Recap: Episodes 41–59

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Welcome in, everybody.

I'm Jasper. Welcome to Dungeons and Randomness. Specifically, welcome to a dedicated recap for episodes 41 through 59 of our sixth campaign, or arc, called Frostbourne. Just in case you wandered in off the street, we've been telling stories together in the world of Theria for a decade and a half, with everything you know about Dungeons and Dragons right there in the core of it all, in some shape or another. I'd be lying if I said there's no homebrew in here. There absolutely is. If you just found the show, or you fell behind and the backlog started to feel less like a podcast and more like a second job, this is your way in. You really don't need the last five arcs to understand what's happening here. But if you've been listening a long time, you'll catch echoes of them anyway.

So as you can tell, today's a little different from our regular feed. We're pumping the brakes on standard episodes to catch you up. We did the same type of recap after episode 20, and we did it again after episode 40. We'll keep doing these every twenty episodes or so, and if you scroll back far enough in the feed, both of those are sitting there waiting for you. This time, we're picking up right where the last one left off, but trust me, you don't need to have heard either of them to follow along. Think of this as the shape of the story so far, not a transcript of every single roll or conversation.

One final warning before we go any further. This recap is nothing but spoilers. That's the whole point of it. If you'd rather experience Frostbourne the way it happened, just like we have, one session at a time, stop right here and go find episode 1. If you're still listening, get ready, because we've got a lot of ground to cover.

Right. Let's get the basics out of the way. Theria is our world. It's big, it's dangerous, and it does not care how clever your plan is. Every choice sticks. Every dice roll that goes sideways stays sideways. Frostbourne is our sixth major arc in that world, and it's built to be a place you can jump into cold. Theria remembers things. Also, Jason Massey remembers things! He's our game master, dungeon master, narrator, all the things. His brain for storytelling is only outmatched by how many sticky notes he has plastered all over his desk. Although he'd never agree, he's kind of a genius at this sort of thing, which makes all us players have a very easy job.

Alright, on to the story. To give you context, here's the shape of where we started for Frostbourne. A little over a century ago, a black dragon named Aruthamar was building something rare in the city of Or'Rash, a place where dragonborn from every faction could gather and get strong together. It was working. And then the famous floating city of wizards, Uman'Yiro, looked at that and decided the correct move was an unprovoked first strike. Dumb move. The attack failed, badly, and Aruthamar answered by leading dozens of dragons to knock the entire floating city out of the sky. Then she started a ritual to make her point permanent, and that ritual is why a continent that used to have weather now has one setting. Snow. Not a bad season. Not a curse anyone's waiting out. A hundred years of frozen and counting.

About a decade in, three of the surviving archmages came to a peace summit in Or'Rash and tried to kill her with a smuggled artifact. They failed to kill her, but they killed dozens of her people, including General Kriv, one of her closest advisors and a cooler head in times of conflict. Aruthamar answered with what the history books politely call a mournful outburst. She unloaded her breath weapon on the mountains around Or'Rash and cracked everything for fifty miles. That one is called the Long Roar. It left raw magic leaking into the land, which is why Theria now has mutated animals, and tears in reality you can fall through.

Cities adapted the way cities do, which is to say, not always well. Winterhaven sealed itself under a magical dome and said, screw it, we'll be fine. Brightport doubled down on coal and steam and got a little more, let's say it, steampunky. The elves and orcs of the Evergreen did the one thing nobody saw coming and actually built something together. The dwarves of Stonesunder lit a mountain-sized forge so hot it melted the snow and flooded their Bru'Gal orc neighbors out of their camps, and that particular grudge has had some deep consequences. And Aruthamar herself is still out there somewhere, rumored to be dying, and nobody's gone looking to check on her, because that seems like the kind of thing you don't survive being curious about.

That's the board as it stands. Cities clinging to survival, caravans disappearing into the snow, and a lot of people trying to carve out something worth having in the meantime.

Now, the people we actually follow in this story. Our leader, for lack of a better word, is Logrhyn Cragborn, a disgraced dwarven marshal whose clan got scapegoated and thrown out of the mountain kingdom of Stonesunder when he was five. He grew up in Aubrey, watching his family drink their way through the shame, and he has been quietly, patiently working a plan to get the Cragborn name back in good standing since episode one. Nythera Rhyelith is our elven assassin, a legendary one at that, better known as Raven's Breath, who came out of retirement to help Logrhyn's cause. She's a hundred and fifty-three and the main reason the group's bad decisions don't spiral quite as fast as they could. Chimera is a tiefling warlock, and his power comes from a demonic patron named Kolgoth, who does not so much lurk in the background as never actually leave the room. It is, and has always been, a bad relationship that Chimera insists is fine. It is not fine. And then there's me. Ruby Pettigrew, half-orc gearslinger adept. That's a fancy way of saying part monk, mechanically, part gadgeteer. I fix things, I build things, I am unable to leave a locked box alone or a red button unpushed, and roughly half the reason this group is still alive is that instinct, and the other half is despite it.

That's us. And threaded through everything we do is Logrhyn's plan. Since the very first episode, he's been quietly collecting a specific list of impossible things. Rare metals, monster parts, materials most people would call myths. It was never about wealth. It's the components for a single artifact, one built to do something very specific: reach into the dreams of a woman named Namara Stonesunder, the rightful ruler of the dwarven kingdom, trapped in a magical coma, almost certainly poisoned, while a usurper sits on her throne. If Logrhyn can get into her dreams, wake her, and convince her to abdicate, the lie that destroyed his clan collapses on its own. No war. No siege. No blood, which is Logrhyn's rule. Just the truth, delivered somewhere nobody can intercept it. Everything this group has spent 60 sessions chasing across Theria comes back to that list, one item at a time.

And along the way, we've made a habit of doing the expensive, difficult thing instead of the easy one. We don't leave people behind if we can help it. We've adopted more strays than we probably should have. We keep insisting whatever we're currently doing is not a heist, and it is, without fail, absolutely a heist.

By the time episode 40 wrapped, we'd made it all the way from the ice-locked city of Winterhaven, to claiming our own crumbling fort, through the religious police state of Aubrey, through the Duergar mountains, and into the stranger, bloodier streets of the southern city of Esterholt, picking up four kids along the way, Chet, Vetty, Ora, and Baz, orphans who never quite stopped following us around and who we never quite stopped letting. Esterholt is where we pick things up now. And Esterholt, by episode 41, still had some unfinished business on the board.

