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--- game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:adventure_journal [2026/03/17 17:16] – [Kidnapping] Bryan Stephens
+++ game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:adventure_journal [2026/04/25 09:49] (current) – [Kellok Manor] Bryan Stephens
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 ==== Sebastian's Searching ====
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:characters:484968adfad.jpg?250 |}}
 Over the course of the week, Sebastian spends much of his time learning the Mechitar at all hours. He is drawn to those parts of the city where the living still move quickly beneath the weight of Geb’s rule.
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 Hairline traces of dim green or blue-white light creep across the surface of the inserted bone, following channels of power invisible to mortal sight. The scrimshaw lines catch that light first, glowing softly as if the magic prefers marked and intentional things. Then the transformation begins in earnest. The bone gives a dry internal creak ... not cracking, but yielding. Its proportions begin to shift. A narrower rib thickens and flares to match the breadth of Blake’s great hobgoblin frame. A mismatched finger bone stretches and subtly reforms until it belongs where it has been placed.
+{{ :game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:characters:femur.png?400|}}
 The process is not one of fleshly growth, but of imposed identity. Blake’s animating necromancy carries within it the pattern of what he is supposed to be ... seven feet of brutal hobgoblin stature, war-forged proportions, dense bones built for weight and force. Any new piece introduced into that pattern is gradually forced to conform. Edges smooth where they were wrong. Curves sharpen or flatten. Thickness gathers where strength is needed. It is less like healing and more like being claimed.
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+==== Learning the Shape of the City ====
+{{ :game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:characters:tm1.png?400|}}
+In the week after the audience with Geb, Tsekani sets himself to a different kind of labor. He does not spend those days basking in the prestige of a new title, nor does he pretend that a place among the Blood Lords means the city now belongs to him. Mechitar is too old, too layered, and too certain of itself for that. Instead, he spends the week trying to understand the politics of the capital ... not the public forms of office and ceremony, but the realities underneath them.
+His first stop is Dizonn Dizuul.
+The Grand Marshal receives him with the confidence of one who knows both the city and her own place within it. There is no mistaking that she has taken a liking to him. Whether that begins in her preference for mummies or in her respect for his bearing, Tsekani cannot say for certain, but he feels it in the attention she gives him. She does not waste his time with empty compliments. What she offers instead is more valuable: she gives him honesty.
+Dizonn explains A title opens doors. It grants access. It draws notice. But notice is not the same thing as regard, and regard is not the same thing as influence. If Tsekani and his friends with to matter here, they must become part of the city’s lived reality. They must be seen, remembered, consulted, and proven useful. That lesson becomes the foundation of the week.
+Dizonn does more than speak in abstractions. She begins showing Tsekani where Mechitar’s real weight rests. She guides him through the city with the sure pace of someone who knows which places are important for their appearance and which are important because decisions actually take shape there. Tsekani walks with her through the formal quarters of power, through the districts where administration hums behind polished facades, and through spaces where guards, attendants, temple servants, scribes, and merchants all intersect in the daily work of keeping the capital alive ... or as alive as such a city can be.
+As always, Tsekani listens more than he speaks. In Mechitar, courtesy is a language of rank and a tool. A bow may signal respect, caution, calculation, or habit. He notices when someone speaks warmly of another person yet does not use the proper title. He notices which names produce stillness and which produce a kind of polite emptiness. The city reveals itself in these moments. Its politics are not confined to council halls. They live in introductions, delays, invitations, old obligations, and carefully measured acknowledgments.
+Dizonn also suggests others he ought to meet. Some are officials who understand how the machinery of the city functions from day to day. Others are figures with no grand station who nevertheless shape outcomes because they know where goods move, where requests stall, where pressure can be applied, and which reputations are stronger than law. Tsekani takes those meetings seriously. He does not approach them as a parade of courtesies. He approaches them as instruction. In each conversation he tries to understand the same question from a different angle: who truly matters in Mechitar, and why.
+Tsekani learns that in Geb, ancientness has weight of its own. He learns that some undead command regard because they are terrifying, some because they are useful, and some because they have simply remained in place long enough that the city has bent around them. This also reinforces his understanding that not all forms of undeath are received equally Tsekani is a desert mummy, and that changes the city’s reading of him. In some eyes it lends him dignity before he speaks. In others it makes him a curiosity. In still others, he senses the beginning of a question ... whether he is simply unusual, or whether he may become significant.
