I learned that there’s a specific kind of gravity that comes when you’re being hunted. It’s not like the steady weight of a mountain. It’s a jagged, frantic thing. The mist in the vale was thick enough to swallow our footsteps, but it amplified the sound of the horns. Four separate groups, then six, their calls echoing off the granite until the whole valley felt like it was closing in.

Pivot felt my heart beating frantically, and replied, their legs drumming against my collar bone. The others have their wolves and crows to lead them, but I have my little spinner. Nol’s wolf-shadow found a scent, and Valentine’s crow led us upward to a crevice freshly hidden behind a boulder the size of a lowlander’s house.

Before we could vanish into the dark, something caught our trail. It was a huge beast, canine in shape, but with mechanical spider appendages, that clicked against the stone and snuffled at the ground. Plexus put a bolt in its gut, and I watched it flee, dragging a wet trail of biological and electronic entrails behind it. A waste of parts, honestly, but it bought us the silence we needed. No one followed.

The crevice led us deep into the heart of the mountain. It was a vertical split that felt familiar: dark, confined, honest. But then the path broke. We hit a perpendicular crack, a bottomless void where an old rope bridge had been cut away. The gap was too wide for a jump, but gravity is only a suggestion if you know how to bargain with it. I told Nol to throw me. At the peak of the arc, I made myself weightless. I didn’t fly, I just forgot to fall. I anchored a line on the far side so the others could cross.

Plexus almost didn’t make it. He lost his grip, dangling over that infinite dark. I felt the surge of violet light behind my eyes, pushing the weight out of his body. Valentine and Nol hauled him up like he was made of feathers, or at least less meat. It was an efficient use of energy, though the feedback made my teeth ache.

Further in, the dark of the crevice broke for a soft glow. We found a cavern of stalactites and stalagmites, and a smooth, ancient chest engraved with runes. Plexus read the name in the runes: Naahmet. He found cyphers inside, but I wouldn’t touch them. You don’t pick up a tool if the handle is coated in poison. This Naahmet is the source of the rot here. Taking his gifts is a structural error I’m not willing to make.

We found a glowing mushroom, about a foot tall. It smelled… right. I took a bite. It was a calculated risk that paid off in a burst of clarity, so I harvested the rest. It led us to a nursery of sorts, a cavern of fungi where meter-long translucent grubs grazed. We watched from behind a column of rock, into a bank of windows to see robed figures walking down a corridor, then entering our cavern and working at extracting a milky white substance from the grubs. A biological processing line.

We tracked another group of three priestesses through the synth-glass. The doors were too solid for us to breach, so we waited for the cycle to change. When the next group opened the door, we used the passphrases the Protectors we fought hinted at. ‘From the father, our bodies,’ Valentine said. They answered, ‘From the silence, the truth whispers.’

It worked until they saw Nol’s face. He’d left his Protector mask off. The panic was immediate. We had to chase them, subdue them, tie them up in a disused side-cavern. We told them we’d come back, but human promises always feel flimsy compared to a good knot.

We moved into the processing hub. Two huge vats of that milky fluid lined the walls. We sabotaged the valves, watching the ‘milk’ drain away into the floor. Beyond that was a kitchen where a man in a black robe and a painted veil oversaw the priestesses’ meal prep. The veil hid his face, but it couldn’t hide the foulness of the work.

We took to the duct network after that. We found more vats, drained them, and watched through the grates as the temple’s dining hall filled with white and black robes.

Then we saw the heart of it. A tiered amphitheater, a sea of cultists looking down at a man without a veil. He was preaching, his voice echoing up into our crawlspace. We backtracked through the metal gullet of the temple and found a residential block.

It wasn’t a room. It was a menagerie. Pregnant women in white robes, depicting hands holding a ball, instead of reaching out, in the iconography. It was a factory. They aren’t just kidnapping children. They’re growing them.

The mountain is solid, but the atmosphere is tainted. The weight of the mountain bears down on this rotten, hollow place. I’d like to see the stone collapse and bury this all forever.

But first we need to somehow get the innocents out of here.

---

Only four folks could make it this week:
Freye Byrnes – A Resilient Delve Who Controls Gravity
Nol Yenach – A Tough Glaive Who Howls at the Moon
Plexus – A Doomed Seeker who Delved Too Deep
Valentine – A Clever Nano Who Commands Mental Powers

Lately, things haven’t been very normal. I think I died. I woke up in an ancient underground tunnel complex with a group of strangers who all share two things: a near-death experience and a ‘spirit animal.’ Mine is a twelve-legged, eight-eyed spider I call Pivot. It lives in a tiny metal capsule in my breast harness pocket, and taps a rhythm on my collarbone to help me focus. We escaped those tunnels with a dozen villagers from Aemkep who’d also woken up there with no idea how they got there.

