Kingmaker — Thursday

Caipora has lived his entire life in the Stolen Lands. He knows every root, ridge, and river bend between the Shrike and the Thorn, and he would very much like to be left alone to enjoy them.

The bandits made that impossible. Their numbers grew fast — too fast — and the disruption they brought soured what was a perfectly adequate existence. Caipora was not interested in adventure, glory, or building a kingdom. He was interested in the bandits being gone so things could go back to normal.

Things have not gone back to normal. Something else happened instead.

In Fangbury, where he has spent more time than intended, Caipora has become something he did not plan to be: known. Liked, even. People come to him with problems. He has — against his better judgement — been solving them. Friendships have formed with the group around him, and somewhere along the way the idea of Fangbury growing into something real stopped feeling like someone else's concern. He would not call himself invested. He is clearly invested.

Tessa Graff grew up on the docks of New Stetven, daughter of dockworkers Davor and Serya, learning early that hard work and patience were things people told the poor to keep them manageable. Her mother knew better. In quiet moments she whispered to Tessa about Milani the Everbloom — not the open faith of temples, but the hidden one, carried in the hearts of people who had run out of other options.

When Tessa was sixteen, a corrupt magistrate seized a grain shipment and soldiers were sent to silence the protest that followed. She watched a friend fall to a crossbow bolt. In the chaos, an older woman in worn chainmail and a silver rose amulet pulled her to safety. Her name was Olmedra — a warpriest of Milani operating in secret — and she saw something in Tessa worth training.

The years that followed were spent learning the blade and shield alongside the Everbloom's creed: stand when others kneel, fight when others despair, carry hope into the darkest places. Tessa became first a messenger, smuggling aid to dissidents, then a direct combatant against bandit lords, corrupt sheriffs, and anyone else who mistook the powerless for permission. She plants rosebushes in the wake of liberated villages — part prayer, part warning.

The Stolen Lands are not, to Tessa, a wilderness to be pacified. They are unclaimed ground, free from entrenched dynasties and the rot of Brevoy's politics. A chance to build something before greed takes root — to shape the laws, the culture, and the leadership from the first stone rather than fighting someone else's corruption forever.

She is now the leader of Fangbury. It did not come naturally at first — leading a settlement is a different thing from leading a charge, and the weight of it showed in those early weeks. But she grows into it more with every passing day. The people of Fangbury are precisely the kind of people Tessa has spent her whole life fighting for. Governing them, it turns out, feels a great deal like the same thing.

Harry Redman was awakened by the Fey and found his way to a mountain monastery, where he spent years in meditation and training. At some point the sitting became insufficient. Milani's faith does not reward those who wait for someone else to change things.

He came down from the mountain and into the Riverlands with a simple purpose: hunt slavers.

What he found was a fledgling settlement that needed more than hunters — it needed someone to speak for it, to stand between it and the world beyond its borders. Harry took the role of Emissary and threw himself into it with the same focus he brings to everything. He is, it turns out, as capable a diplomat as he is a fighter, when the situation calls for it.

In Fangbury he has begun laying the foundations of a monastery — not yet walls and a roof, but the groundwork is in. When the time is right, there will be a place to teach. For now, he builds.

Axiom-777 does not remember much. He is still piecing it together.

What he knows: his designation is Axiom-777, and those who have spent time with him call him Sevens. He is old — older than most things he encounters — and the evidence of that age is written across his plating in scratches, repairs, and replacements he cannot account for. He carries a sense of purpose that feels absolute and a memory of that purpose that feels almost entirely absent.

The earliest thing he can reliably recall is waking as a guest in the household of Lady Jamandi Aldori. How he came to be there, and what came before, remains unclear. He did not press the question. Lady Aldori's charter offered something more useful than answers: direction. A frontier being shaped into something. History being made.

Axiom-777 goes where history is being made. He is certain of this much, even if he cannot say why.

In Fangbury, the chronicle continues. Every event recorded, every name noted, every decision and its consequence set down with the same solemn precision. He has taken the position of Warden — a role concerned with protection, patrol, and vigilance over the land and its people. Whether by design or instinct, the title fits him in a way that feels older than the appointment itself. It may be one of the few things that does.

Vael Orendis was born to a merchant caravan of fetchlings that wandered the length of Avistan. His mother, Ashka Orendis, was a gifted sorceress who saw shadow magic as the family's legacy and set about instilling it in her son. The aptitude was there — more of it than she had any right to expect. The control was not. He was impulsive, volatile, and quick to anger, and it hindered him at every turn.

It came to a head in Brevoy. Vael stole a grimoire from a powerful noble, and when the man's son accused him of the theft, he lost his temper and attacked the boy. Ashka had no choice but to banish him from the caravan. To anyone who came looking, she said her son was already dead.

He wandered aimlessly after that, cursing his misfortune, until he came upon a shrine to Grandmother Spider — his mother's goddess. He prayed for guidance. He received silence. So he defiled the shrine, set it alight, and cursed the Spider and everyone who followed her for the ruin of his life.

That night she answered. In a dream, or something wearing a dream's shape, a thousand webs drew tight around his throat and a figure with his mother's face and many black spider's eyes pronounced judgement on him: "You who are so proud, who are but a slave to your own whims and your impulses, you who have spat in the face of family and courtesy, you will know the loving embrace of the void. Only once you know what it truly means to be ruler and not ruled, will you find your path from the dark."

His inner light was taken out of him and given form — a talking raven named Nox, who now carries every caustic feeling Vael no longer has, and holds them until such time as their owner learns to master them.

Vael considers this a blessing. His emotions had always stood between him and the pinnacle of his art; without them, he advanced quickly, and his command of the shadow deepened. He can argue with his own temper externally now, rather than internally, which strikes him as a straightforward improvement. Nox's opinion on the matter differs, and Nox is not shy about it. Vael describes him as his closest friend and his most hated enemy, in the same flat tone he uses for everything.

What nags at him is the wording. Ruler and not ruled. When he heard rumours of a kingdom taking shape in the south, in the Stolen Lands, something drew him toward it — curiosity about the curse, or the quiet nudging of a patron he never asked for. He could not say which.

He got as far as a troll-held dwarven ruin, where he was captured and thrown into the larder to be eaten. Nox, sensibly, fled. That is where Fangbury's founders found him: waist-deep in gore, entirely calm, asking politely for assistance.