sure that we can let our master have it either.… This power should not be wielded by anyone.” Should it be destroyed? “I think that is what I am saying, yes.”
68. 2:14:59 Nehebka reads Grimnar. She is struck that Grimnar, the Grandmaster’s own acolyte, doesn’t want to bring it home. Her insight is a natural 20.
    • What she senses is strong, sincere hesitation. Grimnar sees himself as a vessel for chaos, not its controller, and this “spits in the face of” that belief.
    • He isn’t corrupted by the remnant, just shaken.
69. 2:18:35 Team Stained Glass.
    • Grimnar tries to reverse his mimicry trait to send Nehebka the vision. On the first try he gets close. Kyle narrates his musing: maybe hit Nehebka, or drink chaos juice (“that’s backwash”).
    • Muffy suggests: “What if the two of you somehow… your elements combine and you create glass?… And then I will paint it.” Nehebka: “that’s us, team stained glass.”
    • Nehebka takes both his hands: “where we come from, we commune. Perhaps send your energy to me, I send mine back to you.” Her sands cover their hands as she casts Enhance Ability on him.
70. 2:22:12 Meanwhile, Muffy and Glauccous.
    • Glauccous: “are you guys going to kill us?” Muffy: “Probably not… I can never promise.” Glauccous: “You’re one to talk.” Muffy: “You started it.”
    • Glauccous asks why she reacted that way to Meir’s name. Muffy: “He’s been dead.” Glauccous: “He’s not… he is at Umbracor. I promise you that.”
    • Muffy: “Why is he there and hasn’t come home? If he were alive? Riddle me that!” Glauccous: “I think you’d have to ask him… I don’t know his whole story… He’s painted a bunch of portraits.”
    • Glauccous offers to deliver a message, “depends on if you kill me or not.” Muffy: “Well, if you try to leave, I will.”
    • Glauccous explains they all go home the same way, through the planar gate. With the Warmind dead, they can get home “without having to get… shunted through time and space.”
71. 2:26:05 Muffy’s message to Meir. She sits in the sand and takes out a much-reused piece of parchment. With Meir’s paintbrush, ink forms on the page without paint.
    • She writes little more than her name: “It’s Muffy. Right back.” (Possibly “write back”; there may be a hidden message.)
    • Glauccous takes it: “provided that you let me and Taupe live, then I’ll make sure that this gets into his hands.”
72. 2:27:19 The Grandmaster argument.
    • Glauccous says they would put the remnant in a vault, and they have “like five of them.” Muffy: “No, no, no, the Grandmaster wants them back… the Grandmaster is my Grandmaster.”
    • Glauccous: “There’s two Grandmasters… you all are in the interior, we’re on the periphery… the one on the outside and the one on the inside.” Muffy: “Wrong. There’s one.” She starts painting it out for him.
73. 2:28:54 The shared vision.
    • Grimnar tries again to connect the two of them through chaos, rolling with advantage. Nehebka rolls a natural 20.
    • His chaos merges with her infinite sand. They share one body: Nehebka has the right eye, Grimnar the left. She sees everything he saw.
    • They understand that a tiny finger bone warped an Elder Brain (“Elden Brain”) into the rampaging Warmind, so bigger or gathered pieces “could be disastrous.”
74. 2:31:20 Nehebka’s own motive. Grimnar picks up a hint from Nehebka: the pieces could be useful. It isn’t greed. Her first desire is to return home, or to fix what was broken and shunted into the Void, and bigger pieces might help with that. So she too is “Don’t bring it back to either side… for our own reasons.”
75. 2:32:46 Grimnar: “this is much larger than any one ruler. This is something that could destroy the Void and all people. Chaos cannot be contained or distorted. It must be free to work in its own desire. We’ve seen when the Shadow King tried to manipulate it that the entire void shook and crumbled underneath its corruption.”
76. 2:34:06 What would Elusia do?
    • Nehebka: “Be honest with me, Grimnar Stormclaw. If the Grandmaster that we know had this piece today, what would she do?”
    • Grimnar: “I don’t know. I would like to think that she would destroy it or put it away somewhere where no one could reach it, but who can say? I don’t know her mind anymore than I know yours.”
77. 2:35:22 The plan forms.
    • Nehebka: “I am curious now. To see this other Grandmaster for myself… It would be our duty to your Grandmaster to make sure that it is true.”
    • Grimnar: “It is not so much that I do not trust the Grandmaster. She has never given me a reason not to trust her, but I don’t think I trust anyone with this power.” If Payne’s intentions are bad, they might relieve him of his five pieces, but they shouldn’t walk in carrying this one.
    • Nehebka: “Do you trust me?” Grimnar: “Yes, I think so.”
    • Muffy, called over mid-argument: “Sorry, I was debating Grandmaster stuff… Of course. Unless it’s the wrong answer.”
78. 2:39:03 Nehebka becomes the vessel.
    • “Where I come from… I guarded my god king’s pyramids. There were other elements made from me to guard specific pieces. You all will call them canopic jars.” She grabs her chest and rips it open.
    • “I will be the vessel for now. They won’t take it from me… I am not human. I am not humanoid. I am merely a vessel. You cannot corrupt me.” Muffy: “I’m glad you’re on our side.”
