Timeline

A sealed box arrived from the Haven royal court carrying a stabilizing agent and an order: find the Golden Mandrake before any of them would be allowed to sail home from Solemn Shore. Bobby was named directly — go at once, or face further investigation. No courier waited for questions; the messenger had already vanished, and Torvin turned the seal over in his hands wondering how hard it would be to forge, and who in Haven was really pulling the strings.

The road ran through the Sablewood, where the trees climbed impossibly tall and the same thorny vines that choke the Mandrake cliffs crept up their trunks. A merchant cart had been ambushed; Bobby caught the sweet, acrid reek of black-market fungal product still clinging to it. Thistlefolk thieves fell on the party and were brutalized, though one broke and fled into the trees. On their leader was a wooden token stamped with a black hand — a Greef mark Torvin knew on sight. Whether the thieves worked for the Greefs or had stolen from them, the family was now in the air, and Torvin couldn’t shake the thought that he might have been the target.

At the boundary stones of Hush, Cybin froze, struck by a wave of Fungril telepathy thick with anguish and pain — familiar, though he wouldn’t yet name it. The moment they crossed into town it vanished. At the Clover Tavern the barkeep Lausa pointed them toward the reclusive Whitefire Arcanist, and Bobby fell into easy conversation with Halthyion, a wooden Clank who farmed nearby and worried over Thistlefolk pressing in at the forest’s edge. Over a short rest, Bobby remarked on how strange the weather had been of late — sudden storms, then clear skies, with no warning at all.

Before they left the tavern, Torvin shared an old story about Sten Nari, a Faint Divinity he’d once tried to swindle — just as Lausa came in, eyeing them suspiciously for lingering after demanding directions to a wizard they hadn’t gone to see. They walked to the Whitefire Arcanist‘s house, and Bobby knocked with his magical hand. She was wary of a metal Clank claiming to be Haven’s errand-runner, but Cybin and Bobby convinced her they meant to do more than carry the Mandrake meekly home.

She told them what the Golden Mandrake truly was: a powerful anti-toxin, and Haven’s best hope against the Serpent’s Sickness — but wildly unstable, wilting soon after it’s picked. A stabilized sample would be worth a fortune. She would help them if they carried it to her friend Silas Vane, an apothecary near the Pinch. And she didn’t trust Haven: the Crimson Veil shortage felt deliberate to her, the supply choked off on purpose. Bobby began to wonder, for the first time, whether the fire that destroyed his ship and its Crimson Veil cargo had been an accident at all.

They guarded her through the stabilizing ritual against forest wraiths. In the fighting, the wraiths Memory Delved both Bobby and Torvin: Torvin relived arriving at work to find the Greefs had murdered one of his debtors, and Bobby surfaced one of his earliest memories — watching a bolt of lightning kill a man through a window during a storm, the root of both his fascination and his fear. The Arcanist warned that the stabilized Mandrake would shine like a beacon to everything corrupt in the Witherwild. With Cybin carrying the sample and the Reaping Eye weighing on his mind, the party set west toward Silas.

They woke to flames. Remy Greef and his thugs had set the Clover Tavern alight and were shouting for the Golden Mandrake. The party fought a running battle out of the burning building — Torvin charging headlong into a wall in the chaos — until the Whitefire Arcanist appeared and tore open a path through the forest for their escape. Bobby worked out that his creator’s severed head pointed steadily north toward Haven, and they used it like a compass to cross the woods; he still carried the head, all that remained of a maker who went out for Clank supplies one day and never came home.

At a river where the bridge had been destroyed, Cybin‘s jumping root carried him across and the others roped themselves over while Torvin held off wolves drawn to the Mandrake’s scent. On the far bank they met twitchy, muscle-jerking Pinch addicts running a clumsy toll scam; Bobby read their setup as amateur work and scared them off posing as a Haven authority, sparing Torvin the urge to simply kill them. Among the abandoned cargo Torvin found Lither family marks on fine silks and a ledger showing the house sliding deep into debt to someone unnamed. Whoever had been traveling in that cart was important enough to ride under Lither colors — and was nowhere to be found.

