Pieces of a King is a four-part story arc that leaves the arena behind. It follows three Knights of the Void from the Dread Fortress: the lightning-touched werebear Grimnar Stormclaw (played by Mudcat), the sand-bound guardian Nehebka, and the very small, very dangerous fennec fox painter Muffy (played by JustSeum). The Grandmaster and the Arbiter are away from the Fortress, so the trio is sent to investigate a darkness gathering at the edge of the Void. It turns out to be connected to a villain everyone thought was finished: the Shadow King. What starts as a scouting mission becomes a war story, a mystery about rival knights, and finally a choice that Grimnar himself says “could possibly be treason.” It also introduces a second Grandmaster, and that idea reshapes how the Void looks from the inside.
Background
The Shadow King was believed dead, his power broken and scattered after the Arbiter defeated him. As Grimnar puts it at the start of the arc: “Of course we are. But he’s dead. The Arbiter killed him.” When the story opens, the Grandmaster and the Arbiter have left the Fortress to deal with “something big that could kill us all,” the threat posed by Fil. Their absence leaves the Fortress’s scholars and knights to handle a second crisis alone. As one of them dryly observes, “These things always come in twos.”
The Story
Episode 1: The Summons and the Fall to Dämmerung
Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG opens deep inside the giant orc skull of the Dread Fortress. Each of the three knights is introduced in a quiet moment. Grimnar is a seven-foot polar werebear whose chest and hands are scarred with branching lightning burns. He argues with his scholar brother, who studies under the Arbiter and refuses to “be a large, bare man… swinging a sword.” Grimnar believes he was touched by chaos as a child and hears its voice. The argument ends the way their arguments always end, with a bear-strength punch to the arm. Nehebka, masked and wrapped in linen, blesses her bronze scimitar with sand, which she conjures from an empty hand. When a superior interrupts her, a snake of sand creeps across the floor toward him. Muffy, meanwhile, finishes a near-photoreal portrait of the Grandmaster and then paints a black mustache on it. The goblin staff and the odd rogue chinchilla chant “hang it, hang it, hang it.” She hangs it at exactly the height only people her size can see.
The three are summoned to the star-filled study of Knight Commander Stolas, a rumpled raven Aarakocra. His divinations by bones, tea leaves and cards all point the same way: shadows are growing at the edge of the Void, and the Shadow King’s power seems to be accumulating on Dämmerung, “a rather bleak looking world.” Nehebka checks his heartbeat through the ground and finds genuine concern, not deceit. Stolas gives Muffy a one-use relay stone. Breaking it calls the nearest gate and brings them home. Before they leave, Grimnar takes Stolas aside to ask him to look after his brother “because he is an idiot.” He also warns that the brother gets gassy on cheese. Nehebka hears every word, because Grimnar’s whisper can be felt before it is heard.
After a lightning prayer on the lava plains, the trio meets Zzhitopp, the comic-loving Githzerai portal master. He mixes iron and dirt into a portal, praises himself (“Well, Zzhitopp, you did it again, you bastard”), explains the goo pit where fallen Fortress folk are put back together, and begs them not to bring him back any fecal matter. When Grimnar asks, “Is it the poop pit?”, Zzhitopp concedes it might be. He also warns them never to swim outside the planar vein. Muffy promptly rolls a natural 1 on swimming. “That’s canon.” They ride a crystalline tube across the Void, past an ossuary whale and a turtle-dolphin. Nehebka feels a black hole look back at her. Then they crash onto Dämmerung in the middle of a battlefield, which tells them at once that something has gone wrong.
Mismatched metal constructs stitched from the bodies of the dead advance, demanding they “Surrender to the will of the Warmind.” The three knights flatten them before the fight properly starts. Muffy rolls two natural 20s and steers her friends through a stampede of retreating soldiers. Her magenta paint corrodes metal. Grimnar calls down a storm through his own heart, and Nehebka buries constructs in coffins of sand. When a signal flare brings giant walkers lumbering out of the smoke, a goblin in a gas mask slaps Grimnar’s thigh and asks, “Friend or foe?” Grimnar kneels and declares him an emissary of chaos. Muffy paints a mustache on a falling Blade Scout (“Magnifique”), and Nehebka scoops the screaming fox into a whirlwind. They escape under an artillery barrage and goblin fog. After an hour in the tunnels they reach the encampment, where the goblin introduces himself: “Name’s Grim, by the way. You’re welcome for the save. Oh, and welcome to the Rust Blood Alliance.”
Episode 2: The War Council
Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL opens far away, in a castle in a realm of perpetual twilight. A man in a slate blue tunic stares at a shadowed sun. He says that the Shadow King’s power was once “trapped within a box… used for spectator sport,” and that it has now been flung across the Void, where “even a fragment of that power will usher disaster.”