Here's where we stood. A serial killer posing as a monster hunter, a man named Thane Silverfox, had been staging fake werewolf attacks to build himself a solid reputation, and had murdered a vampire named Zeera to keep him from exposing the scheme. We'd figured it out, confronted him on a rooftop in a snowstorm, and Nythera put him over the edge. Literally. We'd handed the whole mess, evidence and all, to Mayor Corbyn Hale, and Esterholt's guard finally had their killer. Chet had taken a poisoned crossbow bolt from Silverfox and nearly died for it, not for the first time. He'd also been stabbed through the heart once while we were out of town, which, as you'll hear, did not go the way stabbings usually go.

Episode 41 picks up after all of that finally got put to bed.

The night the case closed, we finally got a quiet moment. We were in the mayor's guest housing, the murder solved, our names cleared, the kids safe, with a meeting with the minotaur leader waiting in the morning. Ora and Vetty went straight for the snacks. Nythera laid out so many daggers nobody could keep count and went over each with a whetstone, Chimera's boomerang included. Logrhyn spent forty minutes cleaning his armor, muttering. Ruby came back from the mayor's assistant, Percy, with a bottle and poured everyone a drink, with a watered-down splash for the kids so they'd feel included. Then she told Logrhyn they were behind schedule with a ticking clock. He said he wished they could leave, but there was a little more to take care of first.

Then the confessions started. Nythera asked Chimera if he was okay. The short answer was no, he said, but he was alive. He'd tried to sweeten the deal with Kolgoth by signing people up to feed him souls, and it turned into the whole mess at Grizzlebits. The werewolf bite that ripped him open had left what he called a third passenger inside him, and Kolgoth needed the power to deal with it. Somewhere in there, it went too far. Chimera wasn't in the driver's seat anymore. He was every impulse he'd ever had, and he was a demon, literally. He'd come close to killing Logrhyn and Ora, and Logrhyn had tried to take the horn off his head, which now has a big cut in it. Then he asked Nythera whether she'd gotten what she needed out of all this, and she took a big swig of her drink. She'd lost control too, she said. What happened to Zeera hit her harder than she expected, and when she found out it was Silverfox flaunting his killing, she had to take him out. She became Raven's Breath, the mask she carries, and she hadn't been her in a long time, and she'd missed it. Ruby told her it was cool, but it scared her, for what it did to Nythera. Nythera said that without Ruby, she didn't know if she'd have gotten control back, and Chimera added that Ruby would always be there. Ruby said she'd do whatever she could to ground them both.

Then Chimera said he had to tell Ruby something about the Gearheart. Ruby asked to go first.

If you're new, the Gearheart is our war rig, built around Ruby and held together with spite. It runs on blood. When it's damaged and gets blood in it, things happen that nobody can predict. Ruby told them that when she went to fix it after a random hitchhiker slash werewolf tore it apart, it had already been repaired. Later, the seats changed color where Chet bled after taking a crossbow bolt to the shoulder. Chimera said he knew why. When the car hit that wall, his demon side attuned to the magic in it, and he could feel it. The Gearheart has a soul trapped in it. Jesse's soul.

Jesse and his brother Austin were the card-sharking Quickbolt brothers who guided us into the mountains to meet the Duergar. Inside their stronghold, which is also a refinery for adamantine, Kolgoth took the wheel, Jesse ended up dead, and the body went into the arcane refinery. Somehow, Jesse's soul got infused into the very metal we now ride around in. Vetty asked who Jesse was, and was told not to worry about it. Ruby got up and paced. It felt like a violation, as if she'd wronged something sacred inside a thing that was hers. There was nothing to do that night, so she wrote it on her list.

That conversation led Vetty to a bigger idea. She asked Chimera, carefully, whether he'd get rid of Kolgoth if he could. Kolgoth wants something in the city, and there's already a soul in the Gearheart, so maybe they could lure him somewhere isolated with the promise of both, without actually handing Jesse over, and bring in a vampire she'd met who does exorcisms. With Kolgoth gone, nobody would have to hurt Chimera to get the greater demon horn, and he'd stop losing control. Ora, who has her own reasons, leaned in and told him she thought somebody needed to kill that demon, and that everyone would help if he wanted it. Chimera said he had two worries. They might need Kolgoth for more than horns, and he didn't know what he'd be without him. Nythera, arm around his shoulders, said she'd researched a circle in Aubrey that traps greater demons, but she'd only use it if he asked. Devil you know, Chimera said.

In the morning, Logrhyn took stock of the list. We had the large emerald, plenty of adamantine, and more werecreature teeth than we needed, which also covered the vampire blood. Three things were missing: an orb of chaotic assault, a greater demon horn, and green dragon breath. Ora had leads. Her mother, a Stonesunder in Lockford, might help with the dragon breath. For the orb, she'd found two places on the continent. One was Uman'Yiro, the floating wizard city, now a fallout ruin where, rumor has it, anyone who tries to loot it dies. The other was Odysia, where the Eladrin are frozen in time, can't age, can't have kids, and are insufferable, always roping you into favors. Odysia was closer, safer, and on the way to Lockford. Logrhyn said insufferable didn't compromise the plan.

First, though, Logrhyn met the minotaur leader, Kragis Ironhorn, in full armor, out of respect. Kragis is enormous, dressed in bone trophies, with iron horns. The minotaurs, the Duergar and the drow had been planning to storm Stonesunder, and Logrhyn told him that would cost them heavily. We were already enacting a bloodless takeover, he said: Queen Namara in a coma, almost certainly poisoned; the usurper Grimhorn on her throne; an artifact to enter her mind and convince her to abdicate; a man on the inside; and the Bru'Gal staging a show of force outside. The Duergar had agreed to wait four months, and Logrhyn asked Kragis for the same. Kragis said dwarves had made promises before, so Logrhyn told him about the Cragborns' exile.