The party found Martin Lither dying at the roadside. An unnatural chemical reek hung over the scene — the same smell Bobby remembered from his burning ship. Martin had been killed by a lightning strike, struck down carrying a message that the Ottomans were deliberately using “weather pylons” to ruin rival farmland. Torvin had grown up alongside Martin, learning the business at his side, always in the shadow of the son who would inherit no matter who worked harder; old jealousy and real grief tangled together as they failed to save him.

They carried the body to the Jewel of the Lake, where Torvin’s attempt to bully the villagers into action failed and he settled for help burying his old rival. Ol’ Greg agreed to carry word to the Lither family on his next fishing run. Speaking with the dead, Cybin learned Martin had been fleeing the very thieves they’d fought at the cart — which meant someone had tipped them off to where he’d be. Torvin grew uneasy, certain the Lithers might blame him for being seen with the body.

Pressing on to Silas Vane‘s hideout, the party found the Greef enforcer called the Anvil guarding it and demolished him, sparing two underlings who fled once their leader fell. They freed Silas and learned the shape of the trade: Crimson Veil cut with Pinch sludge to make the drug, the Greefs hunting cheaper substitutes — and discovering the Mandrake grows best fertilized in Fungril flesh. Silas knew only that his betrayer went by the name V. Ottoman. Bobby recalled an old research outpost in the north that might hold the lab equipment such work required, and Cybin and Silas reached out to Maris by telepathy to warn her of the danger.

Unwilling to send Silas alone into northern Haven territory, the party brought him and the Mandrake along to a Greef drug farm — and were startled to find it flying Lither banners and colors. Cybin took bird shape to scout the estate. When Bobby tried to lift a vial of Pinch product off a wagon with his magical hand and dropped it, the alarm went up. The overseer Aldric Finch waved his convoy out, none the wiser, while the party broke through the front door, obliterated an elite soldier, and seized Aldric — Torvin breaking his arm, Cybin knocking him cold as he screamed for help.

Their escape was cut off by reinforcements: the Hammer, brother to the Anvil they’d just killed, a Master Assassin, and four apprentices. The party entangled the worst of them and Torvin tore through the rest, criting again and again, until Cybin set the Hammer alight with eldritch flame and he died stumbling forward mid-swing. Searching the estate, they found the remains of experimented-upon Fungril in the stables and clear proof of Mandrake-and-flesh Pinch production.

Questioned, Aldric laid the debt scheme bare: the Lithers had signed property over as temporary collateral, and the Greefs had quietly rewritten the repayment terms, compounding interest and “management fees” until the debt could never be cleared — all technically legal, all ruinous. The estate belonged to Sir Garrett Thane, whose family the Greefs were holding hostage to ensure his silence. Sir Garrett himself was nowhere on the property.

The party finished looting the Thane estate and moved out with Aldric in custody, the smoke rising behind them; Silas splinted the broken arm Torvin had given him, and Aldric went quiet, a man who’d already counted his options and found none. On the road, Torvin spotted Lither outriders — green cloaks, silver badges, the sigil he was raised under — and invoked the family motto to pass. Among them rode Malcolm, an old retainer who knew Torvin and vouched for him without a word.

Cassia Lither rode forward and took in the scene: a prisoner, a smoke column, documents in hand. Torvin told her where her brother was buried, and showed her the debt scheme her parents had signed believing it temporary. She read it in silence, then rode off herself with Malcolm and a detachment to rescue the Thane family; Cybin pressed his Valorstone into her hand before she left. At the Callow’s Reach docks the party found six Fungril wired into a precise, machine-built apparatus of brass and crystal — something Cybin knew at a glance was no Greef workshop’s labor, transmitting something through the mycelial network to a place he couldn’t trace.

