Session Information

Session Date: 8th Apr 2026
Saga: 7th Saga - Winter Warriors
Attendance: Sam Gallon,Rowan Hales,Tom Brothers

Session Summary

Mordecai spends the day embedded with the fort’s artillery engineers, where their cover is quietly challenged by the maintenance lead, who realises Mordecai is not officially part of the cannon crew. Even so, the man respects their skill, feeds them, and tries unsuccessfully to recruit them properly. In the mess hall, Mordecai learns more about the engineers’ work and, after joining them at dinner, gains useful insight into how the cannons function and how badly they struggle in the cold. This gives the party an important strategic advantage: the artillery may be vulnerable if the fort’s heating systems can be disrupted. Meanwhile, Viktor wakes in Astra’s home, where an unsettling conversation reveals her fragmented but disturbing knowledge of people’s pasts and futures, culminating in her blunt warning that he will die sooner than expected. Left alone, Viktor uses Commune to contact Vaelrith, learning that there are other ways to resurrect the dead and that even a god of death can be imprisoned by many powerful beings.

Elsewhere, Halfbie and Drache are sidetracked from practical investigation when Halfbie finally reaches Kaelis Ignithar, who gives them a lecture on magical lattices and successfully teaches them how to reshape a fireball into a healing spell, with Viktor as the unlucky test subject. The party later reunites in the mess hall in a chaotic, funny scene involving magical soup enhancement and Halfbie failing to notice Mordecai is standing right behind them. Once together, they exchange everything they’ve learned: Mordecai now understands the cannon systems, Halfbie has gathered intelligence on troop movements and learned “healing fire,” and Viktor reveals both his discoveries about Vaelrith and painful details about his past, his long marriage to Shoni, the death of his son Ryan, and the ideological divide that destroyed his family. Attention then turns to Viktor’s dangerous cloak, which Halfbie diagnoses as an active possession in which a herald is slowly taking over his body. Realising time is limited, the group investigates the fort’s archives and discovers infrastructure diagrams showing that lava from beneath the R&D labs is pumped through the settlement to provide heat, including to the walls and artillery systems. They leave with a copied diagram and a new plan: sabotage the heating network to cripple the fort’s defences.

Full Session Notes

The session begins with Mordecai as they make their way toward the mess hall after having spent the day working on the cannons. Before they entered, the man who had been showing them how to repair the artillery pulled them aside and confronted Mordecai directly, telling them they were not part of the cannon crew. He explained that he ran maintenance for the artillery and that he knew Mordecai was "not part of us," adding that they should "join up." Mordecai at first feigned confidence, but the exchange made it clear that their cover hadn't been as good as they thought. He explained further, saying that the maintenance crew were normally told when someone new was coming through. Mordecai 's only response was a subdued "Oh." The man nevertheless respected Mordecai 's skill, especially after seeing them repair the cannon, and pressed the matter by physically putting a form into their hand. Mordecai then admitted they did not like signing things, called it "a personal thing," and explained that they tended to travel around, blag their way into work, do things for a couple of weeks, and then move on. Contracts, in their view, meant entrapment. The engineer was disappointed but not angry, and instead guided Mordecai into the mess hall, noting that they had still earned food for a day's labour.

Inside, Mordecai asked whether there was any food from Uvam, and there was a fair amount of noodles, rice dishes, curries, and chicken noodle soup. Mordecai 's stomach rumbled since they hadn't had proper Uvam cuisine in years, and the sight was very nostalgic. The serving area was manned by a tiefling who smiled at them before returning to chopping vegetables, and the food was effectively self-serve. Even here, however, Mordecai 's instinctive guilt and self-erasure surfaced: they took only a small portion because they felt like they were "scamming everyone a bit," The engineer immediately countered this by ladling a much larger helping onto their plate, brushing aside Mordecai 's protest, "Oh no, I'm watching my figure", with the blunt insistence, "You've done a hard day's work. You need to eat." It was a small but telling moment: Mordecai didn't quite know how to accept.