Kragis had lost his horns to a greater demon his own brother summoned twelve or thirteen years ago, a fight his brother didn't survive. When the subject of a greater demon horn came up, his eyes flicked to Chimera. Then he pulled out Storm Render, a lost relic of the paladins, and let Logrhyn hold it. Logrhyn swung it at a coffee mug Ruby tossed him, and the room filled with lightning shrapnel. The mug did not survive. When Nythera asked how he'd feel, hypothetically, about adamantite horns, Kragis nearly came apart. Logrhyn offered enough to make them, and they shook on it. Good luck with your demon, he told Chimera on the way out.

Kragis also poured everyone a drink called labyrinth, which left us disoriented for the rest of the morning. Logrhyn priced a smith to work adamantite into his armor. Fifteen thousand gold. He did not have it on him.

Chimera, meanwhile, was trying to find out what Kolgoth wanted him to fetch. Kolgoth had offered a walk that night, the two of them, and when Chimera asked him to fix the scar on Ora's face, Kolgoth agreed: take me to the girl, then our walk. But Ora turned the healing down. She wouldn't put it on his tab, she said, and she was sure Kolgoth was going to screw him over that very night.

At the vampires' temple, the church was divided, the Silent Choir on one side and the Pale Mercy on the other, like a middle school dance. Chet, bandaged and in a sling, was being helped to a bench by Vetty and Ora, with Baz close behind. Ora had already spoken to Seraphane, a weird vampire healer in the basement, a tarot-and-visions type, and Logrhyn took Ruby down to meet her. Seraphane, giddy to have visitors, proposed a game: for every question they asked, she'd ask one back, honestly. She could mix a cure for the Bru'Gal, she said, with two more ingredients from a remote place on the road through Heroes' March. Then Ruby showed her a sketch of the skull from the box we'd buried, and Seraphane's skin rippled into a fanged skull for a second. They admitted they'd found it and buried it under half a mountain in a Medusa cave, because a note told them to. There was a book about it in Fairbay or Odysia, she said, and she drew a map with an X on Odysia. You're right to be afraid. There's something horrific coming, and you have a hand in it.

Then she told them about Chimera. She'd seen him die, several times, always on a bridge. Stoned to death. Beheaded by a crowd. Beheading himself. Beaten to death with bare hands. Sometimes the water was on fire. A ritual knife was in there too, and when Ruby asked what it looked like, Seraphane drew it. It looked like a banana wearing a hat. She seemed very proud. Avoid bridges for four or five months, she said. Chimera wasn't in the room, and Ruby stopped writing. When Ruby asked about a horseless carriage with a soul in it, Seraphane said, You mean Jesse? It was horror for him, she said, trapped in a vehicle he couldn't feel. Her first suggestion was to destroy the car. Logrhyn tried very hard to look like he wasn't considering it, and Ruby smacked him anyway. Ruby asked whether she could scratch her name out of an old contract of indenture and put his in, to free him. Seraphane said Jesse would have needed a contract of his own before his accident. Then she asked Logrhyn whether all of it would be worth it. Yes, he said. As Ruby left, Seraphane slid her a silver coin with a pancake on it. Take it to Bonzo's in Fairbay, she said. They need your help.

Upstairs, we found Mother Duskward, the matriarch of the Pale Mercy. When Chet was stabbed through the heart while we were out of town, she'd stepped in and bitten him to save his life. That left him half-turned, not fully alive and not fully undead, on a ticking clock. Whether to go all the way and become a vampire was his choice, and he wasn't ready. We told her that Silverfox had killed Zeera and was dead, and Nythera gave her Zeera's dagger for his family. Duskward teared up, kissed Nythera on both cheeks, and said if we ever needed anything, anything. Logrhyn asked her to keep all four kids busy while we were gone, which she greeted like free babysitting, and to try to restore Ora's face and undo what had been done to Chet. They'd see what they could do, she said, with the expression of someone who has heard that one before.

That night, Chimera slipped Nythera a note saying he had to meet Kolgoth alone. She said she'd give him space, then followed from a distance. Chimera told Kolgoth that if he didn't know any better, he'd say Kolgoth had lost control. It had been taxing, Kolgoth admitted, the damage to their body and the lycanthropy, and he'd gone off the deep end a little with the extra souls. But the taking over had to end, Chimera said. Kolgoth conceded it violated their deal, and promised it would never happen again, if Chimera helped him find what he was looking for. Chimera told him that if he wanted trust, he should be honest with the whole group. Kolgoth said, You win, and vanished.

Ruby, meanwhile, packed the Gearheart, thinking about Jesse, and brought Dozer's horns to Kragis. Dozer was the minotaur who died helping us in the Duergar throne room, and she'd taken his horns because it felt right. Kragis's people muttered, assuming she'd broken them off a body, but when she explained, he put a hand on her shoulder and poured her a drink. Send a raven when you're back from Odysia, he said.

Later, Kolgoth reappeared and led Chimera to a neglected backyard, a hedge maze in the middle of the city, and made him dig. As Chimera dug, Kolgoth talked about hell, how boring it is and how dangerous for demons like him, hunted for a century by hunters led by an orc. He wanted out. They dug up a forty-pound box with an arcane lock, and inside was a black bottle, a soul jar. It held the soul of someone Kolgoth admired greatly. Before the night ended, Kolgoth promised to tell the whole group everything.

We left Esterholt on the twenty-fifth of Dulin, headed for Odysia, 170 miles away. The kids stayed with the vampires. Chimera had gone by Bonzo's the night before for breakfast boxes, and when he handed Ruby hers, she hugged him longer than she ever has. We crossed the bridge out of town early, and Logrhyn held his breath until we were over. Nothing happened.

A few hours south, Chimera told everyone what had happened, and Kolgoth joined in. He wanted out of hell, and the soul in the jar could make a powerful friend who would get him out. It belonged to a tiefling from a century ago named Darmok, a notorious killer whose memory Esterholt had tried to bury. Nythera, who'd been an assassin in his day, recognized the name and went cold. She'd turned down six, seven, eight contracts from him for young girls, she said, and the hedge maze they'd dug in was where body parts were found. Ruby stopped the Gearheart and sat there with her hands on the wheel. Kolgoth's plan was to hand Darmok his soul in hell, make him all-powerful there, and walk out himself. Nythera turned around, furious, and asked Chimera whether he was trying to convince us this was okay.