+One of the most important meetings of the week comes when he seeks an audience with Zaheri’s mother, the Blood Lord lich, Lady Sayena Nesket. This is an easy appointment, as only a week earlier, he was a guest in her house.
+Where Dizonn teaches through directness, Sayena teaches through presence. The lesson begins before she says much of anything. She carries herself with the kind of authority that already proved itself. Around her, the room organizes itself. Tsekani has known powerful people before, but there is something different in a figure whose influence has had generations to harden. Sayena does not need to press. She does not need to impress. She exists as someone long established, and everyone around her behaves accordingly.
+Tsekani comes away from these meetings and meanderings with a sharpened understanding of what it means to operate in Mechitar. Favor is never only favor. Courtesy is never only courtesy. An introduction can be a gift, a test, or a claim. Being noticed by someone ancient can raise a person or send them to oblivion.
+During the rest of the week, Tsekani continues moving through the city with more purpose than before. He spends time in the plazas and avenues where public life makes itself visible, but he also pays attention to the places where structure gives way to habit. He watches who moves with confidence through official spaces and who hesitates even when allowed entry. He studies the harbor, where the power of Mechitar becomes tangible in trade, supply, and labor. He visits temple districts and sees how religion, law, and order reinforce one another. He walks among the black monuments of the powerful and understands that in Mechitar even architecture is political. Each structure declares continuity, status, and refusal to be forgotten.
+Tsekani is beginning to see that Mechitar measures everyone. It measures their patience, their ambition, their alliances, their staying power, and their sense of the currents around them. Tsekani has spent much of his life surviving systems built to consume him. Here, in Geb’s capital, he faces a city that does not seek to consume him outright. It seeks something more demanding. It seeks to determine who is temporary and who is lasting.
+==== BRING US SEBASTIAN! ====
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:characters:blake.png?400 |}}
+Tsekani returns home to see Sebastian’s door open. Thinking it is odd, he pokes his head in to see no Sebastian, but his equipment still carefully hung and in place. No sign of a scuffle, but a bed slept in and unmade.
+That is not the behavior of the meticulous man.
+Tsekani carefully but quickly gathers Sebastian’s kit and puts it into a bag. He leaves the room and hears his returning companions.
+//”Tsekani, we have returned. Shall we contact Kortash for his trip to the sea?”// Zaheri hails his friend and he and Blake walk into the back hallway.
+//”You’ve lost weight. Sebastian’s been kidnapped”// the mummy says and strides past Zaheri headed out the door. Zaheri turns to follow.
+Both speak again as one.
+//”The Neighbors”//
+This is, of course, referring to Harmony in Agony female human vampire, Rumin Purgo, the male gnome, and Weeping Jack, the male halfling vampire, servants of the vampire Blood Lord Hyrune Loxenna.
+//Right then,”// Tsekani says, //”We are headed upstairs for our own visit”//. The three immediately head upstairs to find their missing friend.
+BANG! BANG! BANG!
+Blake’s mailed hand slammed into the door which dented reinforced wood.
+//”What is it?”// cried Rumin as he cracked up on the door, annoyance in his voice.
+The seven foot skeleton pushes his way through the door, past Rumin and into the room, Tensor following like a pet. Rumin retreats back as Zaheri strides in afterwards.
+//”We decided to drop by and return your hospitality of last week. Tsekani come in,”// the Lich Gestures. //”We just had to drop by immediately. The timing in imperative. You see, our friend, Sebastian is missing. Return him to us”//
+Zaheri’s voice is still recognizably his own ... smooth, deliberate, and cultivated ... but lichdom has made it at once more commanding and more detached. The warmth of life is gone from it. In its place is a cold, perfect authority, each word shaped not by breath, but by will alone. He does not whisper. He speaks with the calm menace of a being utterly certain that death, time, and fear are now lesser things than himself.
+//”I don’t know what you are talking about,”// Rumin sputters, //”You need to leave!”// his alarm is growing as the group enters into their home.
+Blake mocks the servants, //”We are Blood Lords and you are mere servants acting above your station. You bother us in our home and you nothings take our friend.//
+Harmony in Agony scoffs at them all, //”You are not even Blood Lord! You are pretenders. Why I bet you never even met Geb!”//. There is general mocking laughter among the other two, but is nervous even as their vampire guards move closer.
+//”BRING US SEBASTIAN!”//
+Before they can react, Zaheri raises his //Staff of Undying Arcana// and points its skull at the far side of the room. Red fire streaks from its eyes converging in an explosion of a //fireball// behind Harmony, catching her and the rest of the household in a //fireball//.
