23rd Leaffall — Night | Neither of them could make "we forgot a toolbox inside" sound convincing, so they skipped the checkpoint entirely and waited out the dam's nightly shutdown from the treeline, trading nicknames neither wanted — Briggs, Reiny — while the river slackened to something crossable. A sheep got swept off. Pascal and two farmhands went after it. Somewhere down the bank, two guards talked about nothing in particular, except for a name that meant nothing yet: Ella.

23rd Leaffall — Night | They crossed once the water thinned, using a returning sheep herd as cover — Brigitte shoving through with the subtlety of someone her size, Reinald threading more carefully. A guard nearly spotted them. Reinald put him to sleep against the wall instead, and they left him looking like a man who'd simply dozed off on the job.

23rd Leaffall — Night | Inside, near the Purification Room, the guard from the riverbank turned out to be standing right in front of them, mid-conversation with a deerfolk scholar named Bramble. Reinald's first sleep spell fizzled against an anti-magic ward on the doorway, which only confirmed to Bramble that something was wrong. The second plan worked better: Röka, summoned as a glowing spectral fox, rattled the room next door with a Thunderwave loud enough to pull both scholar and guard away long enough to slip inside.

23rd Leaffall — Night | The chamber held a glowing arcane pool and a second deerfolk arcanist, Rowan, who recognized them immediately as the pair who'd toured the dam that morning and was not pleased about it. Reinald's explanation — poisoned water, sick fish, something in the sewers — held together exactly as well as it sounds, and Rowan caught the lie without much effort. Curiosity won out over throwing them out, conditional on supervision.

23rd Leaffall — Night | A bookcase with fresh scrape marks led to a narrow leak and a tunnel too small for Brigitte until she made it less so. Before they could finish weighing the decision, Bramble and Ella returned, suspicious of the still-active wards, weapon raised. Rowan — visibly more interested in being the one who solved this than in confrontation — talked Ella into letting the two "investigate" on his behalf.

23rd Leaffall — Night | Reinald went in first. Ella followed. Brigitte widened the gap to fit through, and the wards chose that exact moment to activate, sealing Rowan and Bramble inside the Purification Room and the other three on the wrong side of a barrier, in a tunnel that only went one direction: down.

23rd Leaffall — Night | The tunnel had been carved by something large, not maintenance crews. A camouflaged troglodyte ambushed Ella; two more joined the fight shortly after. Between Reinald's witch bolt, Brigitte's far less subtle approach, and Ella holding her own better than her job description suggested she should, they came out the other side bitten, poisoned, and short one calm evening. This was nowhere near the actual Depths. Reinald knew that much from his studies. Something about the creatures being here didn't add up.

23rd Leaffall — Night | Further in: stolen dam supplies, explaining why Ella had been transferred here after Soren fired the guards he'd suspected of the theft. While she catalogued the evidence, Reinald — with some encouragement from Röka — lifted a spell scroll she didn't notice leaving the box. They also found a cracked mask matching the Strangeling encountered in Allura's Haven's sewers.

23rd Leaffall — Night | The tunnel opened into a wide chamber full of small clockwork constructs going about menial tasks, entirely unbothered by visitors. One looked at Reinald and Brigitte, said "analysis complete," and went back to work, which was somehow more unsettling than if it had attacked.

23rd Leaffall — Night | Brigitte noticed the statues before anyone said a word about them — towering, glowing, carved as a Lily of the Valley. Whatever they meant, the meaning arrived as feeling, not words: protectiveness, then rage, then something close to betrayal, none of it explaining itself, all of it unmistakably hers.

23rd Leaffall — Night | Reinald struck up a conversation with one of the constructs anyway, Röka translating a language neither of them spoke. It confirmed its team handled the dam's "investigation," denied poisoning the fish, and produced a warded cube containing a "captured creature" — a Remorhaz, the cold-climate kind that apparently didn't need the cold. Past the chamber, a staircase descended toward something the construct called "the Queendom." It had been about fifteen days. The timeline matched the fish, the thefts, all of it.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | Then Ella spotted movement — three strangelings and a masked dwarf entering the chamber, one strangeling armed with a bow, two commoners trailing behind. The dwarf wore a glowing red bracelet and spoke in broken, mixed speech. There was no clean way out without being seen, and Brigitte, backing away, knocked something loud enough to settle the matter.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | She walked forward with her hands raised instead of running. The bow-wielding strangeling spoke the same ancient tongue she half-remembered from the sewers, demanding to know who'd taught "a surface dweller" their language. She said her parents had. He didn't believe her, and had no particular reason to.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | With the dwarf closing in and Ella and Reinald one bad move from being spotted anyway, Reinald summoned Röka into the open — a desperate idea that became, instantly, a religious one. All three strangelings dropped into something between reverence and worship. Not for Reinald. For Röka. Rökkatru.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | What followed wasn't a negotiation so much as Reinald improvising a role he hadn't known he was auditioning for, speaking through Röka to three people bound by bracelets that would kill them for disobedience, all three begging "Rökkatru" to free them. Röka warned Reinald that his power ran through Reinald's own — if the casting went wrong, the bracelets wouldn't just fail, they'd kill the people wearing them.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | Reinald gambled three times. The first freed the hunter. The second freed the dwarf, who hadn't expected to be asked "do you wish to be free?" and answered before the question finished. The third combined the remaining two into one cast that worked but left both Reinald and Röka visibly drained, Röka's spirit retreating into the book to recover.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | The freed dwarf stood to leave, and Brigitte felt the floor tilt slightly. Same jaw. Same hair. Coldrock, seen through a cracked mirror. She didn't recognize Brigitte at all.

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

She was already turning when Brigitte asked, carefully, if she knew anyone named Coldrock. "What do you know about her? Where is she?"

Brigitte told her she was safe, as far as she knew. Admitted there'd been some tension between them. Said they were good, mostly.

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

And she was gone, leaving Brigitte with a throat full of things she hadn't managed to say.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | The remaining strangelings wanted to march on the surface and burn both the dam and Allura's Haven down, not from grand strategy but to draw out one person: small, red-eyed, a harefolk who stayed in the shadows. Reinald, newly self-appointed as an "Apostle of Rökkatru," talked them into waiting for orders. It mostly worked, though the hunter stayed close to the edge of agreeing.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | His reasoning, when it came, wasn't complicated. The surface had taken their Myconids, treated them as resources instead of something bonded to, and done nothing while it happened. That, to him, was reason enough. "They will pay! They will pay for the many lives we have lost."

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | A Queen Skogrsis — still held the city below, though even the strangelings didn't sound convinced she fully agreed with where this was heading. More troubling: the strangelings already moving through Allura's Haven's sewers weren't following the same plan. Multiple groups, multiple agendas, the same general direction.

24th Leaffall — Past Midnight | The Remorhaz stayed with them, the hunter's parting instruction simple — keep it ready, release it whenever Rökkatru says so. Then they were gone, back into the dark, leaving Reinald, Brigitte, and a thoroughly rattled Ella with no good story for Soren, for Rowan, for Bramble, or — worst of all — for Coldrock.