Kolgoth, to his credit, stuck up for him: baby boy didn't know. Logrhyn said he didn't trust Kolgoth and only put up with him because of Chimera. If Kolgoth wanted to help, he could, and if not, we'd pull him out and end him. Kolgoth said that if we ever tried, he'd cut our adventure far shorter than we could imagine, and then he slunk off in a huff. Ruby reached back for Chimera's hand. Neither of you has me, Chimera said. There's only one Chimera. He was taking the bottle, we'd find a safe place for it, and we don't make these kinds of deals. Nythera took his other hand in both of hers. Ruby told Logrhyn she'd do whatever he said, and then she floored it.

On the first evening, Chimera and Nythera spotted a black rider heading north, and Chimera blasted its horse out from under it. Hold on to that rider. On the twenty-ninth, a quarter of the way to Odysia, yetis hit the Gearheart, and one flipped it upside down. Between Nythera's blades, Logrhyn's shotgun and Chimera's fire, it ended with a yeti stumbling back into the flames. Ruby told Chimera nice job, then went straight to the Gearheart and asked whether it was okay.

We flipped it back as a group, with Chimera putting in a noticeably smaller amount of effort than everyone else. Chimera and Ruby both tried reaching out to Jesse. Nothing. On the third of the new month, the front of the car broke through thin ice and a mammoth charged us. It gored Chimera, trampled Logrhyn, and fell on him when Nythera killed it, and Chimera's fireball nearly took out half the party in the process. We used the dead mammoth to lever the Gearheart out of the ditch. Along the way, Chimera rolled a natural one on an Arcana check, and our game master answered by rolling on the Rod of Wonder table. It said that for five days, starting when we reached a city, Chimera would believe everything was free. The city it was set to trigger in was Odysia, which was the worst possible place for it.

The Gearheart kept changing every time we fed it. Mammoth blood gave us shag seats, a rotating bed in the back, and polished ivory knobs. Ruby, who could never have built any of it, said it was kind of badass, and that how much the car liked the blood creeped her out. Logrhyn pretended nothing had changed.

Then frost maggots ruined most of our rations, and Logrhyn had been carrying everyone's. Chimera, on a natural twenty, discovered the maggots themselves are edible if you pop the heads off. Somewhere in there, he finally learned what Seraphane had said. Logrhyn tried to pretend he was afraid of fish rather than admit why we'd been avoiding bridges. He's a bad liar. So we told Chimera, and he asked the practical questions. Do I drown? Do I fall? Is it a mob? He didn't say much after that. Ruby reached back and held his hand.

Which is, of course, when we came to a bridge. The water beside it ran too fast to drive through, so we scouted. Nine cloaked people were running a toll, led by a man in very clean white fur. Logrhyn and Nythera walked up as Greg and Mary Bonzo and said we were exempt because Nythera had family in Odysia. Logrhyn pulled two of the thugs aside and slipped them a silver piece each and a rumor that their boss was holding out. The man pulled back his hood. He was Eladrin, platinum hair, sculpted eyebrows, and he drew a silver knife like someone who'd read about knives. He swung at Logrhyn and bounced off his chest, and then Logrhyn started critiquing his wrist. Nythera mostly wanted the knife. Logrhyn tripped him, set a hammer on his chest, and every rib in his body gave way. Then he folded in on himself, went ghostly for a second, and was gone, leaving only his furs and his knife. The thugs ran. Ruby and Chimera had stayed in the car and heard it all over Chimera's earring.

The bridge was trapped with barrels and wires, and Ruby drove through without touching one. In the furs was a letter to Seleth Kaybourne from his father, Tormond, disowning him as a disgrace. So Chimera had crossed a bridge and lived. We were not ready to call that a win.

A few days from Odysia, a frozen waterfall cracked and a flash flood came down the mountain. Logrhyn rolled a natural twenty on survival, and we floored it. Ruby flipped switches labeled things like More and More More, drawing on the forge core, and took the Gearheart to eighty or ninety miles an hour. It overheated, and we had to bail. The forge core, which started with a hundred hit points, finished with a handful. Repairs took three days. While we camped, three gricks burst out of the snow. Logrhyn blew one apart, Chimera's fireball killed another and lit the big one up, and Nythera and Ruby finished it. Nythera tossed a grick body onto the Gearheart, its blood soaked in, and the car grew a green snakeskin carapace. The mammoth tusks budding out of the bumper turned out to be delayed mammoth blood. Chimera loved all of it. Ruby called it her baby. Logrhyn did not. After the way things went in Esterholt, we hid the car half a day's walk out and hiked in, and on the fifteenth of Amada, almost three weeks after leaving, we saw a magical dome in the mountains with giant white gates and tiny glowing mechanical spiders crawling over them.

This is where Chimera announced that everything was free.

It was the Rod of Wonder, finally kicking in. The gates opened for us. The guards were armed with magic, not weapons, and looked at us like a nuisance. They sized us up by what each of us was. Chimera's magic was borrowed, and they sneered. Ruby's was gears, which they looked down on, but at least she'd built them. Nythera's an elf, which got her a nod. Logrhyn's a dwarf. Bless you, dwarf.

An old Eladrin named Oren, the city's volunteer visitor liaison, came to meet us while the guards looked at him with open disgust. He held out a hand to Logrhyn, who shook it as carefully as he's ever done anything. Nothing happened. There was a small, collective sigh of relief. Oren walked us through a city that looks grown rather than built, with seamless white buildings and hexagonal paving that lights under your feet. We told him we were brokers for a collector who wanted an orb of chaotic assault, to keep it safe. He recoiled, as if we'd asked for a weapon. Then static crackled, and ten feet away a silhouette of an Eladrin appeared, screaming, lit up as if struck by lightning and frozen there. Then it was gone, with no scorch marks. Oren was embarrassed. It happens often, he said, and he asked us to forget it.

They aren't ghosts, though that's what we called them for a while. More on that in a minute.

Oren offered to connect us with the orb's owner, a collector named Draven, who is exacting and doesn't like outsiders. When we pulled out paperwork proving we'd handle the thing safely, Oren lit up over the stamps. The Eladrin love documentation. He let us sleep on his floor and got us a tailor, Samir Quinn, who dressed us in her best guess at our cultures. It went about how you'd expect. Chimera got mesh, Logrhyn got the seven dwarfs, and Ruby rolled a one and got human teeth. Then another silhouette flashed, and Chimera reached out and touched it.