    • The cylinder is hidden inside Nehebka, a nesting-doll arrangement, while Glauccous is distracted. Grimnar thinks the cylinder makes it harder to detect.
    • Grimnar: “I’m not saying we should not give it to the Grandmaster, I just… I think that we need to know more before we do.” Nehebka: they have more pieces, “Which means they have more information.” Muffy: “They also might have my brother.”
79. 2:41:29 The escape plan. Grimnar asks how they’d get out of an enemy stronghold. Muffy has her waystone.
80. 2:43:11 The mustache.
    • Muffy keeps arguing and paints “the right one”: the Grandmaster, with a mustache. Glauccous: “Wait, I didn’t know she had a mustache.”
    • Glauccous: “Our Grandmaster has a beard and a mustache.… Pain[e] and Elusia can be… They can live at the same time.” Muffy draws a beard too.
81. 2:44:43 Asking to come along. Nehebka asks Glauccous to take them to his Grandmaster for information.
    • Glauccous: “Grandmaster Payne is always willing to welcome other denizens of the Void and even knights such as yourselves from the Dread Fortress. He just wants to have a dialogue.”
    • Grimnar: “A name like Grandmaster Payne doesn’t sound all that inviting… Where I come from, your name means something.” Glauccous: “he spells it P-A-Y-N-E… He’s not like, ooh, I’m Grandmaster, I’m gonna whip you.”
    • Grimnar on the remnant: “It has been [put] somewhere safe for now, until we know your true intentions.” Glauccous: “I guess that’s fair.”
    • He carries the sleeping Taupe: “I have the waypoint rune to get us to Umbracor… You guys will be able to see the other side of things… the void is a big place.” Muffy: “Huge!”
82. 2:47:08 Grimnar listens to chaos.
    • He closes his eyes: “Am I making a mistake?” It is not usually for him to decide things.
    • A shiver runs up his spine. At Umbracor he will find answers and be closer to his goals. “Your heart is telling you to go. Your mind and your loyalties are telling you to stay.”
    • “He is chaos first, so he’s gonna go.” “Chaos doesn’t have a loyalty… even though he does.”
83. 2:49:54 Nehebka seeks the God King.
    • Through the cylinder’s wards, the center of her chest burns “as if it was the desert sun itself.” Her inner vision is dragged toward the bone.
    • She sees a cracked reflection of many worlds and realms in kaleidoscopic color, and plucks out the center: “somewhere out there, the God King lives.”
    • “Then her purpose is still her purpose.” “Then we go.”
84. 2:52:48 Treason.
    • Muffy: “why don’t we just leave? These are extra steps. We can make it home and get paid.”
    • Grimnar: “This is… Not about payment or our mission. This is something larger… we must know what the Grandmaster’s intentions are before we give it to anyone.”
    • Muffy: “All right. I will go with.” Grimnar: “This could possibly be treason. I just want to make that clear.” Muffy: “Well, it’s just a regular Tuesday.”

Epilogue

85. 2:54:01 The physician survives.
    • He is alive but terribly wounded, one arm missing. The plumed-helmet Warforged’s frame lies around him.
    • “Oh, God. I was worried that you all wouldn’t make it.” Grimnar: “I think that you’ll find no use for that bomb… we dug through his brain pretty good.”
    • The remaining Warforged stand completely inert. The physician: “So yes, I would say you digging through its brain did the trick.”
86. 2:55:53 The warhead.
    • The physician: “Oh damn, I did want to see what this thing would do.” Grimnar: “Something tells me you’ll find a use for it.”
    • The physician: “Oh, no, I’ll dismantle it. For all we know, Gund would probably put it in a cannon and fire it off for fun.” Muffy: “That does sound fun.”
    • “Thank you, all of you… I do not think we would have survived without you.” Muffy: “Oh, yeah, you wouldn’t have. You’re welcome.” She keeps her “little stanky smile” while he glares.
87. 2:56:50 The war ends. They reclaim the warhead and return by bullet to the site of the solar. “Congratulations, the war is now officially over.” The party passes a parade and fanfare on its way to the planar gate.
88. 2:57:33 Geas at the gate.
    • Glauccous: “we’re going to go to Umbracor and you all are going to meet Grandmaster Payne. Promise is going to be worth it.”
    • Nehebka rejects detonating the warhead (“unnecessary. She’d rather take this place for herself”).
    • She asks Muffy and Grimnar: “Should I make this more permanent just to be safe?” Both agree. Grimnar: “It would be nice to have a reliable ally.”
    • The sands inside Glauccous clutch as she casts Geas: “you will be our ally and will not break,” for 30 days. Already charmed, Glauccous chooses to fail the save. If he acts against it, he takes psychic damage.
    • QR0WNTV: “I’ve never said Nehebka was a good person.”
89. 3:02:03 Into the Void.
    • Glauccous: “hey, we’re allies here. All right, let’s go.” He holds up his brooch and the planar gate flashes.
    • Mid-vein, the path branches off “into the raw stuff of the void down an unseen path” of blues, blacks and grays, “alleyways through the void.”
    • They are bound for the heart of the Order of Shadow Ascendant, Umbracor.
90. 3:02:53 “the season finale of arc one of Pieces of a King.”