Once we finally hit the surface, the plains east of the Black Riage felt too wide, too exposed. The Empty Machine was a jagged silhouette on the southeastern horizon. We started heading north to get the villagers home. That’s when Plexus saw his spirit animal. It led him up into the rocks where he found a girl named Ayla buried in the dirt like a seed and guarded over by a white fox.

I’ll be honest: my first instinct wasn’t pity. I saw her white robes and the red symbols of outstretched hands and I thought ‘payout.’ That robe fabric was pierced front and back, bloodied, yet the girl was whole. That’s high-grade tech. But she was just a kid, shaking and weak. She told us she came from a temple run by someone named Naion. Her role there: performing a ‘strengthening ritual’ on kidnapped children to turn them into warriors. She only woke up because a conscript named Chandra gave her an artifact, a filter he kept in his mouth, that cleared the fog from her brain. It made her realize she’d been stolen, her memories rewritten. She found a secret exit, got stabbed for her trouble, and died. Or she should have. Instead, she woke up to see us and a white fox that wouldn’t leave her side.

We got the Aemkep villagers home. They celebrated, which was noisy. They had a pile of numenera they’d mined, junk to them, but I spent an hour cherry-picking the best bits to distribute among the party. Logic dictated we couldn’t just leave Ayla’s people to the same fate, and we needed to reunite her with her family, so the next day we kept moving north.

We ran into a nomad caravan heading south, looking like they’d seen a ghost. Turns out, they had. The leader was Ayla’s mother, with a white fox of her own. The reunion was… emotional. I stayed back and checked my gear. The nomads told us their village was gone, fled because of the ‘Qalupaliq’ who we deduced to be not a bogeyman, but the temple’s snatchers. A hunter pointed us toward a misty vale, a place taboo to his people. He said there was a game path leading up, but nobody who went in ever came out. Good place to hide a temple.

We found the path. The mist up there is thick enough to drown in, a grey soup that clings to your skin. We were moving through the gloom when Plexus, scouting ahead, ran into the guards. Big. Heavy. Clad in black armor and masks that didn’t look like they were meant to be taken off. He tried to put a spear through one’s heart, but miffed pretty well. They retreated into the haze like shadows.

Miles later, an ambush almost found us. The mist made it hard to see much, but Nol and Plexus had their spirit animals acting as extra sets of eyes. It was a messy, grinding fight. These guards were tough. Their armor was thick, almost seamless. Plexus had to use his Calramite blade just to find the gaps, chipping away at them. Ilios was swinging that broadsword of his, landing hits that would’ve felled a mountain loft, Nol screamed a lot and swung that giant sword staff over and over, but these things just kept coming. Mara and Valentine were using esoteries, invisible forces that seemed to rattle the guards’ mind, but the cost was high. Both of them were bleeding, badly.

I did what I could, aiding the others where the openings appeared, and finally, I managed to bring one down. The last one… he had seen the tide turning and vanished back into the grey. He’s going to the temple. He’s going to tell them we’re coming.

When we finally unmasked the one that stayed down, the silence in the group got heavy. The face underneath wasn’t human, not anymore. It looked softened, like wax that had been melted and poured into a mold, then cooled into something jagged and wrong. Ayla’s words came back to me then. These weren’t monsters. They were the kids. The ones who didn’t escape. The strengthening ritual doesn’t just make you a warrior; it unmakes you as a person.

I looked at the others. They were processing the horror of it, the evil of Naion. I don’t do evil. I do structures. And right now, the structure of our situation is flawed. A frontal assault against a temple full of those wax-men feels like a quick way to end up dead or ‘reformed’ ourselves.

So, I did what I always do when the noise gets too loud. I walked away. Not far, just enough to get the damp stone of the vale under my fingertips. I’m not listening to the moral debate; I’m listening to the rock. I’m looking for the impossible path. A ventilation shaft, a waste-trickle, a tectonic fissure, something that gravity and a few well placed anchors can exploit.

The temple thinks it’s a fortress. But to me, every fortress is just a big machine with a back door. I just have to find the handle.