Bobby teleported aboard Remy’s barge to cut off his escape, Torvin knocked the cornered heir senseless into the water, and the guards folded. Cybin freed three of the six Fungril before fire reached the apparatus and destroyed it. In the recovered document case lay the full debt scheme, proof the Greefs flew Lither colors to misdirect blame, and a single chilling line — “our Qavvik asset confirms the Patriarch’s schedule unchanged.” No name. A function. Someone inside the Lither tower was a mole. Remy, pulled from the water, gave up the locations of several more Fungril farms, which Cybin relayed straight to Silas — and the party realized their prisoner was now a bargaining chip the Greefs would want back.

With Remy bound in a wagon and the fungal survivors tended, the party rode through the mountain passes toward Qavvik’s Tower to win Martin Lither Sr.’s support. Reviewing the ledger on the road, Bobby made a connection that chilled him: the Greef shipping manifests matched records he’d flagged years ago as a Haven customs inspector — equipment routed to a decommissioned weather outpost called Stalkholm Station. He’d raised the alarm twice; six months later he’d been transferred. Deeper still lay Torvin’s own father’s old loans to the Lithers, household records the Greefs should never have seen, proof the mole had been feeding intelligence for years. Torvin held this back from Cassia, telling her only that some of his own loans appeared in the documents and watching how she took it.

At the tower, Martin Lither Sr. met Torvin’s eyes across the courtyard, said nothing, and looked away — recalibration, not hostility, after eight or ten years. While Torvin argued the evidence before the patriarch and Sir Garrett Thane, Cassia set Bobby and Cybin to hunt the mole among the four staff with access to Martin’s schedule. Cybin slipped into Remy’s cell as a wolf spider and found him sitting calm, like a man who expected to leave. Bobby lifted the schedule from the steward Elyas‘s room but was nearly caught; cornered by the physician Sera, his cover collapsed, and he bluffed his way clear by loudly claiming he’d been hired to test the household’s security.

Martin’s verdict on the evidence was cautious — legally executed contracts, he said, needed more than implication. Then a Greef envoy arrived with a first letter requesting Remy’s return and an offered sum, which Martin refused as an insult. The envoy produced a second document: an arbitration filing from Vantis and Associates, one of Haven’s most expensive firms, naming Remy a Greef “dependent” and giving the Lithers thirty days to release him or answer in Haven. The filing had been drafted before Remy was ever captured — the Greefs had planned for all of it. As the room broke up, Elyas slipped out to “fetch something for Martin,” and the mole remained unnamed in the walls.

The Greefs answered the refusal with violence. Assassins struck Qavvik’s Tower in the night — four of them, a coordinated kill team — and in the chaos Remy Greef was killed. The fight was vicious: one assassin was sent through a portal and fell to his death, others cut down in the halls, one very nearly escaping before Torvin ran him through. The tower held, but at a cost, and the steward Elyas vanished during the attack and never returned. The evidence pointed hard at him as the mole who had let the killers in, though nothing was ever confirmed.

In the aftermath the party weighed how to answer the Greefs, who’d already demanded Remy’s return through their lawyers. The Greefs, they understood now, were slyborn — a crime syndicate wearing the manners of a noble house — and would never be mollified by a polite letter; ignoring the summons risked a family war the Lithers could not win. They settled on a course: file a response to the arbitration stating the facts as a delaying bluff, buying two weeks, then ride for Shellsinki and Stalkholm to find harder evidence. Before they left, Martin Lither Sr. armed them from the family stores and gave Torvin a sealed letter of Lither authority.

Martin Lither Sr. saw them off with improved armor from the family stores and, for Torvin, a sealed letter of Lither authority bearing his mark — legal standing to act for House Lither in financial and legal matters. They filed their two-week response to the arbitration and rode for Shellsinki, a small working harbor that had never been important enough for politics. Bobby noticed at once that the channel markers he’d once set for the sea-turtle sanctuary had been moved and the chain barrier cut — boats were cutting straight through the nesting cove.

The party split at the water. Torvin made for the counting house under cover of the Lither letter, claiming to update Lither-Greef collateral documents; when he said Remy’s name, a man at a side table went still and quietly withdrew to a back room whose shutters had been drawn since midday. Bobby and Cybin found Ossa at the sanctuary — a former inspectorate colleague, now its sole caretaker — who had filed three complaints about the boats and been ignored. Under Cybin‘s vines, the harbor master admitted the marker had been moved six months ago on Orvyn Dask‘s order.