Sitting down, Mordecai asked what the engineers actually did all day and learned that they primarily repaired the cannons, which often broke due to the extreme cold. In response, Mordecai suggested a heating solution, some sort of warming system or hot stones, only for the engineer to point out that the obvious fire-based options were dangerous given the "ludicrous amount of gunpowder" stored nearby. Mordecai replied, " i know someone who is really good at making things," someone who liked puzzles and figuring things out. The engineer responded enthusiastically, saying it would be useful to meet them one day and led Mordecai over to a communal table where several of the engineers they had met during the day were already sitting, including Peter Ulrick, the fat and obnoxious engineer whom Mordecai purposely avoided by taking a seat as far away from him as possible. Despite that, the atmosphere at the table was merry. People were chatting, a little alcohol was circulating, and Mordecai took a flagon to blend in.

### Viktor 's Pov

The narrative then cut abruptly to Viktor , who awoke much later in the day, distinctly in the evening, in a golden, ornate room, lying on a comfortable bed, feeling unwell from the cloak that had been making him sick. There was a note from Drake, illustrated with poorly drawn stick figures of the party and a magnifying glass, explaining that the others had gone to investigate and would return later. Astra was sitting in the room, idly twiddling with a dagger, and greeted him with the remark, "Oh. I thought you were never going to wake up." Viktor , still uncomfortable and dryly theatrical, replied that he did not have that joy today, then attempted polite conversation. Their exchange quickly turned toward Astra's unusual perception of time and people. Viktor asked if she had been watching him all day; she answered no, saying she had merely come home for dinner and noticed that one of her doors was still shut. He then asked permission to perform a ritual in the room, which she granted, though only with a slightly hesitant "I guess." The conversation deepened when Viktor asked whether she knew what he was going to do. Astra explained that she did not know everything, but "bits", bits of people, their pasts, and their futures. She likened it to seeing something toppling from the edge of a shelf and simply knowing it would fall.

This led Viktor to test the limits of her insight, and Astra replied with a sequence of disclosures that unsettled him more than he initially let on. When asked what she knew about him, she began with the obvious but incisive claim that he was "not having a very good time," then summarised him as scarred "both emotionally and physically." When she moved toward specifics, naming "Shonni" and then identifying "a boy, or… a young one," Viktor sharply shut her down. He did not want her to continue in that direction. Astra then offered to tell him something of the future instead. Viktor initially resisted, saying that sometimes the future was better not known. Still, he was also too curious to refuse entirely. Astra invited him to look her in the eyes. Viktor answered with an almost flirtatious diversion, "you have very pretty eyes", and Astra responded with the blunt prophecy: "You will die." Viktor tried to wave it away as a universal truth, saying everyone dies and that people in their world often die sooner than expected. Still, Astra pressed that his death would come "sooner than you expect." She also commented on the party as a whole, noting that there was "a lot of fog" around them, as though something was blocking both their future and part of their past. Viktor speculated that the others had "pissed off the God of time," then amended that to say he did not think there was a god they had not angered.

Astra saw prediction as a reliable extension of ordinary intuition. She said the fun was in working out how events came to pass, whereas Viktor argued that ignorance was liberating and that knowing too much would be dull. Astra, however, remained unpersuaded and stated that he was "not getting out of" his death. Viktor , in turn, replied that he did not necessarily want to escape death if it was his fate. However, he also noted that his companions called themselves "the Fate breakers." Astra left the conversation by dismissing the argument and going to dinner.

Left alone, Viktor attempted something much more consequential: he cast the commune spell not toward any of the gods, but specifically in an attempt to reach the being he had encountered in the woods, the one associated with resurrected bodies and cannibals. His reason was significant. He had previously believed that only one power was capable of restoring the dead, and the possibility that other paths might exist intrigued him as a possible avenue to "escape." He drew runes on the floor, opened the ritual, and asked a series of pointed questions. First, he asked whether there were other ways to bring back the dead than through Vaelrith, and received the answer "Yes." Second, he asked, "Will you teach me?" and was told ", No." Third, he asked whether he had heard the being's name before and received another "Yes." Clarification established that the presence answering him was Vaelrith, rather than some different entity. Viktor then pushed further, asking whether Vaelrith had been killed by a mortal "No",, and whether he had been imprisoned by a mortal "No, there were many." Viktor , who broke the circle, kicked through the runes, severed the connection, and muttered to himself, "I should have asked for help." The key revelation he retained was that a god, specifically the god of death, could be contained by multiple powerful beings.