---

Only Kai’s player missed this session. She’s our sneaky character. Plexus tried to step up, but the guards noticed him and his player failed to guess the “password” although his response was inspired!

Freye Byrnes – A Resilient Delve Who Controls Gravity
Ilios – A Perceptive Jack Who Possesses a Shard of the Sun
Mara Voss – A Strong-Willed Nano Who Exists Partially Out of Phase
Nol Yenach – A Tough Glaive Who Howls at the Moon
Plexus – A Doomed Seeker who Delved Too Deep
Valentine – A Clever Nano Who Commands Mental Powers

Leaving the pale woman in charge of the villagers, we scouted ahead. Blue light spilled from a room farther on, and we could hear voices—an exchange eerily similar to the conversation Freye, Mara, and I had earlier. I announced our presence before entering a chamber much like the one in which I had awakened.

Four people were inside. Introductions were made and stories exchanged. Illios, Kai, Plexus, and Valentine had all suffered similar experiences, nearly dying only to awaken in one of these chambers. We agreed to band together, at least long enough to find a way out of this strange place.

Illios muttered something about the complex being ancient beyond imagining as Plexus and I took point. We moved down the corridor and soon entered another room. An old woman stood within and explained that she was one of the elders of the village these people had come from. The villagers nodded their assent. Then she pointed at the pale woman.

“She is evil. She brought us here. She cannot come with us. Leave her behind.”

I was confused, but I recalled that the woman who had demanded blood sacrifice bore a striking resemblance to the pale woman—so much so that Freye believed them to be the same being. I tried to explain this, but the elder only repeated her demand that we abandon the pale woman. Plexus and I exchanged glances. On the surface, her request seemed reasonable.

Meanwhile, Mara spoke with the villagers. They showed no fear of the pale woman and readily accepted her as part of our group. No one remembered seeing her prior to their capture, but none would speak in her defense either, fearing to contradict their elder.

Plexus and I turned, fully intending to insist we leave the pale woman behind, when I caught a glimpse of pale blue eyes in the corridor. It was the beast I had encountered in the forest—hackles raised, teeth bared, staring at me. From the corner of my eye, I saw that Plexus was witnessing a similar vision.

I remembered how the pale woman had healed my wounds and aided these people. She would come with us. The elder could join us—or stay behind. Plexus gave voice to our resolve, and the old woman snapped.

“Leave her! Do as I say!”

Seeing our refusal, she changed. Her arms lengthened, her hands fusing into terrible claws as her body grew. I am a tall man, but she grew to at least half again my height, twisting into a monstrous, hag-like form. She swiped at me, but I leapt aside and struck her a grievous blow with my bladestaff.

The rest of my companions joined the fight with blade, spear, and more esoteric means. The creature’s vitality was astounding. I landed blow after blow that should have slain any mortal, yet it fought on. The battle was hard-fought, and many of us suffered wounds from the thing’s black claws, but at last it collapsed, drawing its final breath.

As the pale woman tended our injuries, Kai slipped away to scout the only passage leading from the room. She returned before any of us realized she had gone.

“There’s another chamber ahead,” she said. “It looks like a barracks. There are a dozen beastmen inside. I didn’t see an exit, but there’s some kind of strange arch covered in runes on one of the walls.”

Illios proposed we attempt to bluff our way inside.

“I’ll disguise myself as an Aeon priest,” he said, “and the rest of you can act as my retinue.”

“I’ll slip back and be ready when this goes pear-shaped,” Kai muttered.

We strode into the chamber as if we owned it. A few of the beastmen hesitated, but their leader quickly rallied them and prepared to attack. Kai sent an arrow whistling into the leader, and the rest of us surged forward. We focused our efforts on bringing him down, and once he fell, Kai cowed the others into a swift surrender.

While I stood watch over the prisoners, my companions examined the rune-covered arch.

“I’ve seen symbols like these before,” Plexus exclaimed. “This is a name—Isenefer.”

The pale woman was questioned. She shook her head when asked if that was her name. Strangely, she produced a small rodent, which squeaked out a few words. Valentine attempted to read the creature’s mind and gleaned fragments of understanding: Isenefer and Naahmet were enemies. Somehow, we had been drawn into a conflict between them.

The pale woman activated the gate, opening a portal to the outside world. We emerged onto the plains east of the Black Riage. We tried to persuade her to come with us, but she only shook her head. We watched as the portal closed, then turned north.

We will see these people safely home.