On Dämmerung, the war camp falls silent as the newcomers arrive. In the command tent they meet War Mistress Trissavin Baenerret, a towering drow in black plate. They also meet Gund Ashbrow, the grumpy duergar chief artillerist, who decides they’re “far too chaotic to be programmed” and therefore not spies. Nehebka threatens to fill his throat with sand: “I do not threat. Everything I say is a promise.” Gund replies, with feeling, that he hates sand anyway. It’s coarse. Grimnar adds that it gets everywhere.
The war’s history comes out in pieces. Ten years ago, the peoples of the Underdark were losing to invaders from above, so they united under one banner and built something to save them: the Warmind. They made it with the help of the illithids, and its contributors gave of themselves “both literal and physical.” Then it “stopped regarding us as allies and started to regard us as resources and obstacles.” The party also learns that two strangers in blue and gray came through days earlier. They spoke of chaos and headed into the Blastlands, toward the mountain range where most of the Alliance’s troubles come from. Gund’s last-ditch plan is to weaponize the corpse of a slain angel.
Grim’s tour, the mess hall and the barracks fill out the camp’s daily life. A bugbear chef has never heard of the Grandmaster (“I don’t remember voting for her”), and Grimnar and Muffy try to recruit him for the D20 Deathmatch: “Sometimes they come back.” Muffy declares the trio the 35th squad of the Kuo-Toa’s Deep Divers, and the Kuo-Toa end up pounding the table with Grimnar, chanting “Chaos! Chaos!” Nehebka performs a ritual and hears a voice like air filling lungs after millennia: “Shadows link them. Chaos beckons… a new king rises,” and “every king needs a crown.” When she asks again, the voice adds a second omen: “every piece has a reflection.” Grimnar’s own vision shows a pulsing orb of raw chaos on a southern peak. Muffy paints a map of that mountain with a dry brush: the mountain glows Warmind magenta, with its entrance a tiny black crevice partway up. That night the knights sculpt, whittle and play Muffy’s game Cabals and Krakens. She is “a terrible DM. Horrendous.”
Then the Nightingales arrive: masked, blood-spattered figures whom the soldiers fear. Their leader removes his mechanical mask to reveal an illithid. He introduces himself as the Physician, because his mother “just wanted to have a very long, important sounding name.” (“Mine just called me Muffy.”) He explains that the Nightingales destroy every fallen body so the Warmind can’t harvest it. He also reveals that the Warmind has blocked every attempt to leave Dämmerung for five years. Muffy’s relay stone is useless. Years ago, the Kuo-Toa found a black star fall from the sky, “a tiny finger bone, made of perfectly black glass.” It was fed to the young Warmind, and “overnight it grew.” When the Physician reads Nehebka’s mind, a storm of pyramids and an ancient god-king pushes him back out.
Episode 3: The Warhead
Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead opens with Trissavin’s memories. She was once a girl who dreamed of being a priestess. Later, papers were signed approving the Warmind, and she told herself that hard decisions were what leadership meant. Now she is “terrified of the possibility of hope.” By morning, Muffy is running an insignia stall for soldiers who want flaming skulls and laser swords on their armor. She also defines the Fortress salute on the spot: two fingers up, one arm tucked behind the back, and the words “up, up and away.”
At the second council, Nehebka startles the room by confessing, “I was the war mind for my domain.” The Physician vows that if the city falls, he will make sure the Warmind can’t take anyone’s mind, his own included. When Trissavin presses Muffy on order versus chaos, Muffy says, “I’m committed to the Grandmaster.” Nehebka then steps in front of her with a warning: “I would hope that your intentions do not turn your malevolent gaze towards us.” When Trissavin answers that she would not dream of it, Nehebka replies, “As one who does not dream, good.” Grimnar breaks the tension by asking for breakfast first: “You could all be dead this afternoon, so might as well eat.”
A living, insect-like transport takes them to the Solar’s Grave. The colossal winged corpse of an angel lies there while crews drill its marrow for warheads. Grimnar notes it “kind of reminds me of the Grandmaster a little bit.” Muffy paints a mustache on it. Gund’s plan needs someone to carry a warhead into the Warmind’s mountain by hand. The party suspects Gund would happily sacrifice them, and Muffy intimidates him in front of everyone. Then the smoke rises. The Physician puts his mask back on: “Well, my friends, looks like we’ve been found.”
