Chaos Bleeds

Fate's Reunion

“So you do have it,” Shayn asks again, glancing nervously between Amara and the bracelet on her wrist that binds her to the Dusk Elf.

“Not exactly. But I believe I know how to find it.” She actually isn’t sure, though. She already knows what the Thellia of the Dark Descent; Chaos Bleeds module never knew: Tollith is a liar. She will not make the mistake that version of Thellia makes; she won’t trust a wandering sorcerer promising her the impossible and making it sound inevitable. Thellia Barlok would not know that Tollith isn’t just a liar, but sorcerer bent on destruction who will one day attempt to tear Vaeryl from her hiding place.

There are a lot of things that Thellia Barlok is not supposed to know that Amara Johnson does know. The Forsaken Realms are named such because Vaeryl, the Progenitor Goddess, created the heavens, the hells, the Wyld, and the material planes and all the planets and stars in the universe, and then created Primordial gods to oversee its maintenance. She then yawned, said she needed rest, and vanished. She forsook her creation and has not been seen in the thousands of years since.

What Thellia Barlok is not supposed to know is that this convenient plot-device deity is never meant to come back. The writers of the Forsaken Realms use grand events crafted around an attempt at either bringing her back or finishing her off for good as a means of resetting the lore and allowing them to create new versions with new rule books in the wake of massively destructive narrative events.

What Thellia Barlok cannot possibly know is that one such event is coming up. Amara is writing Dark Descent; Chaos Bleeds, introducing Tollith the Devourer initially, weakening him and thwarting his first attempt at turning back to the clock to before Vaeryl set the universe spinning. In the video game, Dark Descent; Chaos Marches, he will make a second attempt and be thwarted. And then, one final epic TTRPG campaign, tentatively titled Dark Descent; Chaos Ascends, will be released where Vaeryl must be saved from Tollith the Devourer for good. She is supposed to make an actual appearance, the first in the fifty-year history of the game.

And then, the world will reset and the next version of the Forsaken Realms rule book will be released.

Amara only knows this because it is vital for her to be able to properly tease and set up for it in her module. She has no idea the actual plot of the video game, nor does she know what they are working on for the final campaign of Seventh Version. They only gave her the major plot beats and are giving her the freedom to set them up how she wants.

And Thellia Barlok would know none of that.

Amara has been running through her options; if she goes along with Tollith despite knowing what he is doing, she will die. There is no way around it.

But what if she doesn’t? She’s a scenario writer. She knows she has to account for player choice. While she has been carefully corralling her friends through the Underrealm and toward Minarethil for their confrontation with Thellia, they’ve had countless opportunities to ignore the guardrails and chase after lost cats. In her early drafts of this campaign, she had to brainstorm a ton of fail-safes to ensure Thellia ends up dead.

But this isn’t a campaign. If she rejects Tollith, will he force her to take the poison that ultimately dooms her? Will it be slipped into her food by an enemy of House Barlok?

Or will he attempt to find another Dusk Elf and ply them with promises and wine? If so, then this specific Umbraith could be inside anyone. And if she doesn’t figure out who…

But that itself is perhaps too limited. He might take the offer to anyone. Not just Underrealm residents. Yes, she was hoping this module would mostly consist of Dusk Elves and show off the nuances and intricacies of their society, but the story has escaped her control at this point and she has no means of steering it back onto a familiar path.

“So where do we find it?” Shayn prods.

Yes, that is the question. She knows it hasn’t been created yet, at least not the version that appears in the module as it was intended.

But hers is not the only one. f**k.

Her heart is just the first one. She hadn’t had time to refresh herself on everything and heck. Thellia is just one of multiple. They need to have three of the darkly beating hearts to stop the ritual. Amara had planned for there to be five possible Dark Hearts—or, well, Umbraiths—and the players would need at least three to stop Tollith’s ritual. This would have given the players a few choices and provided some fail-safe if they didn’t pass a perception check on key items.