---

Full House for this game – all players showed up:
Freye Byrnes – A Resilient Delve Who Controls Gravity
Ilios – A Perceptive Jack Who Possesses a Shard of the Sun
Kai – A Confident Jack Who Acts Without Consequence
Mara Voss – A Strong-Willed Nano Who Exists Partially Out of Phase
Nol Yenach – A Tough Glaive Who Howls at the Moon
Plexus – A Doomed Seeker who Delved Too Deep
Valentine – A Clever Nano Who Commands Mental Powers

Valentine’s player didn’t write a backstory for the blog (no shame in that!). In a nutshell, he exposed some scammers posing as Aeon priests and got stabbed for his troubles.

Chris’ character:

Kai was born beneath the Great Bloom of the Past, when a crack in the sky splashed crystalline light across the Glass Plains and the earth seemed to hum. Her mother, a low level scavenger, noticed a faint silver sigil tracing a crescent around her wrist. The villagers whispered that such marks were a blessing of the Aeons, a sign that luck would follow the child. When Kai was only a few days old, an Aeon Priest named Jara happened upon the village in the middle of a routine inspection. Jara found the infant clutching a handful of shards of the Great Bloom’s light and, in the old tradition of the Aeons, took the child under her wing.

Jara grew into a revered mentor and friend. From her, Kai learned how to read the subtle currents of the Past and how to Slip Into Shadow—a skill she taught her as a child, when she would play hide and seek in the ruins behind their shelter, darting through the gloom of shattered spires and appearing a heartbeat later as if she had simply walked through the air. She earned the nickname “Shadow Step” among her companions, and it became a badge of her daring. She also adopted a small, wiry critter she’d found tangled in the roots of an ancient tree—a living relic of the Past with glowing amber eyes. She named the critter Pip. Pip grew to be her constant companion, its tiny paws slapping against the ground as if it were a living compass. Pip’s most useful trick was to mimic Kai’s slip into shadow, creating a perfect distraction whenever the group found themselves in a jam.

When Kai turned fifteen, the once friendly Glass Plains began to tremble. A series of strange stone formations appeared overnight, their shapes pulsing with a low, resonant hum. Jara sensed a surge of the Past within them and decided to study the formations, taking Kai along to prove her skill. The pair were caught in a collapsing cavern during an inspection. Kai, remembering Jara’s lessons, slipped away and used Pip’s distraction to escape. She emerged on the other side, a scar on her left cheek a testament to the ordeal. That incident earned her a reputation as a lucky jack—someone who could survive a collapsing ruin with only a small scar and a handful of witty remarks.

Word of the “Lucky Jack” spread faster than the wind. Freye, the bruised warrior who later met the party, swore that a silver sigil bearing jack had helped them retrieve a stolen relic from a tower of glass. Mara, the robed Nano, whispered that a stranger, also marked with the same sigil, left behind a small device that could open a pocket dimension. And in the quiet corners of a distant cavern, a pale woman who healed the party heard a voice—soft, almost a murmur—say, “Failure has its consequence.” That voice was Kai, her confidence tempered by the scar that glowed in the dark.

Kai’s reputation is built on daring, on the willingness to act before the consequences catch up, on the conviction that if she keeps her eyes on the end, she can beat the odds. She is a jack who trusts her gut, who acts without consequence, and who will often find herself the invisible hand that guides the party’s fate, even when she has never met them.

Kai, a Confident Jack Who Acts Without Consequence

Dan’s character:

Ilios was not born with the shard. He took it on purpose. His girlfriend, Seris, was caught in the activation surge of a salvaged engine—an ancient construct designed to fold heat into motion. When it failed, it began pulling energy from everything nearby: light, life, memory. The Aeon Priests said there was no time. The machine was going to implode into a miniature star.

Ilios found the containment core instead—a fractured solar shard, dormant but intact. He saw what it was the moment his eyes fell on it. He also saw exactly one way Seris might survive. When the machine breached, Ilios drove the shard into his own chest, redirecting the stellar collapse inward. Witnesses describe a sound like a held breath finally released.

Light flooded the chamber. Seris survived—thrown clear, burned but alive. Ilios did not survive. When the light vanished, there was no body. No ash. No echo. Just a scorched silhouette on the wall and a lingering heat that took days to fade. He was declared dead.

The Truth

Ilios didn’t die. He was elsewhere—folded briefly out of the Ninth World, suspended in a place of blinding radiance and crushing gravity where the shard learned his shape.