+Harmony, Jack and Rumin all manage to avoid the worst of the damage by dodging behind furniture or doors. Jack is as fast as his name and bounds next to Zaheri and has the effrontery to strike the mage with a mace. Zaheri winces but is hardly hurt.
+Tsekani fends off an attack from the guards and rushes to attack Jack while Rumin launches himself into Blake alongside Harmony. Zaheri calmly //quickens// his friends and Blake strikes at but misses Harmony. The two dance, with Harmony landing hard hits, and Blake continuing to miss. His aim is off, his bones are not quite aligned. Frustration builds.
+On the other side of the room, Jack is facing a mummy monk and a fearsome lich. He chooses to flee and races out a nearby door, and heads off into the night. Tsekani moves to engage Rumin and the guards just as Harmony lands a heavy blow on Blake.
+Blake collapses in a heap, hurt.
+====== 13 A Plot of Poison ======
+|Campaign Dates| Neth 6 4723|
+|Game Date|03/19/26|
+==== Interlude of Companions ====
+//“What do you plan to do with him?”// Zaheri asks, regarding Sebastian’s captive.
+//“I have invested in some silver tools. They will be most useful in the coming months.”//
+The lich gives a thoughtful nod, studying the dark look on his friend’s face. Zaheri has always seen Sebastian as a man of tremendous potential. He once even suggested the path of vampirism to him. But Sebastian has always carried a rage beneath his careful, disciplined exterior ... rage at the household of ghouls that raised him, and perhaps at Geb itself. Passions that fierce are alien things to Zaheri now.
+//“What happened to you should not have happened. Tsekani and I chose our undeath. Even Blake sees himself as living a second life. This was forced upon you.”//
+//“It is what it is, Zaheri,”// Sebastian says with a faint hiss.
+Zaheri pauses, then speaks with what little compassion remains in him. //“If you choose release, I will aid you in your destruction.”//
+Sebastian goes still at that, considering. //“I still have many people to deal with. So I think I will remain awhile.”//
+//“That is understandable. And perhaps ... if you truly wish it ... we might destroy you and attempt a resurrection. Mortality could be restored.”//
+//“I will think on that. For now, this form gives me the power I need, even if the daylight is a complication.”//
+Sebastian is genuinely touched by the offer. He does not know every secret of Zaheri’s path, but he knows enough to understand how close such an act would come to anathema for him.
+Blake, who has been standing silently nearby, breaks the mood with a hearty slap to Sebastian’s back.
+//“We are survivors, Sebastian, in the hostile land of Geb.”//
+==== The Docks ====
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:monsters:transform.png?200 |}}
+Kortash meets the group at Coffinstone and dismisses his ordinary guards. He remarks that he has not seen the sea in a very long time. As they walk, Zaheri questions him about the distant past.
+//“It is said you were alive ... or at least existing ... before [[https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Earthfall|Earthfall]]. Is that true?”//
+//“Indeed,”// Kortash rasps through his new Voice. //“I have seen many things, including the sea. But when you live as long as I have, memories begin to run together.”// He looks at Zaheri and grins. //“As you will discover for yourself.”//
+Zaheri offers no answer. The words linger with him. He has achieved what was once the labor of his lifetime, yet now, in undeath, he finds the horizon only expanding. Time stretches before him, vast and unending, filled with ambitions not yet realized.
+It soon becomes obvious that this escort is as much about being seen beside Geb’s newest Blood Lords as it is about any real concern for Kortash’s safety. The ancient thing is cordial enough, but after only a brief walk along the docks, he declares that he has seen enough.
+//“ You are free for the rest of the night.”//
+The group hesitates, as though unsure whether they should simply let him depart. Zaheri, however, notes that Kortash is one of the most powerful entities on Golarion. As if to underscore the point, Kortash abruptly explodes into a cloud of maggots and vanishes. Three of the group are left visibly startled. If Zaheri still had lips, he might be smirking. As it is, his head tilts in dry amusement.
+They have little time to dwell on it.
+A sudden alarm erupts from a ship docked nearby, the //Wyvern’s Wife//. Two human dockworkers scream and stagger, their bodies bulging and convulsing. Flesh splits. Limbs distort. Before the horrified eyes of their fellows, the two stevedores writhe and burst with necrotic force, swelling into grotesque forms Zaheri immediately recognizes as rotbombers.
