“Regardless, we weren’t in there long… A couple of nights, as best we could tell, before we were dragged out down Mawk’s Mantle. That leaves us back where we started, I guess – the flickering dawn, the stage, the bismuth nooses, that bloody heron. Funny what your mind notices in the direst moments.”

Our ritual fades, our story ends. Behind the fallen arras, twenty years of asking and wondering. Nilkat and Belka stare into the cooling fire. They trace the knot and growth of exhausted timber, with only ash and ember to shape the phantoms of the trees that could have been.

A finale, then. We play the HISTORY IS GONE BUT WE REMEMBER by Ben Roswell as we let ourselves drift from our tale of Ginnels and Swifts, the bastard nim Shifs and the defiant Maybes. We study the city from a distance, imagine the stories that could have been, those loose ends ready to be woven into our greater tapestry.

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c/w body horror, family conflict, betrayal

“Embrace is a hole. A rip in the heart of the world. It’s like the gardens of Crown’s Ait – petal and green cloistered by wall from the world around. Ordered sweeps of fragant colour and soft, useless lawn. Beautiful, I’m sure, but that beauty belies the effort put into maintaining it”

As the Gall blossoms into new life within Winter’s Lodge, betrayal and despair bury their roots beneath it. Hidden out of sight of the revolution, long laid plans break and new purposes are found. Duty and despair clash violently as those drawn to the Gall’s new beginning are at odds over what it means.

Oken, Neah and Ash each find themselves grappling with destiny and choice.

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c/w violence, betrayal, body horror (ghosts)

“Ask me to talk about history and politics and you’ll be stuck for hours; ask me about the forces that shape our world and my tongue is still. I place my faith in others interpretations and what they say happened – a new Remnant awoke in Embrace that day.”

As alarms wail and the barricades are overrun, Winter’s Lodge and the secrets it holds are under threat from all sides. With the nim Shifs closing in and the Death’s Defiant on the doorstep, the splintered Jubilant Maybe cling desperately to their tasks. As the pressure rises, they can only hope against hope that they’re doing the right thing.

Neah closes a trap, Oken finds his duty, and Ivar and Ezra try to keep themselves together.

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c/w thought invasion, injury, explosions

“If we had one advantage, it was that we faced them on our own turf. Most of the fighting would take place amongst the gambling dens and race courses of Hinter Ward. If there were anywhere suited to turn the odds, it were there.”

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c/w mindreading, manipulation, surveillance, betrayal, break-ups

“But then our triumph broke, torn asunder not by those whose noses we’d bloodied to build it, but those who’d helped us fight for it. Boctive Deign, Xenarus Crow. They’d always held fear in their hearts. That fear would poison our fragile course.” Read more