The Wandering Isles: Session 83
The newly arrived crew steps off their ship into the smoke and clatter of Anbudon, now officially sailing under the name A.M.S. Remington (formerly The Resolute). The city hits like a machine in motion, loud, watchful, and built to swallow anyone who moves through it too openly.
Dash Heidmann breaks away first, hunting down a courier and sending a letter back home to Palperroth, making sure word travels where he cannot. After that, the group pushes into a tavern to eat and get their bearings, but Amaedrianna Blüdfist has other priorities. She orders food, then uses a subtle rhythm of taps, a kind of morse-coded language, to ask for news without asking for it out loud.
It works.
A note is passed to her, marked with a symbol, and Dash notices the same symbol posted above the doorway leading toward the tavern’s restroom hall. Amaedrianna slips away, finds the hidden mechanism, and opens a concealed stairwell that drops down into a dark room engineered to swallow sound. It is the sort of place built for conversations that should never reach the street.
Waiting below is a man named Vale. Amaedrianna introduces herself as “Anna” and gets straight to business. She needs supplies, enough to feed and support the refugees back at The Rising Pearl, the Bastion they have turned into a home. Vale doesn’t flinch. He tells her he can stock the ship within one week. He can even provide Amaedrianna with a mark from which she can acquire some coin.. but in exchange for 50% of her earnings.
Amaedrianna presses further, asking where people can hide, specifically the sort of people who draw eyes, like Ekdíkisi Tintreach with her purple skin. Vale’s answer is blunt and practical, he advises that anyone who is not fully human should be kept out of sight in this city. He raises a hand, and a green flame appears which creates a shadow behind him that looks a lot like a minotaur figure.
Then the tone sharpens. Vale makes it clear he knows exactly who “Anna” really is, and he has no interest in crossing her. Still, he offers help, not only with supplies, but with opportunities. He mentions a “mark,” a way to earn quick cash, and as Amaedrianna prepares to leave, he provides something more immediately useful. A coin for each of her allies, a “get out of trouble” token if things go sideways.
The deal is clean. Supplies will be left on the ship. Payment can be dropped behind the tavern before they sail. Vale also arranges accommodations for the group, and before she goes, he offers a warning that matters as much as any weapon, do not cross anyone from the Cogsley conglomerate. In Anbudon, some families are untouchable, and the city will punish anyone who forgets that.
Amaedrianna returns to the surface and leads everyone back toward the ship to share what she learned. On the way, she catches something that confirms her instincts, a guard watching them, trying very hard not to look like he is watching them.
Back with the group, plans begin to form. Amaedrianna checks in on Weslyn Theiwyse and his schedule. He has nine days before he is meant to meet his friend. With the supply job taking a week, they start fitting their limited time together like puzzle pieces, trying to make sure nothing slips.
In the middle of this, Dash hands Eldrin Drosk some cork. Eldrin quietly takes it, puts it aside, and walks off without explanation, leaving Dash staring after him, confused and slightly unsettled by the non-answer.
Shopping follows. Eos and Amaedrianna go out for supplies. Amaedrianna purchases a pearl, while Eos buys a lockbox set with a gemstone, something she intends to study and test later. She asks Amaedrianna to pay, not quite explaining that she has not way to pay Amaedrianna back.
Elsewhere, Dash and Eldrin visit the Temple of Tempestas. Dash makes a private choice there, offering six aurems anonymously to the children in the temple’s orphanage. The cleric is grateful, but Eldrin, feeling the weight of the gesture, responds by offering six aurems to the temple itself. He suggests it should be “in the name of the party,” but Dash declines. He did not do it for credit, and he does not want a banner hung over it. The cleric offers prayer anyway, and they leave with the quiet kind of tension that comes from two good intentions colliding.
As they step back into the street, they spot Amaedrianna and Eos walking nearby, deep in conversation. Amaedrianna is pressing a simple question, how was Eos planning to pay her back if she has no money? The tone isn’t cruel, but it isn’t soft either. It is practical, and Anbudon is not a city that rewards anyone for being unprepared.
While that happens, Weslyn moves through the city with Chicken the Fox trailing close. Chicken drops an amethyst at his feet, plain as day. Weslyn notices the jeweller it must have come from and returns it immediately. The jeweller ushers him out quickly, almost nervously, but thanks him for the honesty. Weslyn turns on Chicken the moment they’re outside and scolds him, no stealing. Not here. Not now.
Weslyn keeps walking, watching the city’s edge where trees are being cut down, the forest reduced to fuel and profit. The more he sees, the more Anbudon feels like a place that takes and takes until the land has nothing left to give. That pull sends him away from the streets and into the woods. He searches for the hole he once emerged from long ago, the place that started everything. Before he goes deeper, he offers his blood to the woods in exchange for safe passage.
Inside, the canopy swallows daylight and imitates the night sky, star-like specks in darkness where there should be sun. He finds the hole, but what he finds around it unsettles him more. Dozens of marks, signs that people have been climbing out of this place again and again, far more often than it should ever happen.
Then the whispers begin.
Weslyn hears incomprehensible voices rising from the depths. In return, he carves runes into the dirt, feeding magic through the markings, forcing comprehension through a spell that lets him understand language. The noise resolves into echoes across time. Past conversations. Familiar voices. Even moments he was never present for. Questions like, “Where is summer gone?” drifting up with the weight of grief and confusion.
He tries to flee, but the forest turns him back. His attempt to escape leads him to the same place. The same hole. The same pull.
So he stops running.
He surrenders, listens, and the canopy above him shifts. Constellations appear out of season. The sky fractures like glass and tears open into visions that feel too large for one mind to hold. Blood moons rising and falling. Empires collapsing. Confrontations repeating. Events older than his life, looping like a wheel stuck in its own track.
He sees fragments of history and fragments of his companions. He sees his childhood home, his family, and the moment his sister smuggled in a fox cub, the beginning of Chicken. And then the truth lands, heavy and unavoidable. His time lost in the woods was never one long journey. It was many. Different paths, different endings, all returning him to the same point, again and again.
He remembers the contract he made deep in the forest, but realizes something else with startling clarity. Chicken was never part of the bargain. Their bond was not transactional. It was destined. Across every loop, every version of the path, Chicken was the constant.
Not a source of power.
A source of endurance.
When the visions finally break, the whispers cease. The wind dies. The canopy opens. The hole falls silent.
Weslyn returns to civilization carrying more questions than answers, but with a sharper understanding of what matters and what does not. He picks up Chicken and walks back toward the city, still confused, but more aware of what needs doing.
He finds the group again in the town square, mid-conversation about nothing important at all, the kind of meaningless chatter that happens when people are trying not to think too hard about the next step.
Amaedrianna asks Eos what the lockbox can do. Eos promises she will find out.
Then Dash and Eldrin attempt to buy a diamond, only to be slowly bled by a salesman who keeps pushing the price higher and higher. Amaedrianna steps in, takes over the conversation, and secures the diamond for 100 moons cheaper, with no tax added. Dash notices the difference immediately, the discount offered to her and not to him, and he does not love what it implies. But the group doesn’t linger on it. They move on, because in Anbudon, bitterness wastes time.
Weslyn brings the focus back where he wants it. If they are going into the woods, they need to prepare properly. Offerings. Respect. Rules.
Then he learns what Amaedrianna’s supply deal really costs.
They are going to have to steal something.
And that knowledge shifts the weight of everything that comes next.