+The creatures attack at once, turning on the very dockworkers who moments before had been their friends and coworkers.
+Zaheri casts //haste// and barks the command, //“Cut them!”// He knows these things are vulnerable to slashing weapons.
+Sebastian draws and fires in one smooth motion even as Blake and Tsekani leap aboard the ship to engage the nearest rotbomber. The monster lashes back at Blake while the second surges farther up the deck to savage another stevedore. The distance between them is still just right for Zaheri’s //chain lightning//.
+The assault is devastating.
+{{ :game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:monsters:rotgut.png?300|}}
+Tsekani and Hanover move to engage the second rotbomber while Sebastian and Blake bring down the first. As it collapses, Zaheri follows with a //disintegrate// against the other, but the spell fails to strike true at its core. Instead of erasing it outright, it shears away only part of the creature’s mass, leaving behind a pulsing, putrid ruin of flesh.
+Then Zaheri sees another danger rising from the water.
+A dread wraith.
+//Good thing our fighters have //ghost touch// on their weapons,// he thinks.
+Out loud, he shouts, //“Over there!”// and points with his staff. His //wand of shardstorm// is in his hand in an instant, drawn from his belt with practiced precision. A barrage of //magic missiles// follows, force energy tearing into the incorporeal creature.
+Blake leaps to meet it, but his strike glances wide. Tsekani is the one who lands hard, smashing into the wraith and stunning it with the sheer force of his attack.
+//“Bind it!”// Zaheri calls, but Tsekani and Blake are already moving to contain the creature. Other wraiths can be seen fleeing the area, but the group spares them no attention. They have one captive, and that is enough.
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:monsters:wraith.png?200 |}}
+As Zaheri hurries up the dock toward the bound wraith, Sebastian turns his gun on the surviving workers and orders them to the edge of the boat. If anyone shows symptoms, they die where they stand. Yet it quickly becomes clear that this is no spreading plague. The two victims, Rafiq and Parvez, had eaten from the containers aboard ship. Their transformation came moments later.
+The wraith proves none too bright. Under questioning, it reveals that it and its fellows poisoned the cargo, but one container received too much. What was meant to spread widely instead became a concentrated overdose. Worse still, the thing names the one it serves ... Rumin, the same Rumin the group confronted only yesterday.
+That is enough for Blake. He severs the wraith’s head, destroying it.
+{{ :game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:npcs:vernetta_.png?200|}}
+With the interrogation complete, Zaheri turns his attention to the dockworkers still held at bay by Sebastian. He demands to speak to whoever is in charge. One worker points out a mohrg approaching from farther down the dock. She is Harbormaster Vernetta Xenopha.
+Sebastian studies the poisoned cargo while Zaheri strides forward. He explains what has happened and requests her aid in keeping the matter quiet, lest panic spread through the docks. That discretion must include the workers themselves. To underscore the request, Zaheri places five gold pieces in her hands, to be used to compensate the workers and the families of the dead, if they have any.
+//“Deep forces are at work here. If this gets out, it could destroy people who have no part in it. We do not want that. I am trusting you, personally, to see this matter handled.”//
+//“I agree, Lord Zaheri. It will be handled well. This is Geb. Secrets are nothing unusual here. Thank you.”//
+She is plainly taken aback by his generosity. Perhaps she takes him for a new Blood Lord buying favor. Perhaps, if she knows Berline Haldoli stands behind them, she assumes he is currying influence through her. It matters little. The gold will still serve its purpose.
+//“It is shadow ash,”// Sebastian confirms, staring at the tainted food. //“Another attempt on the food supply. I had hoped this had been dealt with a year ago.”// His face twists with disgust.
+//“We do have a lead, however,”// Tsekani says.
+Sebastian nods.
+//“Perhaps not to Rumin himself. But we do have access to his master. I am very glad I kept him around. It seems I will get to use my silver tools after all.”//
+With that, the four return home, where a former Blood Lord waits staked to the floor for interrogation.
+==== Lacerations and Leads ====
+|Campaign Dates|Neth 6–7, 4723|
+|Game Date|03/26/26|
+The group returns to the Mortician’s Suite and their captive, Hyrune Loxenna. He is a pitiful sight, bound helpless in the autopsy room. Zaheri notes that there is a //prestidigitation// on the room that stops blood outside a body from clotting. It all runs freely down.
+Hyrune wishes to die at this point, though the group leaves that up to Sebastian. He proves quite forthcoming about what he knows.