When Viktor left the apartment, he found Halfbie and Drache engaged in an entirely different line of inquiry: a lengthy, earnest explanation of how to conduct an audit. Drache was trying to understand procedural details, such as when one was allowed to ask about "the shelf on the right." Halfbie was carefully walking him through introductions, trust-building, and the proper moment to say, "I need to audit."

The conversation stopped mid-sentence when Halfbie spotted Viktor Malkovich|Viktor ]] and approached to say. However, before he could reply, a small buzzing started in Halfbie's pocket, and a voice announced that it had been "talking for the last five minutes." The voice belonged to Kaelis Ignithar, whom Halfbie had previously contacted in hopes of learning magic. When Halfbie asked whether he might teach them, Ignithar launched into a grandiose lecture on magical theory. Spells, he explained, were "not things," but configurations drawn from the "ethereal fabric" and arranged into lattices. The lattice's shape determined the spell's function. He noted that the fireball was "fire, but it's spiky fire." When cast offensively, the spiky lattice let the spell "stick into" the magical energy of its target. Halfbie, genuinely fascinated, connected this to earlier experimentation in altering elemental attunement by shifting the lattice, and Ignithar proudly confirmed that the theory aligned with his earliest work.

Ignithar then moved from theory to demonstration, using Viktor as an unwilling test subject. He instructed Halfbie to cast a fireball at him and to imagine "a smooth object," then to put that smoothness into the fireball, not spiky, but smooth, "like a river flowing." Halfbie aimed at Viktor with disconcerting proficiency born from recent experience, and Viktor , watching the spell build, experienced PTSD from their previous fight. The first attempt failed completely: the fireball struck Viktor and merely set him alight. When asked whether he felt better, Viktor emphatically did not. On the second attempt, however, the altered lattice worked. The fireball washed over Viktor , healed his wounds, and left him rejuvenated. Viktor blinked and asked, "What just happened?" Halfbie, almost incredulous, replied, "I cast the spell?" Ignithar claimed total credit, declaring himself "the best teacher," and then, with equal seriousness, warned that if Halfbie ever taught anyone else how to do it, he would have to kill them. When Viktor immediately asked to learn the technique too, Ignithar put him in a literal waiting queue via the device, which then announced in a quiet hum that he was number 5,632,000. Halfbie, meanwhile, was nearly ecstatic that Ignithar had remembered their name. The sparkles associated with their excitement, absent during much of their winter form, returned as they revelled in the fact that they had healed someone with fire.

That elation led Halfbie toward the library, but the smell of chicken noodle soup from the mess hall distracted them, leading to the session's most absurd reunion. Mordecai , who by this point had settled into the engineers' company and was actively performing sociability, cracking jokes, laughing, and trying to lift the mood. Mordecai Reverence|Mordecai ]] quickly spotted the others and called out, "Hey, speak of the devil." Halfbie, however, was so focused on the soup that they barely noticed. They served themselves a bowl, only to be immediately disappointed because, however good it smelled or tasted, it could never live up to the remembered chicken noodle soup from the Feywild.

In a bout of sadness, Halfbie turned to Viktor and asked how to cast "the healing fireball" on the soup to make it taste really good. Before Viktor could do anything, Mordecai slipped behind Halfbie. He used prestidigitation on the bowl, sending gold swirls into it as though adding MSG by magic. Halfbie still failed to realise Mordecai was physically present, insisting that Mordecai was "up investigating the cannons" and that it was strange they "could almost hear them". After Mordecai smacked them on the back of the head and physically turned them around, Halfbie still interpreted the event as an illusion, complimenting Viktor Malkovich|Viktor ]] on the realism of the apparent "major image," even down to the jewellery. Viktor then took his own turn at augmenting the soup, casting false life to make it feel more nourishing while using thaumaturgy to make it ripple theatrically. The result made Halfbie feel better, but the soup still did not equal the Feywild original.

The group exchanged what they had learned. Mordecai explained that they had "become an intern." However, in practice, this meant they had done the opposite of what they were meant to do: fixing the cannons rather than merely observing them. The upside, however, was that they now understood how the cannons worked and how they might be sabotaged later. They had even made friends among the engineers. They confirmed that the crew had tried to make them formally sign up, but that they had refused because, as Halfbie already knew, Mordecai did not do contracts.

