Reinald & Brigitte | Night | 23rd-24th of Leaffall 248 A.T.C

Reinald and Brigitte approached the dam in the dark, trying to work out a plan past the guard checkpoint and visitor's office without a believable cover story between them, neither particularly convinced "we forgot a toolbox inside" would hold up to scrutiny.

They settled on slipping through the wilderness, crossing the river. Reinald floats the idea of a "fire-based distraction" before talking himself out of it on the grounds that setting things ablaze tends to draw exactly the kind of attention they were trying to avoid.

The two waited out the dam's nightly shutdown from the treeline, watching the river slacken from a churning hazard into something crossable.

It was during this stretch of waiting that their bickering started in earnest. Reinald, fishing for a faster way to get Brigitte's attention, landed on the nickname "Briggs," which she neither approved of nor managed to talk him out of. She countered with "Reiny."

While they waited, a sheep blundered into the river's current and was swept off, followed shortly by the sight of Pascal and two Needlethorne farmhands wrangling the rest of the sheep flock back into order. From somewhere further down the bank, the two also caught the tail end of a conversation between two guards on patrol — unfiltered guy-talk mostly, nothing useful, except that one of them mentioned a name in passing: Ella. Neither Reinald nor Brigitte thought much of it at the time.

Brigitte asks about Reinald's mechanical arm, and he shares that it's based on old Dwarven schematics, and a great deal of trial and error that ended with a green gemstone lodged in his arm. Brigitte clocks the word Niðavellirian being used by Reinald, which unsettled her mind for a moment, but she doesn't ask further.

Eventually, the two notice that the dam is getting shut off for the night, and after a while they cross the river once it thinned to ankle-depth, then used a herd of sheep being driven back toward the farm as cover. Brigitte casting Pass Without Trace and shoving her way through the flock with the grace of someone who has never had to be subtle about her size, while Reinald ducked and weaved more deliberately. A guard on patrol nearly spots them, but Reinald put him to sleep and the two propped him against the wall to look like he'd simply dozed off.

Inside, near the purification room, they watched a young guard mid-conversation with a deerfolk scholar named Bramble. The guard, it turned out, was Ella — the same name they'd overheard on the riverbank. The pair debated talking their way past versus knocking them both out, eventually Reinald suggests casting another sleep spell.

Reinald's first attempt fizzled out against the anti-magic ward built into the doorway of the Purification Room itself, alerting Bramble that something had gone wrong. He comes up with a new plan, Reinald summons Röka as a deliberate distraction — appearing as a glowing spectral fox and rattling the separate room with Thunderwave — which caused the guard to investigate, pulling the scholar along and leaving the corridor briefly clear.

Brigitte and Reinald slipped into the purification room itself: a chamber dominated by a glowing, sparkling pool fed by arcane lines, with two further doors leading deeper in. Behind one, they found Rowan, another deerfolk arcanist, irritable and instantly suspicious, correctly clocking them as the same two who'd toured the dam earlier that day.

What followed was a tense, talkative standoff in which Reinald tries clumsily, and not always truthfully, to explain the situation: poisoned water, sick fish, banging noises at night, a connection to the sewers beneath Allura's Haven.

Rowan caught him in at least one lie and made it clear he didn't appreciate it, but didn't throw them out either — curiosity, or perhaps a more self-centered perspective, won out enough to let them investigate the room, provided he kept watching.

Reinald and Brigitte's investigation turned up a bookcase with fresh scrape marks on the floor beneath it, which moved recently, and not by the dam's own maintenance. Pushing it aside revealed a narrow leak and a small tunnel beyond, just wide enough for Reinald to fit through; yet Brigitte was too large.

Before they could fully weigh their options, Bramble and Ella returned, having grown suspicious of the still-active protective wards.The guard Ella demands an explanation, weapon already raised, until Rowan — visibly more invested in personal advancement than confrontation — suggests they let the two "investigate," taking the credit for them to follow once their results came in.

Reinald, taking the opportunity to actually move forward, wedged into the tunnel. Ella following after him. Brigitte's forced to widen the hole so she can fit through, at which point the dam's protective wards activate, triggering a barrier that blocks Bramble and Rowan inside the Purification Room, and Reinald, Brigitte and Ella on the other side of it, now stuck in some kind of tunnel that goes deeper.

Rowan and Bramble shout that they cannot dispel the barrier from inside, because of the arcane wards on the Purification Room. Reinald, Brigitte and Ella agreed there was nothing to do but go forward into the dark, despite Ella's evident discomfort with the entire arrangement — a guard who had signed up for paperwork and checkpoint duty, now stuck following two strangers into a hole in the wall with no way back.

The tunnel descended deeper into the darkness, Brigitte using Aveline's bracelet to see ahead in the darkness, beyond was unmistakably carved by some large creature. A short fight broke out with a camouflaged troglodyte that ambushed Ella.

Reinald's witch bolt and Brigitte's direct assault made quick work of it, a second and third joined partway through, though not without Reinald and Brigitte picking up nasty bites and a dose of the creature's noxious stench-poison along the way.