For a moment he wasn't in the room. He saw Odysia as a ruin, then watched it rebuild itself in a blink, then watched its people freeze mid-step, as if shot, and disappear, again and again. Each time, a silhouette lingered where they'd been standing. Ruby told him not to touch the ghosts.

On the sixteenth, Oren took us to Draven's tower with a gift bottle of liquor, ninety-five percent alcohol, labeled do not drink, and waited outside. He and Draven used to be friends, until Oren cleaned Draven's lab. We rode a lurching elevator, the first imperfect thing in the city, up into a cathedral of hoarded artifacts, with a floating cage at the center holding a sphere. Draven was in a gray hoodie and sweatpants, covered in rings, with a bejeweled eye. He was nearly blind, and every few minutes his amulets tore him apart and put him back together. When he drank the liquor, his teeth and throat burned and healed in front of us.

He had two orbs left, he said, they were a bastard to make, and he didn't want our money. He wanted a volunteer, someone who could channel magic to hold something open for him. Logrhyn shook his head at Chimera not to volunteer. Draven turned away. Logrhyn, trying to be friendly, suggested he might sell more orbs if he offered a proper containment option. Draven asked whether we honestly thought he didn't know how to store his orbs, and tossed one out of a wooden cabinet like a bag of chips. Ruby caught it. It was held together by a thin metal band like a hair tie. We promised him a volunteer. Then Logrhyn asked, hypothetically, what it would take to build an artifact that enters the dreams of a comatose, poisoned mortal, and Draven came to life. The orb would shred their sanity and make the dreams easy to navigate, he said. Safer options existed, with other items.

We huddled. Ruby argued we should stick to the plan and not swap the recipe. Logrhyn said carrying bombs wasn't his strong suit, that it could go off for no reason, and, worse, rip the dreamer's mind apart. Ruby remembered a restraining gauntlet built in Brightport a century ago for raw energy, said she could build a container, and told him, Boss, I can do it. I believe you, Logrhyn said, and we took it.

While Draven was distracted, we went looking through his workshop for something to keep the orb in, and found a hatbox holding a smaller box, and a smaller one, until the smallest fit the orb. Chimera, who still believed everything was free, took a gaudy gold clasp set with a rough, lava-rock gem. Later he figured out that the elegant elven filigree and the demonic gem didn't match, like two kinds of magic at war. Nythera, meanwhile, quietly pocketed an elven garment that looked uncomfortably like something her family would own. We left the tower, and Ruby saw a woman weeping and hugging someone's clothes. When we got back to Oren's, the place had been tossed and he was gone, though our gear was untouched. Then another silhouette wrapped around Logrhyn and began sanding at his armor like chalk. Ruby tried to pull him away. The ghosts, it turned out, touch back.

Whatever we did to that ghost, it was gone, and none of us knew whether we'd killed it or banished it. Logrhyn was still smoldering, and insisted it was just a ghost and couldn't really hurt anyone.

By then we were level six, which in hindsight explains a lot. Five guards stopped us in the street. King Sarian wanted to see us, they said. We've never met him. Logrhyn tried to explain himself like a sovereign citizen, and when they went for the cuffs he simply refused to lift his arms. Chimera disguised himself as an Eladrin guard and claimed new orders had come down from the king, which would have worked if he'd remembered the glowing insignia. The guards teleported onto the rooftop next to Ruby, who leapt off in a triple flip. Logrhyn called for Nythera, who appeared behind a guard and said boo. Chimera dropped the disguise and noted, for the record, that this usually works. The captain, a woman named Viviana, disarmed us and, we think, liked him for it.

She took us to an interrogation room and turned off her recording gem. Oren had told us things he shouldn't have, she said, and he was being held for questioning. If his story matched ours, he'd be excused in good time, and as far as we were concerned, Oren was fine. She'd found the orb in its nest of boxes, with a tiny square void at the center that swallowed light, and had a robed person take the box away for inspection. Then she told us the truth about her city. Odysia is dying. An artifact that keeps every Eladrin alive has been malfunctioning for decades, and each time it does, someone is lost between existing and not existing. The silhouettes aren't ghosts. They're citizens, stuck, in agony, forever. Draven is supposed to fix it. He's also her father. She lost her two daughters to it fifteen years ago. She thinks Draven has gone mad, and that the king, a traditionalist who doesn't want to owe anyone, has put his faith in the wrong man.

We described the man on the bridge. She knew exactly who he was. Seleth Kaybourne, the idiot child of an old and powerful family, who'd stolen artifacts from Draven's tower months ago and run. She wasn't sorry. It was a relief to hear that not every Eladrin comes apart if you shake their hand. She let us go, told us to leave that night, and tucked a note into Chimera's pocket.

At the gate, a robed man handed Ruby the box. He called it a compounder, what we've taken to calling the Doubling Box, and he was nervous, handing it over with great care and making her promise to take it far away. Once a week, one of the boxes vanishes for a day and returns a little larger, and whatever's inside doubles in strength and instability. After seven weeks, you have an orb of chaotic assault about the size of a human skull. You can take it out on the day it reappears, but you can't undo what it's done. It's like straightening a pile of spaghetti. Ruby told him it was for a collector. It is for Logrhyn. We left with a bomb in a box, and six days until it came back.

Chimera read Viviana's note on the road. If he was still alive in the month of Estes, she'd be on vacation, and if he wanted to meet, he should press his thumb to the seal. Estes was a month and a half away. He blushed, folded it up, and put it away.

The trip back wasn't kind. We hit a landslide, a trapped bridge, and a storm that pinned us for two days and dented the car with hail, and we ran low on food. On the twenty-fourth, at dusk, we found a figure standing in the road. A black rider, horseless, with a sword stuck in the ground. It was the one Chimera had shot on the way down. Chimera, who had just smoked an unreasonable amount of blackgrass, was sure it was there for him personally, which, to be fair, was not a crazy guess.

