Session 1 — The Cursed City

The story so far, for the table’s memory. Told as the Dungeon Master gave it. It follows session 0.

Ashore

After months of rain, the seven woke in sunshine on the shore of Tyre’s island: verdant, ringed by cliffs of some three hundred feet, more than a mile of open water to any other shore, and a trail winding up toward a walled city. Everything heavier than leather — every weapon, shield, and coin — had been torn away in the swim. Thorne Ashenpaw named the place the Cursed City, and the boy from the ferry panicked at the name: he was raised on stories of shadow monsters in Tyre’s ruins.

The boy opened the box he had carried through the drowning — a rickety wooden letter-box — and gave each of the seven a “lucky coin.” Niðrerir knew them for old Tyre coinage, each worth perhaps five hundred pieces. The boy’s family — mother, father, brothers — is gone since an attack on their farm; he begged the seven for protection and passage to Sunton.

The river had also taken Niðrerir’s Celeste cloak; he cannot fly. Leif Stormcloak kept his feathered cloak through the wreck.

The customs of cargo

At the top of the trail stood black walls hung with ivy, a sealed gate, and a roofless customs shelter: a pedestal with a basin of hardened black beeswax and a bronze mouth, carved with travelers marking crates beside hulking figures — pictures only, with no writing among them. The inscription on the wall was another matter: written in Celestial, which Niðrerir read: “That which cannot enter by its own authority must be declared. Mark the burden, name the burden, and trust the burden to Tyre.” The last word was CARGO.

Nyra Vail built a bow-drill and raised a spark; Ace grew it into the flame that melted the wax. Marks written in Common did nothing. When Niðrerir wrote the marks in Celestial, rock golems rose from the ground — eight in the end — and carried every person up and over the wall like cargo, without malice, setting them down at the ancient market.

The city and the dogs

Within the walls: shadows everywhere, a main road oddly intact after a thousand years of abandonment, buildings of dark stone with fallen roofs, thriving sheep, flashes of color that vanished when looked at, and the panting of unseen dogs. In the market courtyard a pillar of rainbow light thirty feet across poured into the sky; Zureth, approaching it, felt an ominous, resonating song and backed away. West of the market stood the white towers of a castle untouched by ruin.

A conjured illusion of a bone drew the first wild dog at a charge. The dogs blink from place to place: struck, one vanished and two more appeared in its stead, and still more came down the road. Three humanoid shadows emerged and fell upon the dogs, their allegiance unknown. Thorne raged, slew the first dog, and weathered the pack’s onslaught; Nyra froze the dogs with the sound of an unseen predator and stepped through space, as the Shadar-kai can; and the seven and the boy reached an intact building and shut the door behind them. Outside, the dogs beat the shadows. Three dogs remained.

The Moon and Phoenix

The building was a shop, its name written in Celestial: the Moon and Phoenix. Cold silver light lay across arms, armor, cloaks, and amulets, every piece bearing a silver bird above an upward crescent. A swarm of pixies flew out when Nyra called asking the shop’s permission. A baker’s dozen of sheep grazed an indoor room, and a stone tablet behind the counter showed four roads: the phoenix west, the mountain north, the sun south, and the scales of the market here. The session ended among the shelves.