Gifts from the Queen
The party left Llerrum in rare comfort, lounging atop the Queen of Dhruv’s war elephants while the mahouts did the steering. On the first night, a mahout brought out a bundle of parcels sent on the Queen’s behalf. Krish unwrapped Rootbreaker, the Royal Sword of Dhruv, and Vien found a lamplighter’s mantle, with a note that Her Majesty had remembered one more thing. Quinlan’s soul-stolen cloak came back to him freshly cleaned, its secrets finally explained. The last parcel was small and addressed to Sabra — sent by Fessik, the remorseful cultist in Llerrum’s dungeon, who had asked that it reach the Samitran princess. Inside lay two pressed Zillow flowers from Samitra, left behind by her eldest sister, Serene. Fixed to her shields, they hummed with new strength.
Around the Fire
The campfire turned the party thoughtful. Quinlan wondered what mark he might leave for his old mentor Fernath if he knew he would pass this way, and settled on the Thieves’ Cant sign for repentance — or pruning — etched beside his acorn symbol. Vien realized that a habit drilled into him at Lux Arcanum, never trusting a first source without verifying it, had come from the Radiant Seat all along. Krish confessed that his coin had chosen his elephant — the one at the very back, in the dust of the entire caravan. Sabra turned the flowers over in her hands and knew exactly what she would ask Serene if she found her at the Seat: what her goal was, and what she was doing with the Shattered Will.
As the fire burned low, Krish’s thoughts kept circling back to the Muted Herald and everything done to his homeland, his anger hardening into something with a name. Sabra thought of Krish’s mother, whose kindness she had never forgotten, and felt her loyalty to her friend grow. Long after the others slept, Quinlan opened up to Vien about growing up beside the endless forest, where color was only ever a dream. Vien promised that the secret would stay with him.
The Border
On the second day, the eternal dusk of Dhruv thinned into a patch of blinding light, and the elephants panicked. Krish took charge, calling out a mahout’s training cry while the others steadied the beasts, and the great animals soon plodded on through the glare. At the boundary stones, the mahouts drew to a halt — Dhruv’s war beasts could not cross into Radiancy territory without it looking very much like an act of war. From there, the party walked.
The Checkpoint
A border wall rose ahead, its single opening watched by wardens in white and gold. The checkpoint was plastered with wanted posters bearing the party’s faces in uncomfortably accurate likenesses — wanted by order of the Light-Bearer Council, at ten thousand Zenit apiece. Learning that people the Seat dislikes have a way of disappearing, the party opted for a quieter approach. Krish read the future to guide his friends through. Vien wove a subtle illusion so that the wardens saw faces that were just slightly wrong — an extra finger here, a larger nose there. Quinlan drew the guards’ eyes elsewhere like the shadow he was, and Sabra folded her cloak into a pilgrim’s bundle with her shields hidden inside. They slipped through without raising a single suspicion.
The Glasswake Serpent
A few hours down the pilgrim road, travelers ahead scattered from the path with a gasp. Gliding across the sand came a Glasswake Serpent — a huge floating snake of translucent glass scales, sunlight pouring straight through its body — flanked by two drifting motes of hard light. Krish shouted the remaining pilgrims off the road and charged in with Rootbreaker. The serpent shrugged off the earthen blow, but the royal blade struck again and tore into one of the motes.
The tide turned when Krish spotted the creature’s vulnerability to darkness. Quinlan switched to shadow and peppered serpent and motes alike, while Vien’s thunderbolts cracked across the dunes. The serpent blazed white and seared the whole party, but one by one the motes winked out. Sabra dazed the beast, Krish’s next blow left it weakened, and when it lunged for Sabra in desperation, she answered by punching its face clean off with her shield.
As the party approached the corpse it began to vibrate, falling still when they stepped away — it had been drawn to the Harmonics they carried. Quinlan plunged a shadowed hand into its side and drew out a single glass scale that wards against light. The grateful pilgrims crowded around to thank them, though they gave Quinlan a wide berth. His soul-stolen cloak, white as snow when he had taken it from Fessik, had turned black the instant he stepped into the Seat’s light.
The Holy City
From the last dune, the Radiant Seat matched the vision from the Harmonic of Memory — a sprawling, spotless city of white spires and ringing bells beneath a sun that never moved. At the city’s edge, though, stood the burned-out shell of the Dhruvian embassy, where Krish’s cousin Jasmin had been posted only a couple of months before. Dhruvian pilgrims recognized the royal blade at his side and saluted discreetly, and one confided that the arsonists had worn pilgrim robes but moved far too much like a team — and he was almost certain he had glimpsed gold beneath their hoods. The Shattered Will had a cell somewhere in the city, and it had taken Jasmin.