Yeah, if I do end up back in earth, I am definitely renaming the Dark Hearts to Umbraiths. That is a great word.

But Shayn is still looking at her. “There is more than one, actually. What more did the Mother of Trees tell you?”

“Well, she didn’t really tell me much, more like showed me. But nothing she showed me made me believe there was more than one… How many are there? How do we get them?”

Amara wishes she’d had more time to check her notes. If only that session hadn’t run late and she’d had more time to review before leaving for Erika's.

Then again, if it hadn’t been running late, she would have been on time getting Aislinn, and they likely would not have been crushed beneath a truck. And she wouldn’t be here. She would be in Erika’s living room snacking on whatever baked good her former college roommate had concocted, laughing with Aislinn about her day, chatting with Hana about her next dance recital, asking Leah if she had any questions before they started…

“I believe they are—” But she doesn’t get a chance to explain. Three daggers fly through the air, all aimed directly at Shayn.

With a dexterity she has never known before, Amara moves like lightning, swatting two of the daggers off their trajectory with one hand while grabbing Shayn with the other and pulling her to the ground. “Someone isn’t as afraid of a Barlok as they should be…” she mumbles.

But Shayn is already wriggling free from Amara’s protection and grabbing the fallen daggers, hurling them back in the direction they had come from.

The first strikes the chest of a phoenixborn hiding on a roof, the second embeds itself in the eye of an equeene peaking around a corner.

“Not bad,” Amara says, scanning the nearby windows for the assassin. She spots it in a window—eight eyes gleaming in the dark. An arachean. She raises a hand and sends a bolt of sacred fire hurtling toward the would be murderer too fast to be dodged.

“Your enemies or mine?” Shayn mutters.

“I only have Dusk Elves for enemies.”

“So I don’t count? Aww. That almost hurts.”

Amara chooses to ignore the jab. There isn’t time for banter. If this was her table, she would let the party banter continue for as long as the players wanted. NPCs can wait. Especially if she makes sure they are rolling with disadvantage.

But it’s not a game, and no one seems to be playing by any rules.

“Who would be after you?” She grabs Shayn's wrist and drags her out of the now deserted street and into a shop, hoping for a shred of concealment behind the dress mannequins.

“Khidell… Or some of his people.”

“Who?” Not a name she recognizes. So likely not an official character with established lore. More likely, someone invented for a backstory, then.

“Let's just call him an ex. We separated awhile back on less than stellar terms.”

A bit of backstory that is either unique to this Shayn or that Erika never bothered to mention. Amara wishes she could just figure out how this place worked. “And he’s after you? How long has he been tailing you?”

“Maybe? It’s not like he's actively stalking me, more like he tries to kill me if he happens to hear I'm in the same town. Just, yknow, how we reminisce about old times.” Shayn is entirely too nonchalant about a homicidal former partner, Amara muses.

But then again, joint p*******e is a romantic night out for two Dusk Elf women planning their nuptials. She really does not have room to question the way Wild Elves apparently handle break-ups in this version of the Forsaken Realms.

She hopes that once she gathers the rest of the Band of Do-Gooders, they don’t all spring new and violent components of their backstories upon her. “How long do you reckon he is planning on sticking around in Minarethil?”

“He doesn’t exactly supply me with an itinerary. Can't we just go back to your castle or something? I don’t even know why we had to leave.”

“We had to leave because the Matriarch would question why my questioning of you did not involve drawing blood.”

“Oh. I see. We go back, I go back to my cell…”

“Precisely. I suppose we should just leave the city for now. Unless you think he only brought three friends.”

“Now that you mention it, leaving the city might be best.”

“Why?”

“Cities he visits have a tendency of ending up on the wrong end of very powerful explosion magic.” She turns away from Amara as she says it, voice tight and high.

“Leaving the city it is. But once we are out, you owe me a ton of answers.”