But together with Ella's help they managed to defeat all of them. Reinald remembered from his studies at the academy that there are many dangerous creatures living in The Depths. But even in this dark tunnel, they are nowhere near the actual Depths. Something's off.

Following the tunnel, the group finds discarded supplies that matched recently reported thefts from the dam's own storage — guard equipment, personal effects, evidence that whatever moved through these tunnels had been raiding the surface above. Ella mentions that Head Arcanist Soren suspected that some of the guards had stolen the supplies, fired them over it, and that's how eventually Ella was stationed at the Southern Dam.

While Ella investigated the supplies, Reinald, egged on by Röka, lifted a still-wrapped spell scroll from a box mid-conversation with Ella, who failed to notice that he takes it. Further in, they find an odd cracked visor, a broken mask matching the 'Strangeling' that Brigitte and Reinald had encountered in the sewers of Allura's Haven before, Reinald takes it along.

The tunnel opened into a wide chamber filled with the same small metal clockwork constructs — ten of them, going about menial tasks: reading, sorting herbs, patrolling, examining mushroom samples. The first one any of them encountered up close turned toward Reinald and Brigitte, paused, and simply said "analysis complete" before turning and continuing on its way, unbothered, as if confirming they weren't worth the trouble of further attention.

As Brigitte stepped further into the chamber and took it in properly, her eyes caught on something standing among the constructs — multiple large glowing stone statues, carved in the unmistakable shape of a Lily of the Valley, towering over everything around it, providing light into the room. She stopped. Whatever the statues meant, it didn't come with words, only feeling — protectiveness first, immediate and instinctive, then underneath it something closer to rage, and underneath that, something that felt uncomfortably like betrayal. None of it made sense to her. She didn't know which feeling she was supposed to be having, only that all three were hers, and none of them would explain themselves.

Reinald, fascinated rather than alarmed, approached one of the constructs directly and struck up a halting conversation, with Röka translating despite not speaking or understanding the language himself. When Reinald pressed for more — who they answered to, what exactly they were doing here, what lay beyond the staircase down — the construct's answer came back the same each time, flat and unbothered: "Sorry, I can't divulge that information."

What it did confirm was that its team was responsible for the dam's "investigation," though it firmly denied having poisoned the fish in the area. The construct produced an odd cube etched with warding symbols, which it identified as containing the "captured creature." Beyond the chamber remained a staircase descending into total darkness, leading, the construct explained, toward something it called "the Queendom."

According to one of the constructs, they've been here approximately 15 days, which seems to line up with the first fish going bad and supplies going missing, according to Ella. Brigitte, skeptical of this entire situation, remained on lookout. Reinald's enjoyment of the constructs' company didn't last. Ella spotted unknown movement first, yanking Reinald behind a pillar as three of the strangelings and a masked dwarf entered the chamber, one of the strangelings a bow-wielding warrior, accompanied by two commoners.

The dwarf bore a glowing red bracelet and addressed the others in broken, mixed speech. Reinald and Ella were stuck, there was no way out without being spotted. The dwarf interacted with one of the constructs and realized that there were 'visitors' nearby, and told the bow-wielder to get ready.

With no way out and no time to argue, Reinald persuaded Ella not to fight, but to flee toward the unknown queendom below. Ella refused on the premise that they had no clue what would be down there — her hands tight on her spear, her composure visibly fraying for the first time since they'd met her, the look of someone realizing she was a very long way from a job that used to just mean checking visitor paperwork. Brigitte, edging backward, knocked something loud enough to draw attention, causing one of the strangeling to approach her.

Brigitte, not wanting to leave Reinald and Ella, walked forward with her hands raised. The bow-wielding strangeling, armed with a massive bow, spoke the same ancient tongue Brigitte recognized from the sewers.

The strangeling challenged her directly, demanding to know who taught 'a surface dweller' their ancient tongue. Brigitte claimed to have learned it from her mother and father; the figure didn't believe her, not unreasonably. The dwarf stepped towards Brigitte, intending to either capture or attack her, realizing that if Ella or Reinald were spotted, they'd attack too. Reinald tried a risky gambit.

Reinald summons Röka to the center of the room, who's befuddled that Reinald even summoned him in the first place, questioning what he wants him to do. However, with him visible and present, the room's posture shifts entirely.

The three strangelings turn to Röka and drop immediately into something between reverence and worship, recognizing Röka as an Idol — or at least some title attached to him, something far beyond what either Reinald or Brigitte know anything about: Rökkatru.

What followed was less a negotiation, but more like Reinald improvising in real time, having Röka speak to the strangelings. The strangelings, bound to dangerous bracelets that would kill them in "a blaze" if they disobeyed their orders, begged "Rökkatru" to invoke his power over Ginnugagap and free them from the binding.

