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Troubled Sleep

Story Emits


Tension has steadily been building in the city of Arx for months, as the summer turned to fall, and the fall to winter, without any change in King Alaric Grayson IV's condition. With the duties of the crown ignored, uncertainty and fear rules the day, and the mood in the Lower Boroughs has turned particularly ugly as crownsworn have reported abuses by emboldened Inquisitors and Iron Guardsmen. No one, however, was expecting the explosion.

The relatively quiet winter day is shattered in Arx by a deafening explosion that rocks the city with brief tremble in the ground, followed by a plume of fire originating in the Lower Boroughs shooting hundreds of feet into the air for a blinding moment before vanishing. Iron Guard rushing down to the Lower Boroughs find that the fire vanished as quickly as it showed, tracing the source to the Graveyard of Arx. Where Malavaunt's Shop and Tannery once stood is now a blackened hollowed-out ruin, the force of the blast having knocked over headstones nearby. Of the cause of the blast, there is no sign.

Few knew that Duchess Nadia Nightgold or Prince Abbas Thrax had quietly departed the city of Arx with a handpicked contingent of Nightgold and Thrax soldiers on a venture into the far northwestern reaches of the Gray Forest. However word starts to spread of their return, with rumors quickly spreading of some manner of horrors found in a shav village, and a mad Abandoned chieftain with a broken mind brought back to the city in the hopes of learning more about just what happened.