+He is doing the bidding of someone within the Cathedral of Epiphenomena. They found dirt on him from his youth as a vampire and the devastation of a village. And he got paid, of course. He does not know why they have him doing it. Shadow ash makes it easier to convert someone to undead when they die.
+He says he heard one name, “Bremeteria Veng,” but does not know who that is.
+Rumin, it turns out, is someone who caught Hyrune’s eye. He is a smuggler and the one arranging for his wraiths to plant the shadow ash. There have been something like five ships involved, but Hyrune cannot remember any of their names.
+Afterward, the four discuss their options.
+//”I am angry to hear that a Church of Urgathoa is involved in this,”// rumbles Blake.
+//”It is her cause to create more undead,”// Tsekani notes, but Sebastian smiles evilly and shows his fangs.
+//”Yes, but many of her undead require the living to feed. Wiping them out is not in their best interest.”//
+Zaheri notes acidly as well, //”The Cult of the Dawnflower embraced slavery. I am not sure that was totally in keeping with Sarenrae’s teachings. Sadly, the gods seem to care little for what is actually done in their names.”//
+The skeleton ponders and says, //”I shall case out the Cathedral. I should visit regardless.”//
+//”Tsekani, you have already been in contact with key members of the city. You and I shall ask around about this Bremeteria Veng.”//
+//”I want to see what Rumin is up to. Perhaps a trip to the Cerulean Glade,”// Sebastian says with simultaneous detachment and menace.
+The four head out.
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:places:catherdrial.png?400 |}}
+After discreet searching, Zaheri and Tsekani speak with Ilyra Vhess, one of the members of society Dizonn introduced to the mummy. Ilyra Vhess is an upper-class Gebbite woman of immaculate bearing, known for moving easily through Mechitar’s refined circles of wealth, scholarship, and old undead patronage.
+It turns out that Veng is a professor at the [[https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Ebon_Mausoleum|Ebon Mausoleum]], one of Mechitar’s most noted schools of necromancy. It is the training ground for many of the ruling Blood Lords, including Zaheri’s mother. Zaheri himself, however, more interested in the confluence between the arcane and divine, attended the [[https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Mortuarium|Mortuarium]] in Yled. See [[http://www.seenar.com/doku.php?id=game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:adventure_journal#blood_games|07 Blood Games]] in this journal.
+Lady Vhess is not a professor herself, but a cultivated patron of learning with a particular interest in funerary philosophy, necromantic history, and the social politics of the Ebon Mausoleum. Soft-spoken, elegantly dressed, and exceptionally well informed, Ilyra is the sort of woman who always seems to know which scholar is feuding with which rival, which lecture is worth attending, and who might be persuaded to grant a private introduction. She not only knows the name Bremeteria Veng, but is able to write a letter of introduction.
+Blake is welcomed inside and shown through the Cathedral of Epiphenomena with the kind of calm confidence that only comes from a place that has nothing to hide and nothing to fear. The great temple is everything the largest single church dedicated to the Pallid Princess on Golarion should be... immense, severe, and magnificent in a way that feels both reverent and unsettling. Black stone, pale ornament, and funereal grandeur combine into something that enthrones undeath. Every corridor, chapel, and vaulted chamber speaks to wealth, power, and certainty. This is devotion established in stone.
+What pleases Blake most is how open it all is. The Pallid Princess is not honored here in whispers or behind locked doors. She is worshipped openly, publicly, and without apology. Blake finds that deeply satisfying. There is something honest in it, something that feels closer to the truth of the world than the squeamish customs of the living so often allow.
+As he is led through its halls, Blake measures the place with the eye of a warrior. The cathedral is not merely ornate, it is formidable. Its scale alone would make any attack difficult, but the real strength lies in its design, its guardians, and the quiet sense of layered preparedness that seems built into every approach and threshold. Sightlines are controlled. Entrances are few and defensible. Those who serve here do not carry themselves like people who expect danger, but like people who know exactly what they would do if it came. Blake comes away with the firm impression that no one is going to assault this place easily. Whatever else the Cathedral of Epiphenomena may be, it is not vulnerable. It stands like faith made into a fortress.
