The next morning, the party heads straight for the Church of Pas, where Maul accosts the first priest she sees and demands answers. The priest is somewhat taken aback and is unsure how to respond. He addresses Maul as Honorable Defender, and Maul asks, "What does that mean? Defender of what?" The priest reponds, "Defender of the Whorl. Of the faith of our Lord Pas: father of the gods and ruler of the Whorl. Master of the sun and the rain, giver of life, hallowed be his name."
When Maul asks this priest who they are and why they were killed, the priest is nonplussed. Angered by this (from her point of view) seemingly deliberate stonewalling, Maul demands to see the head of the church. The priest, sensing that his life is in danger, reluctantly leads the party into the church and up to the first floor, where they find several of the white-robed guards milling about. The priest knocks on the door of the central room and announces to the person on the other side that several Defenders are here and wish to speak to him. The muffled voice on the other side acknowledges this but doesn't appear. When Maul begins fiddling with her weapon, a guard with a gold facemask steps forward and asks the Defenders to please return to the ground floor, where the Inquisitor will meet with them shortly. As other guards approach, maces drawn, the party recognizes that the aggressive approach isn't working and retreats.
After several minutes of waiting in a courtyard under constant but relaxed guard, the party finally meets his Excellency the Reverend Hightree: the stern Inquisitor of Cernbridge. The party tries once again to get answers, but it eventually becomes clear that Inquisitor Hightree doesn't have any information about their personal situation. He indicates that the Defenders are based in the capital city of Viron and that they are mostly likely to find the answers they seek there. The town of Cernbridge has never received a visit from any Defenders, at least not in the Inquisitor's memory.
On more Whorl-wide topics, the Inquisitor is able to provide some information. Asked why the people hanging outside the front gate were killed, the Inquisitor replies, "They weren't killed, they were executed. For committing heresy, for questioning the eternal wisdom of Pas and intimating that our Lord has forsaken us by extinguishing the sun and causing the rains to cease." Asked what he thinks of the current situation, with the drought and the dimming sun, the Inquisitor replies stoicly, "Pas has a plan."
After demanding supplies, which the church provides to them without comment, the party goes in search of a ride to Viron. On the docks they find a man who agrees to ferry them to the coast on his logging skiff. On the uneventful, two-day journey down the Cern River, Sparky engages the skiff captain in a theological conversation. In time, and with enough booze, the captain confides in Sparky that this so-called Plan of Pas sounds like bullshit to him. The world is clearly coming to an end and the priests are doing nothing about it. Asked for advice on how to navigate the city of Viron, the captain cautions the party to proceed carefully. Viron was once a safe, if restrictive, place. But since the dimming of the sun the insurrectionists have been causing havoc in the city, which has in turn put the city guard on edge. Look at one of those silver-masked devils wrong and you'll get a mace in the side of your head.
Approaching Viron from the mouth of the Cern River, the party sees that the river and bay are filled with barges and skiffs moving to and fro. What they don’t see are any boats or vessels that look like they could brave the waters too far beyond the shore.
Back on solid ground, the party ventures into the heart of the city, where the streets, illuminated by lamps and makeshift braziers, are thronged with people. Some just going about their day, others begging for food, and white-clad soldiers everywhere. Suddenly, a fiery explosion bursts from a building just a block away from them, throwing masonry and rubble into the sky. Screams of terror are mixed with shouts from nearby soldiers and also from dark-clad individuals who (based on some sixth sense in the fuzzy depths of the party's martial minds) seem to have been expecting this particular trouble. Before the party can react, they watch as the black-clad men and women scatter and run, throwing alchemist’s fire at bands of soldiers and shouting something about Echidna and the death of the sun as they go.
In the chaos the party struggles to stay together, but with the help of Hood's dexterity and Bear's strength they somehow manage it. Meanwhile, Boomer uses one of the cyphers he found to tag one of the black-clad men who seems to be allied with the insurrectionists. After giving him ample time to find his way to wherever he's retreating to, the party tracks him to a building in a quieter, darker neighborhood of the city.