Halfbie then lowered their voice to relay the information they had gathered about troop movements and the fort's general operations, and finished with the far more exciting revelation: "I learned how to heal people with fire." Viktor backed this up by gesturing to his scorched clothing and confirming he had been the test subject. Mordecai , reacting to the sight, took a moment to neaten Viktor 's clothes. During the same conversation, Viktor casually mentioned having "a nice chat with your son," prompting Halfbie to ask after "Vaely" and Mordecai to explain that he meant Vaelrith. He reported that Vaelrith had been deeply annoying but had yielded two important facts: before being "rebreathed," he had been imprisoned by many immortals, and there were other ways to resurrect the dead beyond Vaelrith's divine domain. At that precise moment, only Mordecai noticed a flicker in Halfbie's expression: their eyes turned momentarily cold, with an intensity strongly reminiscent of Chenris Tallfellow when academically interested, before relaxing again into their usual warmer innocence. Mordecai made a mental note of it.

The discussion then moved from cosmic possibilities to Viktor 's past. When Mordecai pressed him on whether he knew someone "capable" and "mildly clever" who understood the gods, Viktor admitted he did: Shoni. This prompted immediate teasing. Mordecai , noting that every time her name came up, his face changed, encouraged him to talk about her, but when they joked about that reaction, Viktor did not flush red; instead, his face went paler than usual. Mordecai responded by pulling up a chair and handing him cider, then began gently but persistently asking questions. Viktor eventually revealed that Shoni had not been a fling at all but his wife for some sixty years. The marriage had not been arranged or forced; rather, "things change, people change." He was visibly awkward throughout the conversation, but he did answer. He explained that he had been ill when he met Shoni, back when he was in his thirties, and that they had got on "like a house on fire." They married and settled in the desert while he worked as a travelling doctor, doing his best to keep his routes close to home. In time, they had a son, Ryan, whom Viktor described as adventurous, bold, and brave. Ryan's death at the hands of the Dustbloods was, in Viktor 's telling, the beginning of the family's collapse. He connected this directly to his loss of control at Blackwall, admitting that when he saw one of the Dustbloods' kind, he "snapped."

Viktor also disclosed the deeper causes of his separation from Shoni. In the early years of their marriage, when doctors believed he would die, Shoni had "found a way" to make him "not dead," and at this point, he smiled, lowered his glasses, and showed pointed fangs and red eyes. Yet what saved him also opened an ideological divide. Shoni saw divinity as the answer to illness and suffering; Viktor , after seeing what the gods left behind in his travels, came to believe that "the most potent deadly disease of this world are the divine." He wanted to cure Shoni's illness through medicine, but she refused, remaining convinced that divine power held the answer.

He admitted that he had responded by secretly spiking her food with medicine. She "did not like that," the arguments lasted for days, and eventually they decided to go their separate ways. They were not officially divorced, but, as Viktor put it, "it is final in her eyes." Mordecai 's response was one of support rather than judgment. They told Viktor he did not have to face his ex-wife if he did not want to, or that if he wanted to see her without all the baggage, they could try to make that happen, too. Viktor refused concealment. If they went, he said, he would go as Viktor Malkovich. He would stand by his beliefs, and he would continue searching for a way to cheat death.

That declaration naturally led to the next problem: the cloak. Viktor mentioned Astra's prediction that he would die sooner than expected. However, he himself estimated he had perhaps twenty years left, given that he was around 140 and not in good health. Mordecai dismissed Astra's pronouncement as possibly manipulative, but Viktor thought she mainly liked people to know that she knew things. When Mordecai offered something in exchange for the life story he had just given them, Viktor 's answer was simple: help him get rid of "this problem," while pointing to the cloak binding itself to his neck. Mordecai extended their hand; Viktor initially misread the gesture, thinking they meant to hold hands, before realising it was a handshake. After they shook, Mordecai sealed the promise with an ornate little peck and agreed to help. Viktor then suggested that Halfbie be allowed to examine the cloak. Halfbie, who had repeatedly been stifled earlier whenever they tried to investigate it, checked that they were finally allowed to speak and proceed. Mordecai confirmed that "quiet time" was over and that it was now time for them to "be a nerd."