The defense of the Solar’s Grave is the arc’s biggest battle. Grimnar burns away more fur from around his eyes to hurl a fireball three hundred feet. Nehebka strides through a tree into the enemy lines with Muffy, who breaks a lieutenant’s knees: “They can’t go for those toes, but we can go for theirs.” Grim answers Grimnar’s fireball with one of his own and gets rated “Six out of ten.” When two Titans arrive, Trissavin orders the party to take the warhead and go. Grimnar covers their retreat by firing two beams of chaos energy from his eyes, and one Titan crashes to the ground. The episode ends with more war horns sounding. The Warmind is coming.
Episode 4: The Warmind
Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind opens back in the realm of cold light. Two knights in gray and blue, Glauccous and Taupe, kneel before a man they call Grandmaster. He sends them to retrieve “another echo, a remnant of the Shadow King.” They are to offer peace to Grandmaster Skypiercer’s forces but never give up the prize. Alone, he looks at a portrait of Agdrel: “What price will we pay for your folly?”
The rest of the battle is told through Nehebka’s meditation as the party rides a burrowing transport toward the mountain. Trissavin was blasted across the field, and Nehebka kept her airway clear with sand while rejecting her gratitude. Muffy conducted a ragged squad like a maestro and killed a Titan with a rainbow, each band its own kind of harm. The troops chanted “Muffy! Muffy! Muffy!” Grimnar boasted “I will meet you at the top,” fell on his face, then climbed the last Titan anyway. He sheared its head off and rode it down into a hero’s roll.
In the Deep Divers’ tunnels they find Warforged cut down cleanly, frozen and lightning-scorched, but no Alliance bodies. “There’s somebody else here.” In an ambush, Nehebka swaps places with Grimnar to take a volley meant for him, and the Physician stays behind to hold the tunnel with a light blade. Beyond a door thick with tainted chaos, “a choked and clogged river,” they find the Warmind already brought down and barely alive. Glauccous is wiping his sword on his cape. The knights call themselves Knights of the Order of Shadow, an order once known as the Dragon Knights, and they serve “the Grandmaster of Shadow.” Glauccous squints at Muffy and asks, “Meir?” Muffy’s brother, a painter she believed dead and whose brush she carries, is apparently alive in their order.
Talks fail, and the fight is short. Grimnar’s twin lightning strikes leave both knights helpless. Muffy asks Taupe, with real curiosity, “Where would you like to die?” (“Preferably on a beach with a drink.”) Then she chokes her gently unconscious. Nehebka refuses to strike a helpless foe. Instead her finger turns to sand, crawls over Glauccous’s face, peels back his mouth and forces its way inside him, making him a cheerful friend. Glauccous lays out his order’s cause, no more “people pulled out of their homes for sport,” before helping Grimnar dig through the Warmind’s hot “brain soup.” The prize is a finger bone of Agdrel, overflowing with chaos. Grimnar uses a warded cylinder from Taupe’s belt to keep it from taking hold of him. Through it he sees the Shadow King in plain clothes, studying how to bind chaos into his own bones, and musing about sacrificing kin, even his niece, Elusia Skypiercer.
Grimnar comes away shaken. “We cannot let their master have it. But I’m not sure that we can let our master have it either.” When Nehebka asks what the Grandmaster would do with it, he admits, “I don’t know her mind anymore than I know yours.” Nehebka once guarded her god-king’s pyramids, the way canopic jars guard their contents. She rips open her own chest and hides the cylinder inside: “I am merely a vessel. You cannot corrupt me.” With the remnant gone, the Warmind dies, its Warforged go still, and the ten-year war is over. The Physician survives, missing an arm, and promises to dismantle the unused warhead, because otherwise Gund “would probably put it in a cannon and fire it off for fun.” At the planar gate, Nehebka binds Glauccous as their ally for thirty days. Her player’s comment: “I’ve never said Nehebka was a good person.” Glauccous raises his brooch, and the vein carries them down a hidden path toward Umbracor, the heart of his order.
Aftermath
The arc ends with the war on Dämmerung finished. The Warmind is dead, and the Rust Blood Alliance celebrates with a parade as the party passes through. The Shadow King’s finger bone, however, is hidden inside Nehebka rather than delivered to the Dread Fortress. The trio is heading into the stronghold of the Order of the Ascendant Shadow to meet Grandmaster Payne (“he spells it P-A-Y-N-E”). His order already holds “at least five” pieces of the Shadow King and has invited the Grandmaster’s knights to talk. Glauccous carries Muffy’s note to her brother Meir, and Muffy still has her relay stone in case things go wrong. Grimnar is following chaos ahead of his loyalties, and he gives the last word on the plan: “This could possibly be treason. I just want to make that clear.” Muffy’s answer: “Well, it’s just a regular Tuesday.” This closes the first arc of Pieces of a King.