Entry II: Chains, Blood, and the Sunken Heart
July 14, 2025
Previously in Wildvale…
At the Draeven Estate, Lord Aiden Draeven received the party in a cold, fireless hall. He revealed a hidden shame—Gabriel Draeven, an honored elder, had fallen to the Blood Tide and was sealed in the family crypt. The wards were failing, and Aiden needed the matter ended quietly in exchange for access to his most guarded archives.
In the crypt’s dust and darkness, Gabriel—feral but flickering with memory—warned of chains breaking, blood remembering, and a figure waiting in the tide. When the party struck him down, they uncovered a rusted House Valdane sigil, arcane seals like those at the Cathedral Veilstone, and blood-scrawled warnings of a “Sunken Heart beneath the drowned halls.”
Within the Vault of Remnants, they met Selwin Draeven, a needle-fingered archivist who confirmed the second chain lies in the drowned ruins of House Valdane’s Sunken Archives. He offered only a torn, waterlogged map and a warning—what sleeps there was never meant to wake.
Meanwhile, unrest spreads: House Luthair arms their knights, market posters brand Viola a heretic, a gray-robed watcher stalks Medan, and the Blood Tide fog now creeps into noble courts and temple spires. The city’s pulse quickens.
Entry I: Whispers, Weapons, and the Crimson Brand
April 28, 2025
The mists of Wildvale swirled thick as ever as our unlikely champions stepped deeper into the shadows of the city’s scheming heart. Having recently cracked the first of the four Veilstones beneath the desecrated cathedral, the group emerged marked—by power, by blood, and by purpose.
Their first stop: a crooked alley behind a crumbling tenement, where the eccentric artificer BurrBin still peddled illicit curiosities and delirium-drenched trinkets. Though his hands trembled from the weight of what he dared to smuggle, his craftsmanship remained keen. Each adventurer received a magical gift, forged from secret alloys and forgotten schematics—tokens meant to bolster them for what lay ahead.
From there, the group made their way toward the fractured heartbeat of Wildvale’s commerce: the market district, a once-proud plaza now echoing with half-empty stalls and whispered paranoia. Yet where others hid, they proclaimed. Boldly, the party cried out their chosen name—
“Two Crimson, Two Veil!”
—a taunt cast like bait upon bloody waters.
And sure enough, something answered.
From the fringes of the crowd came snarling ruin: two Nightbringers, vampires long succumbed to the Blood Tide, feral and howling with hunger and madness. They struck without restraint, fang and claw lashing at stone and flesh alike. The battle was brutal, but swift. The party’s resolve—honed beneath the cathedral—held strong. Mist met steel, and silence returned to the square.
Yet violence was never the only path in Wildvale.
Wounds tended and eyes keener, the party sought the flickering flame of Whispers in Wax, the rumor-shop nestled like a secret in the alleyway’s ribs. There, blindfolded Maera offered them melted truths in exchange for coin and questions unasked. Of vengeance, she spoke. Of the Sunken Archives, where crimson echoes still whispered. Of House Draeven, and the rot growing behind its noble doors.
As the party stepped back into the fog-drenched streets, the shadows were stirring, and their name—Two Crimson, Two Veil—was no longer a secret.