When he returned…

Ilios, a Perceptive Jack Who Possesses a Shard of the Sun

I put as much distance between myself and the village as I could, but I was still weak. The scar on my shoulder ached and was hot to the touch. My fever had returned. I could feel the moon rising in the sky, the beast threatening to emerge. I tried to fight it, but I was exhausted. As it took control, I sensed—more than saw—glowing blue eyes watching me through the forest.

I awoke naked on a synth slab. Almost naked, I should say. A wide leather belt, festooned with pouches, was strapped about my waist. My chest ached and was covered with newly healed scars. Mercifully, my fever seemed to be gone. I pushed the pain aside and sat up to take in my surroundings.

The room was lit by glowing blue orbs—the same shade of blue as the forest creature’s eyes. I was in a large chamber, with half a dozen synth slabs arranged in a circle. Two people were stirring on nearby slabs: one was wiry, covered in bruises, the other a small, stunning woman in robes. A trifle embarrassed by my nudity, I rummaged through the pouches on my belt and found my clothing and equipment. I can’t explain how all my gear fit inside them. Later, Mara—the robed woman—said something about a pocket dimension, but quite frankly it’s beyond me.

I dressed and introduced myself.

The bruised one was called Freye. They seemed more interested in disassembling the glow-globes lighting the room than in talking. I later discovered they were a Delve. Mara, was a Nano of some ability. None of us had any idea how we had gotten there. We remembered encountering an animal with glowing blue eyes: a spider for Freye and an eel for Mara. All of us bear a mark on the backs of our hands—a mark that glows blue when we touch someone.

After Freye stripped the numenera from the place, we left through a tunnel. It soon split into three directions. I thought I saw the creature I’d encountered in the forest moving to the left, so I led us down that passage. After a few hundred feet, it opened into a room where I spied a pale woman being held by two insect-like creatures. I crept forward to get a better look, Mara close on my heels. Unfortunately, she slipped on some alien fluid coating the floor, alerting the creatures to our presence.

One of them flickered out of existence and reappeared directly in front of me, trying its best to sever my head with a scything claw. The other seized the woman and began dragging her toward a hole in the wall. Freye used some ability to hold the creature in place, preventing it from hauling the pale woman away. Mara unleashed blasts of energy at them. I must admit that I flailed more than I fought, only occasionally landing a solid blow.

We eventually defeated the beasts, though we were nearly spent by the effort. The pale woman approached and healed our wounds. She communicated through gestures, as she did not seem capable of speaking our language. She also gave each of us a cypher—mine appeared to be a healing device. A cursory search revealed the room was a dead end. The woman became visibly agitated when I investigated the holes in the walls. They were large enough for more of the insect creatures to use, so we beat a retreat before any others emerged.

A tremor ran through the complex as we returned to the intersection. Mara heard crying from one of the unexplored passages, but we could see daylight from the other. The tremors were getting worse. Cracks formed along the ceiling, and chunks of debris began raining down. We headed toward the crying and found a room filled with people—men, women, and children—all huddled together.

Mara said we’d never make it out if we tried the daylight path. As we searched for another option, the pale woman staggered to a wall and made an arcane gesture. A passage opened in the stone. We began ushering the people out of the chamber. Most reached the safety of the passage, but Mara was struck down by a falling block of synth, and two villagers lay unconscious on the floor. Without thinking, I leapt back into the room to drag them to safety, but their combined weight was too much.

You can’t save them all.

The thought flashed through my mind—but I refused to accept it.

Through the falling debris, I caught sight of Freye. They were concentrating, sweat beading on their brow. We locked eyes, and they gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

Try again.

Suddenly, the weight of the unconscious forms lessened. Gathering them into my arms, I charged across the room as the ceiling collapsed behind me. I barely made it into the passage before the chamber gave way entirely.

We lay panting in the dark passage. The tremors seemed to have stopped. As Freye and the pale woman attended to the wounded, I scouted ahead in case any more insect creatures were lurking nearby.

I found a small chamber. A synth altar stood at its center, its channels stained with dried blood that clearly marked its purpose. A stout chest sat against one wall. Behind the altar stood a woman—strikingly similar in appearance to our pale companion. She held a glowing red orb in her hands.

“Warrior,” she began, “you can have power beyond imagining, riches without limit—anything you desire. Bring me one of those pitiful creatures and make a sacrifice. Their lives are meaningless. A little of their blood will grant all your desires.”