+==== Cerulean Glade ====
+{{ :game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:npcs:rumin_purgo.png?200|}}
+Sebastian has the most solitary job, which comforts him. Being undead now still weighs heavily on his heart. //At least I still have one.//
+The Cerulean Glade is a glassblowing shop. It squats in the alley like a business that has outlived its better years. The stone shell is blocky and plain, its old blue paint sun-peeled and flaking in strips. It has ornate, yet opaque, windows, as benefits a glass shop showing its wares. One door faces south for customers, while another, larger one sits around back to the north, both of them stout wood banded in iron. Small signs beside them declare //”By Appointment Only,”// which somehow makes the place feel less exclusive than secretive. It does not look abandoned... but it does look like a place that prefers not to be noticed.
+Sebastian watches the place and sees a few customers come up, try the door, read the sign, and walk away puzzled but resigned. No one seems to think anything is unusual. Passing by himself, Sebastian can hear what sounds like movement and activity inside. He decides to wait and watch.
+Hours pass.
+His friends come looking for him after meeting back at the Suite.
+After they all tell each other what they have learned, Zaheri takes charge. He casts a //clairvoyance// into the back and sees a dread wraith on guard. He also sees Rumin clearly packing a bag of holding to leave. They have to move.
+//”Blake and I will go around back and enter through that door. Tsekani and Sebastian, take the front. That glass is over a wall, so we cannot smash our way inside. Doors are it.”//
+In short order, both teams are in place. The larger back door takes more work for Blake than the door in front. Tsekani and Sebastian storm into the front area.
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:monsters:glass_golem.png?200 |}}
+The front room of Cerulean Glade opens into a broad display hall that feels too empty for comfort. Along the eastern and western walls, raised platforms support human-shaped glass forms, each holding a framed stained-glass panel depicting some sunlit woodland glade. The pieces are striking, all jewel tones and captured light, but the room around them is sparse enough to make the beauty feel staged rather than inviting. At the far north wall, a long wooden counter blocks easy passage deeper inside, with two closed doors and a handful of smaller display cases behind it. The whole chamber feels like a shop arranged for appearances first and business second.
+//”So, at some point those four things are coming to life,”// mutters the mummy as they move across the room.
+Sure enough, as soon as he vaults the front desk, the glass golems begin to move. Sebastian is alarmed to discover they are in fact //solar// glass golems. Tsekani rips the door behind the desk off its hinges and sends it hurling across the room, smashing displays.
+At the back, the dread wraith moans an alarm the moment Blake removes the door. This wail can be heard throughout the building. Zaheri immediately unleashes a barrage of //magic missiles// even as Hanover closes on the target. With the door ripped off, both groups can see one another. Sebastian darts through the bottleneck, away from the golems. As Blake strides in to confront the wraith, Rumin walks into the room.
+//”Stop! Wait! I give up!”//
+He waves off the wraith, and the golems pause. Zaheri sees his chance and moves to Rumin. He tries to be his most friendly, being the “face” of the group. But on a natural 1, he is not used to having no face, to having the cold touch of a lich, to having eyes of fire. His attempt to come across as supportive instead comes across as menacing and threatening. It does not help that Sebastian is holding a gun on Rumin, his face showing inhuman anger.
+Fortunately, Rumin does not care. He is all in.
+A brief dialogue shows that Rumin knows he is in over his head and figures he is a loose end “they” will come after. That is why he is leaving. He is willing to turn over his ledgers showing what ships went out where with the poison.
+//”I have got to lay low for a while.”//
+Zaheri offers to take him to their home in Graydirge so he can speak with Berline and tell her all he knows. Zaheri would also like to brief her himself. Tsekani chuckles to himself as Zaheri angles yet again to subvert a minor enemy into a co-belligerent.
+The four help Rumin finish packing and all slink out into the pre-dawn light.
+==== Kellok and Mechitar ====
+|Campaign Dates| Neth 8 – 20, 4723|
+|Game Date|04/23/26|
+==== Kellok Manor ====
+{{ :game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:npcs:hanst.png?400|}}
+Zaheri brings Rumin to Kellok Manor and places him under the supervision of Anatalla. Rumin seems relieved to be alive and too pragmatic to complain about the arrangement. He understands quickly that this is not imprisonment in the simple sense. It is conscription by competence.
+Anatalla puts him to work almost immediately. Rumin knows routes, docks, suppliers, the kinds of people who can be paid to ask fewer questions than they should, and the habits of those who imagine themselves invisible inside the normal clutter of trade. He is too valuable to leave idle. Within a day, he is helping organize names, contacts, and likely channels in Graydirge, with talk already beginning of how such a network might eventually be mirrored farther afield. Yled comes up more than once. Rumin does not volunteer ambition, exactly, but Zaheri can see the shape of it forming in him... a man who has lived by slipping through cracks now being offered the chance to build a few.