Then everything went sideways. A guard caught Bobby in the harbor master’s papers; someone fled the counting house’s back door shouting that they were under attack; Torvin ran into a wall trying to give chase and the town guard descended. A brawl broke out, Cybin watching from the rooftop as a spider before dropping in to entangle the fleeing stranger in vines. Cybin‘s Wild Touch — cinnamon drifting through the alley — finally broke the tension, persuading the tired guard captain to hear the party out before he marched everyone off. He brought them to the lodging house, where the innkeeper recalled an out-of-place Haven firm’s representative passing through about a week earlier.

Captain Strell wanted a simple answer about who threw the first punch; he got a longer story about Lither and Greef contracts and Remy’s name, and was unmoved — until the unnamed stranger Cybin had stopped on the rooftop stepped forward to redirect him, confirming the party’s hunch that he was the real threat in the room. Bobby’s good standing bought an opening: the captain trusted him to inspect the counting house ledgers, which showed months of shipments running south to Stalkholm under something called the Ironstone Survey Group — the same pattern Bobby had flagged twice as a customs inspector before he was transferred.

Back at the lodging house, Dask held up under pressure until Cybin caught him glancing sideways at the stranger, afraid of him rather than for himself. Cybin called it out, and the captain got a name: Gideon Tranter, a Vantis and Associates field operative posted to Shellsinki to keep the pipeline running smoothly — not a lawyer sent after the fact, but the man on the ground who’d known the arbitration was coming. The party walked Tranter out of town under pretense of escorting him home, then dropped it a kilometer out and broke him: Greef cargo shipped by boat to Shellsinki, held by Dask, sent south to Stalkholm. He wrote a confession for Qavvik’s Tower and was released, shaken and finished in Haven.

An hour from Stalkholm they came on deep ruts worn into a wide circle and found the cause: a Clank walking an endless loop, contemporary in build but with golden mycelium grafted through its casing, muttering the only words it had left — cargo, route, confirm, station. Cybin reached through the network and found it attached but unreachable, a living signal forced into a machine and ruined. They left it to its loop. At the station’s single underground entrance, a bluff about Vantis auditors held until the guards asked for papers; Bobby put fire on both, Torvin caught the runner, and one guard didn’t get up. The party rested in the tree line and chose stealth for the descent to come.

The party slipped down into Stalkholm to find an unmanned checkpoint, a loading area stacked with crates, and a motionless Clank threaded with mycelium that resolved to static in the network — present, but not answering. Two workers argued over a manifest in the next room, something about a “Melda” who’d logged three units, not two, and was “down below.” Cybin in cat form watched for both heads to drop and signaled the others across the corridor without a sound.

The administrative level below held desks, a guard pacing a slow loop, and a second dormant Clank — this one with a faint suppressed presence, more like a buried mind than blank static. The party chose contact over caution: Torvin drove into the guard at full force, Bobby played good cop, and the room froze. Cybin pushed a single word — disobey — into the corner Clank and stopped its arm mid-swing, but the guard shouted to a storage closet and three more units poured out. The fight was brutal, Torvin’s armor giving out entirely, saved at the worst moment by Bobby forcing a reroll on a killing strike. The Clanks fell one by one and the last guard surrendered.

In the records room the clerk Evren gave up the key, and Bobby went through the cabinets. There he found the proof his customs career had cost him: manifests of live Fungril shipped south under the very procurement codes he’d flagged twice and been transferred for. Among the research logs documenting the graft program lay an Ottoman technical document for the weather pylons — and the revelation that the Ottomans hadn’t built them at all. They’d found a pre-existing atmospheric control system and were still learning to use it. A bell was rung somewhere above. With his armor destroyed, Torvin and the others took a borrowed cart and a fresh cover story toward the research level below — where V. Melda works, and the deeper experiments are still running.