I leveled my crossbow at her and told her the only thing I desired was to see those people safely out of this place.

“Help us or stand aside. I’ll happily send this bolt through your neck if you try to stop us.”

She tried again to entice me to sacrifice one of the people we had found. Wary of her power, I called for Freye to join me. Her demands for blood sickened me. Tiring of her, I lunged into the room, striking the orb from her hands and slamming her against the wall. She shattered into dust. I turned and crushed the orb beneath my boot heel.

Gathering up our wounded, we prepared to journey deeper into the complex. We can only pray we find our way out of this benighted place.

Freye Byrnes – A Resilient Delve Who Controls Gravity
Mara Voss – A Strong-Willed Nano Who Exists Partially Out of Phase
Nol Yenach – A Tough Glaive Who Howls at the Moon

Chesry’s character:

The tunnel was failing.

I felt it before I heard it—the subtle wrongness in the stone, the way dust drifted upward instead of down. The cave had been stable when we entered, its walls threaded with dull metal veins and ancient support arches half-swallowed by rock. Now those veins glowed faintly, pulsing like something disturbed from sleep.

“Move,” I told them. “Now.”

They were a mixed group—scavengers, a guide, two villagers who should never have come this deep. Fear made them clumsy. Fear always did. I stayed at the rear, urging them forward as the cave groaned and shifted, shedding pebbles like warning shots.

We reached the narrow ascent just as the first collapse came.

Stone slammed down behind me, cutting off the lower tunnels entirely. The shockwave threw me to one knee. Someone screamed my name from above.

“Go!” I shouted back. “Don’t stop!”

They hesitated. I heard it in the silence between falling rocks.

“GO.”

They went.

I turned to follow—and the world broke.

The ceiling came down in a roar that drowned thought. The passage ahead vanished in a curtain of stone and dust. I ran anyway, then stopped short as the tunnel ended in a wall that had not been there a moment before.

Darkness rushed in.

The air filled with grit and choking smoke. My ears rang. Somewhere deep within the collapsing cave, something hummed—a familiar, distant resonance. The artifact chamber. The place I had touched, days earlier, when curiosity outweighed caution. The place that had answered me in a way I still did not understand.

I struck the wall once, twice. Solid. Unyielding.

The light dimmed.

Panic surged—not sharp, but heavy. Final. The certainty that there would be no second attempt, no clever solution, no time.

My breathing broke apart.

And then—despair stripped everything away.

No plans. No training. No discipline. Just the raw, wordless refusal to die alone in the dark.

I pressed my hand against the stone and screamed—not aloud, but inward, with every fragment of will I had left.

The world faltered.

The wall did not break. It did not move.

It forgot me.

Cold washed through my arm, then my chest. The pressure vanished. The stone blurred, lost its edge, and for a single impossible moment I was nowhere the cave could properly define.

I fell forward.

Air hit me like a blow. Open sky. Night. I tumbled down a slope of loose shale and lay gasping beneath unfamiliar stars as the cave behind me collapsed completely, sealing itself with finality.

They found me at dawn, half-buried in dust, alive.

I’ve never been back to that place. No one could—the entrance was gone, swallowed by stone as if it had never existed.

Mara Voss A Strong-Willed Nano Who Exists Partially Out of Phase

Andy’s character backstory:

I remember a being who reveled in the sunlight. Or at least I remember remembering such a being. Basking in the warmth, feeling the nourishing energy of the glow. Letting skin darken as it absorbed the light.

But that being is barely an echo. What is true, now and forever, is that all is darkness, and light destroys.

But even creatures of darkness can try to bring light to others.

The mother was so afraid. Terrified her child would be lost, but more terrified still of the darkness. She was shrieking at the portal to the ruin, her heart needing to go after her child but her fear — and perhaps something else — making it impossible for her to move forward.

Then she saw me, and I saw a desperate hope in her eyes, and my heart broke yet again.

“Please — my baby — she’s in there somewhere. And I can’t—“

“I’ll get her,” I said. “Wait here.” Damned, contagious hope. I never could defend against it.

The hole was deep, and very old. I’d been anticipating a leisurely exploration in the blessed dark, mapping out the veins of the Ancients and collecting what bounty I could find; or, Void allowing, finally meeting my grim destiny. The former part of that plan, at least, was clearly not in the cards, and I was determined to fend off the latter at least long enough to save this child.

But there was no sign of a child. The dust of the corridor was undisturbed; the few branching archways fused shut as they had been for eons. I could hear nothing — or could I?