+Sebastian comes along as well, though his purposes are his own. Kellok Manor and its surrounding reaches are close enough to old patterns of movement, old places of shadow, and old prey. He needs supplies, reagents, odds and ends that are easier acquired here than in the capital, but there is also the matter of hunger. He moves through his old hunting grounds in a different fashion now, no longer simply a careful man stalking danger and necessity, but a vampire learning the contours of his new existence. There is no complaint in him, but there is a quietness that suggests adjustment is still a daily act of will.
+Rumin is startled when he sees Drusilla, a fey of some power, plainly acting in support of Hanst and the twins. The surprise on his face is almost enough to amuse Zaheri.
+He takes it in slowly. Drusilla. Hanst. The children. Anatalla. Sebastian.. Rumin says very little, but the look he gives Zaheri says enough. He understands now that this is not a collection of favors or accidents. It is a network of power. Growing power.
+Later, with the two of them speaking more privately, Zaheri decides to test a thought that has likely already crossed Rumin’s mind.
+//"You considered it, did you not?"//
+Rumin glances at him, wary but not confused. //"Being turned?"//
+Zaheri gives the slightest incline of his head. //"You served a vampire with two vampire minons"//
+Rumin lets out a dry breath through his nose. //"I did think about it. Once."//
+//"And now?"// Zaheri asks.
+Rumin is quiet for a moment. //"Now I think I was in love with not dying, not with what it would make me. That is different. I do not want it anymore."//
+//"A wise distinction,"// Zaheri says at last. //"Undeath is not merely survival. Too many mistake it for that."//
+Before he leaves, Zaheri finds Hanst and steals a few quiet moments with her. The children are nearby, close enough that their presence fills the edges of the conversation even when they are not speaking. It changes the air around her. She does not seem diminished by motherhood... if anything, she seems further anchored, as though her will has driven roots into the world.
+He asks how she is doing, and she answers honestly enough to satisfy him. Tired at times. Watchful always. Happy more often than she expected. The children are thriving Hanst speaks of them with a quiet warmth that catches him off guard not because it is strange, but because it suits her so completely.
+Zaheri asks after their routines, their sleep, the small domestic rhythms of the house that would once have seemed beneath notice. They are not beneath notice now. Hanst gives him a sidelong look after one of his questions runs just slightly too long on nothing more consequential than whether the twins are keeping the same sleep schedule.
+//"You do know,"// she says, //"that you can simply say you missed us."//
+The words draw a rare pause out of him.
+His answer is softer than most he gives anyone. //"I missed hearing your voice each day."// A beat. //"Each night, rather."//
+Something in Hanst’s expression gentles, though she does not mock him for the correction.
+//"You are allowed to say such things plainly,"// she tells him.
+Zaheri looks toward the children before answering. //"I am learning that many things are permitted to me that I did not once account for."//
+Hanst steps closer, not enough to make a scene of tenderness, only enough to make clear that none is needed. //"They are well,"// she says. //"And so am I. You are building too much to vanish into your own thoughts every time you leave for the capital."//
+He inclines his head, accepting the rebuke for the care that lies under it.
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:npcs:berline.jpg?300 |}}
+Before returning to Mechitar, Zaheri prepares his report for Berline. He does not trust the roads, the carriers, or the number of hands through which written truth may pass. He writes the report plainly first, then lays //secret page// over it, disguising its contents beneath something innocuous and administrative. By itself that would be caution. Combined with what follows, it becomes prudence.
+He delivers the disguised report in person.
+Once it is safely in her possession, he uses //sending// to provide the password by which its true contents may be revealed. The separation pleases him. A hidden document in one place, the key delivered by spell in another. Anyone intercepting one without the other gains little.
+Berline receives him with the air of one already balancing too many blades. The report strips away some of the remaining uncertainty, but not enough to comfort her. If anything, it sharpens the danger by giving it shape without yet giving it a throat to cut.
+She is worried.
+//”I am being pressed in my affairs”//
+Zaheri is wise enough to not ask for more information.
+//”Suspicion alone will not do. I need proof... something that can survive scrutiny, something that ties the poisonings and the smuggling to hands high enough to matter.”//
+Their conversation is brief by necessity, but weighty enough to linger after it ends. Their next steps will be quite dangerous.