Halfbie's analysis of the cloak was detailed and thorough. After learning that Viktor had stolen it from an ancient temple of Vaelrith in the Still Lands and had possessed it for fifty years, Halfbie physically examined the vulture feathers and the point where they fused to his skin. They immediately noticed a pocket of dead, still air around it, an unnatural sensation that felt wrong. There was also a sweet scent of decay, not putrid but alarming in a way the body instinctively recognised as dangerous. At the site of attachment, Viktor 's skin was coming away in clumps, dying en masse. At the same time, black tendrils seeped inward beneath the skin as though the cloak were becoming part of him. Halfbie's manner shifted during the examination, taking on the cadence and analytical precision of Chenris Tallfellow as though searching that mind "like a database." They referred to the problem, half jokingly, as a possible issue of "squatter's rights laws," but professionally diagnosed it as "a classic case of having your body taken over." Viktor explained that the cloak housed a herald, which he had used like a key; now that herald was trying either to kill him or take him over, and he needed a way to imprison it again or to dominate it himself before he died. He also confessed plainly that when the herald of Serafina had been killed, it had in fact been the herald in the cloak that had done the deed. Mordecai indicated that they had already suspected as much, but appreciated the admission. Halfbie's reaction included a strange combination of personal defensiveness and solidarity: "First of all, that's my son you're talking about," they said of Vaelrith, before apologising for their own role in events and welcoming Viktor , however awkwardly, to the "club" of having one's body taken over.

Chenris, communicating through the crystals, first apologised that the only solutions he had identified would not help Viktor . Curtly defended his own intelligence when Viktor disparaged him, explicitly blaming Mordecai for preventing earlier investigation. Viktor , however, insisted that his case differed from Mordecai 's and Halfbie's more relational experiences with possession: he did not care about the herald's feelings; he only wanted it "in a box." He floated the idea of placing it into a sword, specifically "the sword of a man who cheated death," while looking toward Drache and the Obsidian Obliterator on his back. When he asked Halfbie how long he had until the herald took over, Halfbie gave the grim but practical estimate that it could be anywhere from a month to twenty years, depending largely on how much damage Viktor continued to take in battle. Viktor accepted that waiting too long was not an option, especially given how painful the process already was. He complained, with dry humour, that repeated fireballs from Halfbie were not helping matters. When Halfbie defensively replied that they did not throw them so much as "launch" them, Viktor responded by casting bestow curse on them and rendering them unable to speak. The group then shifted to planning. Mordecai summarised the key weakness of the fort's artillery: cold caused failures, and the entire system relied on a method to keep crucial areas warm. Halfbie added that the fort contained small lava channels running beneath the roads to key locations. They immediately saw the tactical implication. If the lava could be rerouted or stopped, the cold could disable the cannons en masse; failing that, the firing pins could be snapped.

To pursue this line, the party consulted the fortress records. Halfbie sent a message to Terrence Witherfeather asking whether he could cast large-area freezing magic, and Terrence confirmed that he could perform many freezing spells. Mordecai also floated the idea of learning how the fort's lava channels worked and whether they could stop them to make it harder for the fort to retaliate. They all agreed and headed to the records library to learn more.

With that in mind, the group headed to the records room late at night. The door was locked, but Mordecai picked it, and Halfbie quickly located the switch the archivist had used to open the bag of holding that stored the records. Inside, numerous workers were asleep in sleeping bags despite the unpleasant scurrying noises made by monsters outside. Halfbie told everyone to ignore the sounds and follow them, using their multitool as a light source. They navigated to the relevant shelf. Halfbie and Viktor searched through the material until they found the infrastructure diagrams they needed. These revealed that the lava rose from an underground well located beneath the R&D labs. From there, it was pumped to the centre of town and distributed to heat the Golden Palace and the nearby gardens. Interestingly, the diagram showed four additional lines running out toward the outer wall. Each of these was marked only with the abbreviation "NG," with no explanation. Recognising the importance of the find, the party made a copy of the diagram, returned the original book, slipped back out of the archives, and set off toward the R&D room indicated on the map.

Trivia & Notes

Viktor back story bits:

• Shirley
• a young son - Orion - murdered by Scorch Dustblood/ their family

Footnotes