Far down the corridor came the faintest sound of weeping.

I broke into a run. The being I don’t remember being would have had to move slowly, carefully, unable to see in the darkness. But the being I am ran sure-footed and swift toward the sound of the cries. As I ran, the corridor became narrower and more serpentine, but I continued apace, never slowing. How had this child managed to venture so deeply into this ruin? It didn’t matter; if I could save it, I would.

At last I came upon another closed archway, this one marking the end of the corridor. The cries had been getting louder and louder; by now they were piercing to my ears. It did not occur to me to wonder how the child could have gotten past this locked archway; my mind was entirely focused on breaking the lock. Grabbing a rock, I began slamming at the mechanism.

With every concussion of rock against mechanism, the child’s cries got louder. Whack – Cry. Whack – Cry. Over and over until finally the lock cracked into pieces. I shoved against the portal with all of my might, and as it slowly ground open the cries continued, getting louder and more frantic until finally the door swung free and—

Those aren’t cries — they’re laughter. And pouring through the portal — pure, unfiltered, poisonous sunlight.

As the raucous, high-pitched laughter of whatever it was that lured me into its trap merges with the gorgeous pain of the golden light, I don’t bother fighting. This has been coming for a very long time, and I allow myself to welcome it.

Plexus – A Doomed Seeker who Delved Too Deep

Here’s Icculus’ character backstory:

People from the lowlands talk about the ‘horizon’ like it’s a flat line where the world ends. In Legrash, the horizon is a vertical wall of granite and ice. I was born hanging from a harness, pretty much. You learn quickly in the Black Riage: if you don’t trust your knots, you don’t see the next sunrise.

I’m not much to look at. A sinewy frame covered by form-fitting insulated clothes, mirrored mountain goggles, a harness heavy with gear, short dark hair poking out from under a fur-lined hat, and wind-burned skin. My hands are calloused enough that I don’t feel the bite of the synth-rope anymore. I carry enough climbing cams and anchors on my harness to kit out a whole squad, but I prefer the silence of working alone. Down in the dark, confined ‘throat-mines’ of the mountains, silence is your only friend. It tells you when the rock is about to groan. It tells you when something ancient is waking up.

The Aeon Priests at the regional Durkhal call me their ‘mountain goat’. I go where their armored airships and levitating platforms can’t reach. I’ve spent the last few years shimmying into so-called ‘impossible’ ruins, places where gravity seems to have forgotten the rules or where the air is too thin for anyone with sense.

I’m pretty good at it. I can strip numenera from a pressurized housing without scuffing the synth casing. The Priests pay me well in shins for it, though I couldn’t tell you what the things actually do. I brought them a pulsing glass sphere last month (nearly lost an ear to a security drone getting it) and they acted like I’d handed them the key to the sun. To me it was just a heavy, glowing ball that really didn’t like being moved. I’m good at the how of salvaging, but the why is for people who have time to read books and stand around in rooms talking about them.

It was supposed to be a pretty standard extraction. An Aeon Initiate named Kaethen, a kid barely old enough to have peach fuzz, was sent to ‘oversee’ my work up by Mt. Zanlis, at the Spire of Shifting Anchors. The Spire is a finger of pink rock that hangs suspended underneath thick cabled synth tethers between two peaks (and, yes, from day to day or week to week, it shifts seemingly randomly between any two of the numerous peaks in the area).
First we had to find the damn thing in the sea of mountains, then scramble up the slope and rope climb to the shoulders of one of the peaks it’s anchored on, and then finally the real business began.

Kaethen was nervous. He kept checking his instruments, eyes wide and sweating despite the mountain chill. On the way out to the Spire, I told him to stay on the main catwalk running along the tether, but he saw something that made him reckless, maybe a glimmer on the secondary cable? A spike on his instrument? He stepped onto a structural cleat attached to the side of the tether, supporting the catwalk, that looked solid, but the ages had turned it to brittle dust.

The cleat under him shattered and the whole catwalk structure shifted. Kaethen didn’t even scream; he just gasped as he fell into the three thousand foot void, one hand somehow catching a loop of my safety tether which was dangling through the catwalk, pinning me to the floor and yanking the ancient structure violently. I didn’t think. I never do when the mountain tests me. I leaped for his hand, and I remember the violet shimmer in my vision getting so bright it blinded me, a side effect of the thing I’ve carried since I was a kid. I felt the air around us crack with sudden frost, crystals of ice materializing out of nowhere as the air around us grew denser. I grabbed Kaethen’s cowl with one hand and slammed my other palm toward the huge vibrating synth tether.