Reinald realized that their only way out of this was to use Röka's magic to destroy the bracelets, as he had no way to dispel the magic on them otherwise. Röka warned Reinald that as his anchor to this world, his own power was directly tied to Reinald's — and that if Reinald failed to destroy the bracelets cleanly, it could mean death for the strangelings wearing them.

Reinald, channeling Röka's untested void magic through his prosthetic arm, took the gamble three times over — each attempt riskier than the last, each one carrying the real chance that the power surging through him could kill the strangelings instead of freeing them.

The first gamble freed the bow-wielding strangeling. The second gamble freed the mysterious masked dwarf, who was confused that Röka would even address them directly — but when Röka asked, simply, "Do you wish to be free?", the answer came back immediate and raw: "More than anything." The dwarf reached up and took off their mask without waiting to be asked twice.

On the third gamble, Reinald and Röka combined the final pair into a single higher-stakes cast that worked, but visibly drained both of them in the process — Röka's spirit flickering at the edges, Reinald's prosthetic arm sparking with more strain than it had ever shown before.

Röka's spirit, exhausted from the experience, was forced to leave for now, retreating back into Reinald's book to recover. Now free, the dwarf rose and turned to leave — and Brigitte felt something catch in her chest. The face was wrong in all the right ways: the same jaw, the same hair, like looking at Coldrock through a cracked mirror.

A sister?

Scarred and hardened in ways Brigitte couldn't begin to guess at, and looking at her without a flicker of recognition. Brigitte didn't say a word. She couldn't find one.

Mysterious dwarf:
"Whatever the fuck you two did, I'll pay it back to you."

She didn't wait for a response. She was already turning to leave when Brigitte stopped her — gently, carefully — and asked if she knew anyone named Coldrock.

Mysterious dwarf:
"What do you know about her? Where is she?"

Brigitte told her that she was safe, as far as she knew.

The dwarf was quiet for a moment, working through something Brigitte couldn't read.

Brigitte:
"We've seen better times.
She's a little angry with me.
I did some things. But we're good."

Then she turned her back on Brigitte, already walking toward the dark.

Mysterious dwarf:
"Good. Then I'll know who to fucking spare."

And she was gone, leaving Brigitte standing there with everything she hadn't said still caught in her throat. The three strangelings who remained were past the point of caring about anything but their freedom and their new devotion to "Rökkatru."

They pleaded to be allowed to march on the surface and burn the dam and Allura's Haven to the ground, merely to draw out the one who had enslaved them. When asked who exactly had wronged them enough to want this kind of war, they couldn't give a name, only a description. Small. Red eyes. Remained in the shadows.

A harefolk.

Reinald, attempting to intervene as an "Apostle of Rökkatru," tried to persuade them to wait until further orders from the spirit "Rökkatru." For now, that seemed to work, yet the bow-wielding strangeling remained agitated. The hunter's reasons came out plain and unpolished. They had no name for the one they wanted dead, only a target: somewhere in Allura's Haven, hidden, kept safe by the people around them. "Burn the city to the ground!" the hunter demanded, now in Rökkatru's name, if that's what it takes to reach this 'harefolk.'

When Reinald asked why the town itself deserved any of this, the answer came back sharp.

The surface dwellers had abandoned them. Worse, they'd taken from them — not just resources, not just land, but the creatures the strangelings had bonded with, the Myconids, used as nothing more than a resource, without a second thought.

Bow-wielding strangeling:
"They let all of this happen!"

That, to him, was reason enough to destroy the surface-dwellers.

Reinald carefully tried to suggest, without even realizing what he was really saying, that 'his people,' or as the strangeling called them "surface dwellers," had 'lost their way,' but they could find it again, perhaps through Rökkatru.

Bow-wielding strangeling:
"They will pay! They will pay for the many lives we have lost."

Reinald and Brigitte learned that some kind of Queen, named Skogrsis, remained in the city — but something in their tone gave the offer less weight than it first seemed to carry. The queen, they admitted, wasn't fully convinced that the path they were on was the right one.

There was something else tangled into it too: the strangelings already moving through the sewers beneath Allura's Haven, the ones Brigitte and Reinald had each crossed paths with before, weren't simply other extensions of the Queendom's orders.

They had their own plans running in parallel. Whatever was happening underground, it seemed increasingly clear that it wasn't a single, unified effort — it was several, overlapping plans, each with its own reasons for being there.

Reinald and Brigitte learned that the other group of strangelings already had a way from The Depths into Allura's Haven's sewer system. And that the mysterious cube kept by the constructs had within it a powerful and dangerous creature that could destroy the dam or even bring ruin to the city.

A Remorhaz, but not just any. A variant that could still thrive far away from the arctic.

The bow-wielding strangeling took it, and said to keep that one ready to be unleashed whenever Rökkatru decided it should go.

With that, the small group of strangelings disappeared back into the dark, returning to The Depths and The Queendom, leaving Reinald, Brigitte, and a thoroughly shaken Ella alone in the chamber. All of this left the three with more questions than answers, and absolutely no good story ready for Soren, for Rowan, for Bramble, or — worst of all — for Coldrock.

Now what...?