+After a full twenty-four hours, Zaheri is ready to depart again. There are supplies to gather, preparations to finish, and a rhythm to re-establish before he and Sebastian return to Mechitar. Rumin remains at Kellok Manor under Anatalla’s supervision, already being drawn into useful labor. Hanst and the twins remain safe, settled, and more fully part of the shape of Zaheri’s life than he might once have admitted. Berline has the report and the means to read it. The next move waits in the capital.
+So Zaheri turns back toward Mechitar with Sebastian beside him, both of them carrying what they need... and both of them, in their own ways, carrying what they have become.
+==== Bremeteria Veng ====
+{{:game_systems:pathfinder2e:blood_lords:npcs:bremeteria_veng.png?400 |}}
+Their invitation to meet with Professor Veng is for the 20th of Neth. This leaves a bit over a week for the trip back to Graydirdge and to get to know the city better.
+Back in Mechitar, Blake has been working on assembly of the dinosaur bone golem they destroyed taking the Mortician’s Suite. He knows Zaheri will help with the magic, but Blake knows how to knit bones together. She also is in charge of the solar golems. Zaheri got the command words from Rumin and now those guard their abode. No one else is just going to sneak in.
+Tsekani is working to learn the city and understand the lay of the land. This is not easy for the large mummy, as this is not his specialty. When Zaheri returns, the necromancy immediately engages in the same task. Tsekani has to acknowledge Zaheri’s edge in all this. He was always adroit with others, but in undeath, Zaheri has finally come into his element. Mostly.
+Zaheri has trepidation about being invited to a party hosted by Lady Nesket, his mother. He knows she wants to show him off. The mage all but begs at least one of the others to come with him. Tsekani waits long enough to out what desperation looks like in a lich and then relents. Zaheri is shown off, and his mother asks about the twins, but in a starkly clinical way. It is another example of how this journey has altered Zaheri from the exact path he planned. This is not lost on Tsekani.
+There are rumors going around the city about the incidents in the dock. Nothing is solid in any given direction. The new Blood Lords are blamed by some, but this is a minority opinion. More feel the group acted to stop the attack and save lives. Their generous payment to support the families of the dead and injured is believed, especially with the Dockmaster Vernetta’s testimony. Still, this is an example of how the group is now treading in a place of increasing politics and power and they must guard their own reputations with various factions in order to succeed the near impossible task before them.
+They meet Veng in her office at the Ebon Mausoleum. After introductions, Zaheri tells her about the shadow ash, and the plot to send it out to poison trade neighbors. As ever, Zaheri mentions Nex, but this is now more to cover up who they think the real villain is than what he believes. Sebastion assures Veng it of the veracity of the substance and she is most concerned. Zaheri notes what is going on in terms of the game Blood Price, like a modern human using chess as analogy.
+//”What we thought were major players were Pawns. Those are being cleared. Now we face more powerful pieces. Now we face Factors, maybe even Vaults. All moves we have to make to threaten the Minister”//
+//”Indeed, a dangerous game. This is why I like teaching. However, in my position I have the authority to grant you an inspection of the Sanctum they have closed off. For, … research. I can supply that”//
+Veng writes what amounts to a warrant to enter and hands it to Zaheri.
+//”This covers the legalities of things. It is about as political as I get. Still, this is Geb so anyone in power, especially in Mechitar, has no choice but to have some politics to remain alive or unalive. Oh, and as this is Geb,”// she pulls out a rather large crystal, //”Give them this as well. Crystal can speak louder than ink on paper.”//
+The four thank the professor and head back through the night to their quarters, However, upon return to their home, a slathering ghoul from Kortesh is waiting with a request to come visit his master. The group immediately follows the ghoul wondering what their charge wants.
+The high-priest of the demon lord of ghouls is as welcoming (and menacing) as ever. And as usual, the Lord of Nemret Noktoria seems to know all about the activities of the group. He is quite concerned about what is going on in the Cathedral, and possible links to higher ups within the organization of Geb. Because he is a priest of a different god, and an outside king, he cannot take direct action. However, he “asks” the group to do him a favor.
+//”It is a small request. I would like you to find a purple gem. It links this world to the negative energy plane. I am sure it is being put to poor use. If you could intervene it would be most welcome”//
+His Voice, of course, does the talking. It is clear the head of Yurgak is still quite conscious, and her eyes dart back and forth when her mouth is not in use as the Voice of Kortesh. A gruesome reminder of the dangers of crossing this powerful being.
+The group agrees and heads home, this time to plan for their entry into the Cathedral of Epiphenomena.

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