Sermons and Secrets
The party split up to dig. In the bazaar, Quinlan found the mart of the Bladed Root, a clan of assassins. For a couple hundred Zenit, his contact revealed that the Shattered Will kept four cells, one in each quarter of the city, and that Jasmin would be held in the southern one. He handed over the cross streets, and then both men vanished in clouds of smoke.
Elsewhere, one of the party came upon a priest preaching to a crowd of pilgrims: “The world stopped. The Seat did not fall. Ask yourselves why.” The crowd neither cheered nor argued — they simply agreed. When the priest raised his hands, his sleeve fell back to reveal a tattoo of a circle cut by five unevenly spaced lines. The pilgrims named him Father Solivar, head of the faith, whose cathedral was the great building crowned with a beacon — and whose doors would stay locked until later in the week.
Vien had a reunion of his own at another street sermon, where the preacher turned out to be Father Ivers, two years ahead of him at Lux Arcanum, who still remembered the night Professor Vorun caught Vien smuggling food out of the cafeteria. When Vien asked his advice for a friend in need of confession, Ivers called it above his pay grade and pointed him toward Father Solivar, a member of the Light-Bearer Council itself. Back at the inn, the party pooled what they had learned, including a rumor that a memory-touched heretic was held in the same cell as Jasmin.
Into the Southern Cell
That night the evening bell emptied the streets, though the sun stayed exactly where it was. Quinlan picked out the cell at once — a block-sized compound with reinforced windows and sentries pacing a walkway along its roof. He watched pilgrims knock at a side door and trade a refrain before slipping inside, masks hidden beneath their sandy robes. The party donned pilgrim robes of their own and shuffled into the middle of the next group, and Vien caught the exchange at the door: “What does the light hide?” “What memory cannot bear.” Inside, in a covered atrium, members were shedding their robes for Shattered Will attire.
The party slipped away, and Krish found stairs leading down. Below lay a holding room piled with spoils. A chest held a cloak like those worn by Seradin, Zara and the Aetherborn, along with a mask ornate enough to have belonged to one of the Herald’s own Voices — it went straight into the lining of Quinlan’s cloak with the rest of his collection. In the cells beyond, they found Jasmin asleep, and with her a woman they recognized from the stories: Tessel Rootbinder, who had led the Shattered Will in Dhruv before Seradin pushed her out. Krish found the key under a welcome mat, and Jasmin was free.
Tessel Rootbinder
Krish saw no reason to free any more of the Shattered Will. Tessel insisted they were not her kind — she had defected rather than help harvest Dhruv’s memories, and as a former Voice, she could help them. If they wanted to know who made people disappear in this city, she pointed out, they were standing in one of their cells. After a quiet exchange with Jasmin in Dhruvian, Krish learned that his cousin believed her, and the party let Tessel out.
She repaid them with answers. Father Solivar, she told them, was the Voice here, and held the final say over the Seat. For Sabra she had news that cut deeper: Serene had been in the city until about a month ago, before being sent south, beyond Lux Arcanum, alongside a man who looked very much like Quinlan. Both had left with the Muted Herald himself, serving as his generals — just one rank below the Voices.
The Escape
Tessel checked everyone’s masks and led them back through the compound, answering one door’s challenge — “Who speaks for the Light?” — with “No one, yet.” At the final door, sentries on the roof shouted that they were not supposed to be there, and the ambush was sprung. A masked officer dropped down with a flawless three-point landing, a raccoon-masked fighter attempted the same and planted his face in the gravel, and a rocket-booted rifleman opened fire from above.
Sabra threw herself in front of blow after blow meant for her friends, punishing anyone foolish enough to swing at her. Krish carved through both enemies on the ground in a single sweep, and the gravel-eater went down for good. Quinlan’s warning shot left the rifleman rattled, and Vien zapped him clean out of the air. That left the officer, and Krish finished him off.
The door opened onto a quiet side street, and no one followed. Still, the party suspected the ambush had been Tessel’s doing — that she had slipped the sentries a duress code along with her password. Tessel insisted it had simply been the fastest way out, and that the sentries must have changed their routines while she was locked away. Jasmin would be safe in Vien’s rooms at the inn. Whether Tessel would come along to Father Solivar’s cathedral, however, was still being argued as the bells of the Radiant Seat rang on beneath a sun that would not set.