Nythera pointed out we could just drive through him. Ruby said, gun it. We got within twenty-five yards, the rider raised its hands, black spikes burst out of the ground and tilted the Gearheart, and we hit it anyway. Its gauntlet clamped onto the hood and dragged it up on top of us. Ruby hit a switch labeled Nope, the handbrake, and one labeled Bad Idea, which overclocks the forge core. Logrhyn's shotgun blew a hole in the hood. Chimera cast heat metal on its armor, which mostly impressed no one, then blasted it with Eldritch Blast. Nythera landed a crit with a poisoned arrow, and the rider was ripped loose. Logrhyn double-tapped it as it lay behind us, and we ran it over. Its gauntlet stayed stuck in the hood, and Logrhyn had two shotgun rounds left.

About three seconds later, something took shape in the cab. A skeletal demon mastiff with tiny bat wings, and Chimera's face. The rider had died under Chimera's curse, and under that curse, we get a dog. It locked eyes with Chimera and sat there, panting. Ruby never saw it. She was driving. Nythera stabbed it, Chimera pet it, and when he dismissed it, it tore apart and screamed like a person. Kolgoth later confirmed the dog comes any time Chimera kills something with a soul. Logrhyn was horrified. He had just seen a dog with Chimera's face on it, he said, and he could not handle anything else happening to this car.

We pulled over half an hour later, and Ruby pried her hands off the wheel. Logrhyn used a stick to pry the gauntlet out of the hood. It was heavy and evil, and Chimera's touch gave him a flash of visions. It's tied to the riders. When one dies, it comes back adapted to however it died, and this one would come back missing a hand and want it back. Kolgoth, feeling rejected over the dog, told Chimera he should wear it. It would let him always know where the riders were. The chance it would take over his personality was ninety-eight percent against, Kolgoth said, though he never said it would come off. Logrhyn said absolutely not, and kept pitching the Doubling Box as a solution. Nythera voted to leave it behind. Ruby wanted to take it back to Seraphane, who'd reacted so strongly to the skull. In the end, we brought it, and nobody wore it.

That night, after everyone slept, Logrhyn crawled under the Gearheart, cut his palm, and fed it thirty hit points of his own blood to get us home. The car came out the other side covered in inch-thick plates of stone, everything but the glass. It's heavier now, slower, harder to stab, and the doors are heavy enough that opening one counts as a feat of strength. The holes were already starting to heal.

The next morning, the twenty-fifth, Ruby found Logrhyn on a rock with a bandaged hand. She asked what he'd done, and he held it up and said, I shared. Then we argued about the gauntlet in the snow for most of the morning. Logrhyn wanted to kick it down the hill and let whoever finds it find it, and pointed out that wherever we took it, we could be leading the riders to the kids. Nythera sided with him. Chimera and Ruby wanted to learn what it was. Ruby called it above her pay grade and suggested leaving it a day outside the city. While they argued, Nythera went to the car, grabbed the Doubling Box, and set the lid over the gauntlet. Now it was in the box, and for seven days nobody could trace it. She tossed the box to Ruby, who caught it very carefully, because the orb was rattling around in there too. Logrhyn said he wanted to be mad, but it was probably the best solution. Then he said what was really bothering him. He'd been at this for twenty years. Ruby had been with him for eight. Plans were in motion, but he was worried we were getting sloppy, that people were learning too much about us, and that we'd picked a fight we couldn't afford. Ruby put a hand on his shoulder and said, You're right. We have to focus. Get close to Esterholt, fix the car, get supplies, make a plan.

That plan lasted about a day. On the twenty-sixth, at night, we came across a mining camp under attack, with explosions and miners streaming out of a cavern, chased by a bone devil, ten feet tall and skeletal, with green eldritch fire and a scorpion tail. It caught one of them and beat him against a rock until he came apart. The miners ran for the lights of the Gearheart, and we stepped in. Chimera tried to open the roof hatch, failed, blamed upper body strength, and stepped out instead. Our game master let slip that bone devils are immune to fire and poison, so Chimera put his fireball away for Eldritch Blast, and Nythera's poison did exactly nothing. Ruby went down hard to a crit, rolled a natural twenty on her death save, and got back up. Nythera finally killed the devil with a psychic blade through its back into its heart, and it faded like a firework and left a pile of bone. Chimera pulled a bone spear out of his leg, and a shadowy hand pulled some of the devil's ethereal goo toward him and healed him. It tasted like spearmint. The fight left Logrhyn with exactly one shotgun shell. Afterward, he leaned on his shield and said that sometimes he thinks we should find a quiet place and start a business. Ruby told him that's what Stonesunder is for. He said she was right, and that he'd forgotten how much fun we were having.

The foreman was Thomas Billick. They were mining copper for a woman in Esterholt, he said, and had set off explosives to open a sealed wall, and the devil came out. He couldn't pay us, but he offered his legendary shotgun, a four-barreled beast in an engraved box. Logrhyn pointed out that Billick had just shown a stranger a legendary weapon with no plan for what to do if the stranger turned out to be the murdering type. So we made a deal. We'd clear the mine of devils in two days, and get the gun, ten percent of everything they dug up, and the name of his employer. Chimera drew up the contract, which has a lot of blanks, and the word shaft shows up a lot. Devils reach our plane through revenge summonings, warlocks and blood mages, or accidents, Logrhyn and Nythera knew, and they tend to arrive in threes. Pact magic loves a rule of three, Chimera added. Sometimes it means six.

Logrhyn got ten shells out of the miners, which put him up to eleven, and they gave us a map with the methane pockets marked. We went in on the twenty-seventh. Our first survival check came back a six. The map was upside down. We walked out, and ten minutes later walked back in. Nythera scouted a chamber and found a bone devil gnawing on an arm with its back to us. The chamber was also full of methane, which put a hard stop on Chimera's favorite spell. So we built a fallback. If it went bad, we'd retreat to a reinforced hall forty or fifty yards back, and Chimera would throw fire into the methane room and bring it all down. No fire until we need fire.

We opened with Ruby's wrist ballista. The devil dropped the arm, charged, then turned invisible, and Logrhyn threw a handful of gravel to show us where it was. Chimera's blasts hit it for thirty-four, and then a second devil appeared behind him, stung him with poison, and clawed him down to a third of his health. Nythera stabbed the first devil for forty. Then the first devil rolled a natural one on the fumble table, the wall behind us cracked, and water began to come through.