I wasn’t just stopping his fall. I was trying to hold up the entire collapsing section of the Spire catwalk. It felt like I was trying to bench-press the sky. The smell of ozone was so thick I could taste it, sharp and metallic. Then came the heat in my face and the wet, warm drip of blood blooming across my lips from the sheer pressure of the gravitational feedback.

The last thing I remember is the sound of the metal buckling, of the wind screaming and the look on Kaethen’s face. He looked at me like I was a god, or a monster. I just remember thinking: ‘the Priests better pay extra for this.’ Then, the catwalk cracked, the sky fell away, the valley rose up, and the world went black.

I think I’m still alive, my feet are on solid ground, and I have no idea how I got here.

Freye Byrnes, a Resilient Delve who Controls Gravity

And Filbanto Stew arises from the ashes!

I’m not blogging about it, but we’ve played a lot of games in 2025. Dragonbane, Scum & Villainy, and Blades in the Dark are frequently at the table. We’re going back to the Ninth World for our next campaign. Our GM asked us to come up with character backstories involving some good deed we attempted that nearly cost us our lives. We’ll start with my character…

---

Something was off. The village was remote, and people are usually suspicious of armed adventurers, yet these folk seemed relieved to see us. The elders escorted us to one of the larger huts, fed us, and explained their dilemma. Their livestock were being devoured. For weeks nothing would happen, then a sudden killing spree. The creature was clever and difficult to track. It favored rocky ground, crossed streams – anything to throw off pursuit. A hunting party had gone after it about a week ago. They hadn’t returned.

My companion, Arjay, whispered, “This place is cursed. We should leave.”

I insisted we help. These people didn’t have much, and if the beast wasn’t driven off, they wouldn’t survive the winter. I was a fool. If I’d only listened, he might still be alive.

Arjay could track anything. We followed the creature’s trail through the wilderness, but the light was fading fast and we needed a place to camp. As the green-striped moon rose in the night sky, he caught the scent of smoke, and we followed it to a ramshackle cabin. The woman inside greeted us and agreed to let us stay for the night. How could we have been so stupid?

I awoke to the spray of hot blood across my face as Arjay’s headless body toppled to the ground beside me. I scrambled to my feet, staring into green eyes glowing in the dark. I could barely make out the beast – only an impression of claws, teeth, fur, and bony plates. It tore into me, bearing me to the ground and sinking its fangs into my shoulder. I managed to free my dagger and, more by luck than skill, plunged it into its eye. It roared in pain and fled into the night.

As I lay on the dirt floor, bleeding out, I caught sight of my friend’s severed head. This place is cursed. We should leave. The words echoed in my mind.

My senses slowly returned. I heard someone moving about the hut and opened my eyes.

“Awake, are you?” our hostess said, turning toward me.

I saw her ruined face, the missing eye. I knew she was the beast we had sought.

“You’re an ungrateful guest,” she said, gesturing to the empty socket.

I struggled to rise, but I was too weak.

“Are you feeling unwell, warrior?” she crooned. “Let me attend your wounds.”

Straddling me, she took great care in cutting away my torn shirt. “This looks painful. Does it hurt?” Her face twisted into an evil leer as she thrust her thumb into my wound. The pain was excruciating, but I refused to cry out.

Tiring of her game, she rose and picked up Arjay’s rucksack. “I’ll leave you now, my stoic warrior,” she spat. “I doubt you’ll survive, but if you do, you will know pain.”

The villagers eventually found me. My wounds had turned foul. Each night, as I watched the moon wane through my hut’s tiny window, my fever grew worse. During the new moon, I heard the elders whisper that I would not last the night.

But I did.

My fever broke. I grew stronger – and more restless – as the moon waxed. The woman’s words came back to me: You will know pain. I finally understood what she meant. Gathering my gear, I slipped away late one night without even thanking the villagers for their help. I knew that if I stayed any longer, they would pay a terrible price, for I could feel the beast trying to claw its way out.

I have been lucky so far – though some forest creatures and local livestock might disagree. Each month, as fair Luna waxes full, the beast takes control. I am reluctant to seek out others, for fear of what I may do when it claims me. Still, I must master the creature within, or it will master me.

Nol Yenach – A Tough Glaive who Howls at the Moon