Hood knocks on the building's subterranean wooden door and charms the woman who answers it, persuading her to let them in, which she does. She leads the party to a large room inhabited by a few dozen men and women, where she calls out to a man named Jude Blackstone and says, "Look who's back!"
Jude is stunned, but also clearly pleased, to see the party. He asks how this divine miracle has come to pass, and the party tells him they have no recollection of who or what they are. Jude is dismayed to hear this but believes that, whatever's happened, it must be for the greater good of the Whorl. He is convinced that the party has been sent by Pas to save them all, and sets about telling them what he knows.
First, he reintroduces himself as Jude Blackstone, a priest of Pas. But unlike many of the faith's blind followers and upper clergy, he is an inquisitive man who seeks answers. Six months ago, when the sun started to fade, he began scouring the Secret Archives of the Vironian Church for explanations as to why the apocalypse had begun. In time, he found writings that had been kept secret for centuries, ostensibly because they contain divine esoteric knowledge considered too profound to be disclosed to anyone other than the initiated, containing evidence of the actual Plan of Pas, prophesied to take place "when the winged race descends from the heavens to lead the people in exodus." With claims of “angel” sightings on the rise throughout the surrounding area, Jude believed he might have stumbled upon something important and so spent several weeks attempting to decipher these texts, secretly cross-referencing other restricted works of history in the Secret Archives. In these other works he found several accounts of a subterranean complex to the west, beyond the Typhon Mountains, referred to as "the Whorl Engine."
Several weeks into his research Jude was taken into custody by the party, whom he refers to as the Order of the Crescent Sun. They had been sent by Bishop Arlo Valencourt to investigate rumors of heretical clergy who were spreading apocryphal lies about the One True Religion in these times of trouble. Before they turned Jude over to the Inquisition, however, he was somehow able to convince them to review his findings, which led to Bear admitting that she, too, had recently witnessed angels descending from the heavens. Seemingly because they considered it part of their mission to root out heresy, the Order decided to investigate further and followed the clues Jude had found.
The Order began their journey west. Jude later learned that they had gotten as far as the abandoned city of Nessus, but couldn’t figure out how to pass through the irradiated Typhon Mountains. So the Order made camp in a nearby village of halflings called Old Tyndale while they determined their next move. Boomer kept a journal during the expedition and made notes on possible routes, taking the local folklore he learned from the halflings into account. This included tales of a fallen goddess, which they called the Medusa, guarding something called the Wind Walkers’ Passage--and the dead city beyond the mountains, known as the Necropolis.
While Boomer continued gathering data, three of the Order's own betrayed them: their captain, Jandar, her faithful lieutenant, Zolis, and Romaro, a new recruit to the Order who was, it turned out, a plant under Arlo’s control, tasked with spying on the Order. Jude doesn't know the details, but apparently these three were seduced by a third party, who commanded them to slip away to discover the Wind Walkers’ Passage on their own, but not before betraying the rest of the Order to a local tribe of barbarians who slaughtered the halfling villagers and returned the remaining members of the Order to Viron in chains.
For whatever reason, the party did not betray Jude to the Bishop, and so he remains safe from suspicion, for now. Boomer’s notebook was confiscated by the Bishop, but priests allied with Jude's cause were able to view it briefly to steal Boomer’s map of the area. Jude presents the map to the party, but without a key because there is none (it seems that the key was in Boomer’s head).
The party asks what happened after they were returned to Viron, and Jude is sorry to say he doesn't know. But it's clear that Bishop Valencourt sentenced them to death for heresy and had their bodies interred in the Forbidden Wastes. How they returned to life, Jude couldn't say. But to a religious man it indicates divine intervention, and Jude stands ready to help the party however he can. To that end, he provides Boomer with two more cyphers his priests found in their travels: a Banishing Nodule and an Emotion Soother (details in Discord).
He also supplies the party with their real names:
- Boomer = Roondar (of the Crescent Sun)
- Sparky = Carric (of the Crescent Sun)
- Maul = Nalla (of the Crescent Sun)
- Bear = Owynka (of the Crescent Sun)
- Hood = Stedd (of the Crescent Sun)
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