Chimera went down again, to a hair, and Nythera got him up with a potion. Ruby ran at the devils instead of away, took a crit from a bone spear that hooked her, then a claw that put her out. Logrhyn got her back up, tried to take her place in the grapple, and failed. He shouted for everyone to run. Someone at the table pointed out that we owed Chet an apology, because we had been Chetted. Chimera tried to talk a devil into lying down, in Infernal. It shrugged him off. He told it where to put the horse it rode in on, and ran for Nythera as the wall opened up.

It was the toughest fight we've been in. The wave swept one of the devils away. Nythera hugged Chimera from behind and manacled their wrists together so they wouldn't be separated, and Chimera fired his biggest blast into the wave to buy half a second. Logrhyn slammed into the other devil like a pool ball, planted his shield, and scruffed Ruby behind it like a kid at the park, so the water broke around them. We weathered it one roll at a time, and were swept down a hole onto a ledge behind a waterfall, with a two-hundred-foot drop beside us. Kolgoth, who had said nothing the whole time we nearly died, said nothing now, and Chimera noticed.

When we could breathe again, Chimera kissed Nythera on the mouth, wrung out his shirt, and said at least we made it. Ruby scowled at him. Logrhyn got to his feet, poisoned and swaying, and tried to tie a lasso knot. Ruby thanked him, quietly, and he looked at her. In all the years we've known each other, we've never come that close to dying. He didn't say anything, but she could see it in his face. It was regret. This better be a badass shotgun, Ruby told him. Then Nythera asked what was next, boss, and Logrhyn went off about strangling the foreman and every mining code Billick had violated.

Technically, we had completed the mission. Both devils were dead. We'd also destroyed the mine, as Logrhyn pointed out. We'd been extra thorough. We'd washed it. We rested behind the waterfall, which, per the rules of every waterfall, was hiding something. Nythera slipped the manacles off with sleight of hand and apologized for chaining him, and Chimera said that if she was going to put him in manacles he trusted she had a reason. Normally he has to pay for that kind of treatment. While we sat, Logrhyn said the greater demon horn on our list was in the Aubrey cathedral, installed forty-eight years ago by his late uncle Sandeer Cragborn. It was a building his own family built, and one we'd be robbing eventually.

The thumping we'd felt came from deeper in. Chimera sensed old magic, and we followed it to a chamber of square pylons made of an alloy none of us recognized, light as foil and red-veined where drips of rock hit it. Logrhyn licked one. It tasted like a nine-volt battery. Ruby licked it right after, and collected dice-sized fragments in a sack. Across from the pylons was a circular dais with a stone arch and two waist-high consoles with eight-fingered handprints. A gate. Nythera had seen one before, and said Endurants power them. She threw a rock at a pillar, rolled a natural one, and it bounced off her chest. Chimera's test blast at a pillar vanished silently. So he put his hands on the consoles and blasted them with everything he had, like pouring a super soaker into a canteen, and it flooded all at once and wouldn't take. That's when Kolgoth, silent through all of it, offered to help. A payday loan for magic, basically.

His price was an apology, from each of us, for how we'd treated him over Darmok in the car. Ruby said she was sorry for how things came across while she was driving, and for not saying anything. Nythera said she was sorry his feelings were hurt by her not wanting to resurrect a serial killer, and he told her she could do better. Logrhyn said he hadn't said anything wrong, and that he'd been right. Eventually, he got to the real thing: we only tolerate Kolgoth because we love Chimera, and we could do a better job of not making it feel that way. Kolgoth accepted it, and told Chimera he already felt closer to all of us. We all threw up in our mouths a little. Chimera said he did, too.

With Kolgoth channeling through him, the arch lit up and the room filled with hot wind, and through it we saw a desert, then a marsh, then a cave Nythera knew immediately, then the lakebed above us. We picked the surface, next to the Gearheart. Right before we left, Nythera and Ruby saw it behind the pylons, sticking out of the rock. A claw, about the size of Ruby. She chipped off a piece. The claw twitched, the wall cracked, and then it settled. We came out beside the Gearheart in front of a crowd of miners who watched us appear from nowhere. We still don't know what it is. For now, we call it the Thing in the Walls. Out of character, the table suspects it's massive, powerful, and imprisoned for a very good reason, and we are all hoping it's not the one that rhymes with "Schmerrrasque."

On the surface, Logrhyn went straight at Billick. We'd solved his demon problem, he said, the mine was closed, and it was under a lake. Then he told him to give us the name of who hired him, or get beaten. Billick asked us not to tell her he'd talked. He gave us a name, Miss Billson, and drew a map to a prim and proper tiefling in the merchant district of Esterholt. We took the shotgun, officially the Overkill shotgun. At our table it's called Fuck It, because that's what Logrhyn has to say to fire all four barrels. It normally fires two barrels in a cone of exploding dice. Jameson talked our game master into making the cone a Dex save for everyone in it, so it plays like a fireball made of buckshot. In the test, it did sixty-two thunder damage. If Logrhyn fails the strength save, half of that goes into him.

On the road back, a huge blood-red bloodhawk landed on the Gearheart's hood. Chimera tried to charm it and wiggled his fingers a lot. Ruby offered it jerky out of the roof hatch, and it took it, pecked her palm, and squeezed halfway into the car. It bit Chimera's fingers, so he used prestidigitation to make them taste awful, which would have been more useful beforehand. His joint went to Nythera, who held it out, and the bird took it from her very gently, then burst out through the hatch in a cloud of feathers. Logrhyn named it Birdinand. Ruby had proposed Ferdinand, and adopted the improvement. It left nineteen feathers, worth thirty-five gold apiece, and Ruby gave them to Nythera, not Chimera. On the twenty-ninth, the Doubling Box gave back the orb, a quarter larger and shimmering red. We put it back. The plan is to have a new box made out of adamantine.

Then we were home, or what passes for home. We'd told the kids we'd be back in a couple of weeks. It had been a month. We took the mayoral suite at the Silksheets, and Chimera's dog, it turns out, is free to summon when you have a place of your own, so he called it up. Our game master rolled a d20 for each of us to see who the dog would warm to, and when Logrhyn and Ruby tied for lowest, picked Logrhyn, because that's funnier. Jameson then rolled a natural twenty handling it, and our game master ruled that the dog stays. Ian named it Doug Mera, and the table calls it Dogmera. A second natural twenty, back to back, gave it a trait: it stands watch, and everyone gets sharper passive perception while it's around. It also steals watches. Logrhyn dropped a bottle of booze into the Doubling Box as a test and started a journal of dates. We now had three things in there, on three different schedules. The gauntlet was due out on the second of Thorim, three days away. Then we went to Bonzo's Dark.

Vetty was working as a waitress. She'd been there two and a half weeks, and the place had named a sandwich after Nythera, the Knifera, spicy enough to make you bleed. Nythera asked whether we hadn't left them fifteen thousand gold. Vetty said she'd never had a day job and kind of wanted to help. Baz has a job with the blacksmith, and likes it. Ora takes jobs for somebody and doesn't talk about it. She leaves the Gloaming Quarter and comes back with money, and Vetty has learned not to ask. Then she told us about Chet. He'd put off the decision about becoming a vampire, and got sick. He tried to bite someone outside the Gloaming Quarter before he'd even turned, and they had to pay a big bribe to keep him out of trouble. Chimera said, oh, your first bribe. He'd turned six days ago. She asked us not to tell him she'd told us, and said she wanted to pack up and come with us. Logrhyn told her nobody was going anywhere for a couple of days. Chimera added that the next thing we had to do was really boring. Logrhyn, who had told the kids to retire and take admin jobs, was confused and annoyed. She went back to work, a little sad.

In the temple basement, Chet came skulking out of the shadows, tackled a rat, and tore into it with two sets of fangs. When he saw us, he was mortified and ran to change his shirt. Nythera said it was good to see him up.

Then we talked with Seraphane. Chimera described the riders, the skull, and the gauntlet, and she stiffened. She raised a hand, the door at the top of the stairs shut, and a hazy dome went up around us. Pardon the theatrics, she said, but there are people in this church who would kill all of you to get that gauntlet. Then she realized how that sounded. A very small number of people. Maybe ten percent. Negligible. Chimera asked if she meant the Silent Choir, and she said she was very glad she'd put up the dampening field. Ruby cut in: we have a thing we didn't mean to have, and we want to know how to keep it away from everyone we care about.

Her visions had been getting harder to see, as if someone were blocking them, and some in the church believed the Silent Choir was sabotaging her. The Choir believes in a first vampire, long ago, who may be coming back, and thinks the riders are harbingers, tied to the blood rain a few months back. The riders were knights once, she said, from a kingdom that supposedly gave birth to the first vampire. Her working theory was that they'd wanted Chet because only a vampire can talk to the riders, and Chet was a vampire they could afford to lose. When Seraphane asked if we'd really run into one, Ruby said no, we ran over one, with our motorized carriage. Mother Duskward wants to be diplomatic, Seraphane said. She had offered to slit a throat, and Duskward had forbidden it. The Choir doesn't know we're allied with the church, she added, so if an outside party were to have an unfortunate accident, nobody would look at the Pale Mercy. Ruby said we're good at unfortunate accidents, no promises. Name me a price, Seraphane said. Chimera asked whether destiny could be altered. She said knowing it only solidifies it. Ruby told her to let us settle in first.

On the gauntlet, she told us never to put it on, and to throw it into the sea or a deep hole, because it can't be destroyed. When Nythera asked who might know more, she named Dame Ordress, the Knowledge Keeper, who has a library with only one subject in it. Ruby asked, did we beat it, is it over? If her visions weren't blocked, she'd know more. Nythera told her that people who worry they're going insane usually aren't. Ruby asked if she could come back alone sometime, with questions. Of course, Seraphane said.

As we got up to leave, Chimera slid a tarot card, Death, onto the table face down. She told him to be careful about inviting a third into his relationship, and spoke of the soul jar, and things that are worse than death. He said he'd made a deal and meant to make good on it.

Then we went to see Chet. He wouldn't go home, he said, because his father would kill him. Logrhyn told him it wasn't permanent, give it twenty or thirty years. Things change. He also told him not to take any job that sends him out alone, because they'll send him out to die. Nythera told him she knew it had been an impossible choice, and it was good to see him pulling through. We left him to it.

Vetty, Baz, and Chet are accounted for. Ora isn't. We have to find Ora.

So that's episodes 41 through 59 of Frostbourne. Since the last recap, this story got bigger, older, and a lot less forgiving. We learned what's inside the Gearheart, and what it cost. We went to a city of beautiful, frozen people who are dying, and walked out with a bomb in a box. We found out the black riders are real, they're hunting us, and one of them is coming back for his hand. We nearly lost each other in a flooded mine. And Kolgoth, who we spent this whole stretch trying to keep at arm's length, got every one of us to apologize to him.

There's a lot still open heading into whatever comes next. Logrhyn's list isn't done. The orb was one piece of it, and the greater demon horn is waiting in a cathedral his own family built. The Doubling Box is counting, with the orb on a weekly clock and the gauntlet on its own, due out on the second of Thorim. Seraphane's warning about Chimera and bridges is still unresolved. Darmok is still in a jar, and Kolgoth still wants out of hell. He thinks Chimera should wear the gauntlet, and Chimera hasn't said yes. Chimera is very curious about that mismatched clasp, and Nythera is sitting on an elven garment that isn't done with her yet. Jesse is still in the Gearheart, and now so is a little of Logrhyn. Ruby has a chip off the Thing in the Walls, a sack of strange alloy, and a standing invitation to visit Seraphane alone, which she plans to take. The Silent Choir might be blinding Seraphane. Chet is a vampire who can't go home. And in a city of frozen people, a woman named Viviana left Chimera a note to press his thumb to if he's alive in the month of Estes. Oh, and we still have to find Ora.

If you've made it this far, thank you, genuinely, for sticking with a bunch of idiots who keep insisting this is not a heist. If you're brand new, this is a great place to jump in. We'd love it if you'd rate the show, leave a comment wherever you listen, and tell a friend who'd like getting lost in a world like this one.

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We'll be back with the regular feed next episode, and we'll catch you up again after episode 80. Until then, this is Jasper, signing off. And remember, if a box ever tells you it's going to double what's inside it once a week, that's usually your answer right there.