Session 1: Blood and Salt

The salt-scoured door of the Rusty Anchor groaned open and shut with the rhythm of the tide, letting in gusts of brine and the creak of moored ships rubbing against the Externia docks. Inside, the tavern was a low-ceilinged cave of timber and shadow, its windows filmed with years of salt spray. The air was a thick stew of spilled ale, fish guts, and the faint tang of old blood soaked into floorboards that had seen their share of dockyard disputes. A few oil lamps guttered against the damp, casting wavering amber pools across scattered patrons—dockhands nursing their last coppers, weathered travelers waiting on morning passages, and a handful of desperate souls who looked like they’d been there since winter and wouldn’t leave until the coin ran out.

Behind the bar, Orlick wiped the same chipped glass he’d been wiping for ten minutes, his nervous fingers working the rag in tight circles. His gaze swept the room with the practiced anxiety of a man who knew trouble before it walked through the door—and tonight, trouble was already breathing down his neck.

Near the cold hearth, Rhen stood in finery that didn’t belong within three streets of this place—a half-elven figure in clean leather and a well-cut cloak, her dark eyes moving across the room with quiet calculation. Across the room, Karn the Unbroken leaned against the bar like he was carved from the mountain itself—a Goliath whose scarred gray hide and silent stillness made the dockworkers give him a wide, instinctive berth. And in the corner booth, half-hidden in shadow, Corbin the Smelter hunched over a scrap of schematic parchment, a dwarf in scale mail with a light hammer at his belt and the faint tang of machine oil clinging to his beard.

The uneasy quiet shattered with the bang of the tavern door, kicked wide by a battered boot. Three figures shouldered inside, green cloth armbands marking them as Green Daggers—the extortion crew that had been bleeding this dock for months. Their leader, a rangy man with a split lip and brass knuckles already glinting on his right hand, scanned the room with the slow grin of a predator who’d found easier prey than expected. His eyes landed on the dwarf in the corner, then slid to the Goliath at the bar, then to the half-elf by the hearth. He nudged his companions and started weaving through the tables toward Corbin’s booth.

“Evening, short-king,” he drawled. “You look like a man about to board a ship. Ships are dangerous. Lots of accidents at sea.” He leaned over the table, his shadow swallowing the dwarf’s schematics. “Fifteen gold. Passage protection. Keeps bad things from happening to good people like you.”

Behind the bar, Orlick’s rag stopped moving entirely.

The Green Daggers moved before anyone could blink—and Corbin paid the price. The leader’s brass knuckles whistled past the dwarf’s scalp as he ducked low, the blow cracking splinters from the booth’s wooden backing. But the dodge put him off balance, and a second thug’s club caught him square across the shoulder—a sickening thud of wood on scale mail that sent shockwaves down his arm. Before he could reset, a bottle came spinning out of the lamplight and exploded against his ribs in a shower of glass and cheap whiskey, soaking his schematics and splitting skin. Corbin crumpled sideways, blood spotting his beard.

Then the room erupted.

Karn’s stillness shattered. He shoved off the bar with enough force to crack floorboards, his greataxe coming free in a single fluid motion. Three strides and the axe descended in a brutal overhand arc—no subtlety, just a storm of muscle and ancestral fury. The blade caught the lantern light an instant before it caught flesh, shearing through the leader’s leathers and biting deep into the meat of his shoulder. The rangy thug never even screamed; he just folded into a wet heap as arterial spray painted the booth behind him.

Corbin’s hand snapped up through the pain. A runic palm-plate flared orange, and a bolt of condensed fire caught the club-wielding thug square in the chest. The man’s greasy brigandine ignited with a whump, and he reeled backward, beating at the flames before collapsing against an overturned table, smoke curling from his unmoving form.

Rhen stepped clear of the hearth, and the temperature in the room dropped—not from cold, but from presence. Warm golden light trailed from her fingers to Corbin’s wounds, the celestial warmth knitting torn flesh and stanching the bleeding. Then her lips curled into something sharp as she locked eyes with the last thug—the bottle-thrower, standing frozen near the door.

“You made a very poor choice of target,” she said, and spoke a single word that wasn’t quite a word. “Run.”

A psychic shriek tore through the thug’s mind. His eyes went wide, pupils dilating to inkblots as something deeper and darker than fear detonated behind them. His legs carried him backward—not toward the door, but straight into the edge of the bar with a hollow crack of skull on oak. He slumped to the floorboards beside his unconscious leader, twitching once, then going still.

Silence.

Glass crunched under settling floorboards. Orlick stood frozen behind the bar, his face the color of old candle wax. The patrons found sudden, consuming interest in their own drinks. Nobody saw anything.

Karn stood over the carnage, his greataxe dripping slow crimson. Corbin braced himself against the booth, cataloging damage—glass in the wound, schematics ruined. Rhen lowered her hand, the last traces of golden light fading. Their eyes met. Dwarf, Goliath, half-elf. Three strangers who sixty seconds ago didn’t know each other’s names.

Orlick found his voice at last, a thin, reedy thing. “Their pouches. Take whatever’s in their pouches. You’ve earned it. Just… please, before more of them come.”

The Spoils and the Stitching

Karn moved with ritual economy, tearing coin purses free from the fallen—nine gold, a handful of silver, a bent copper ring. The leader’s brass knuckles he weighed in his palm and tucked into his belt, not as trophy but as contingency. When he returned to the bar and began wiping the blood from his greataxe blade, his mouth moved silently in old Goliath words for watch over the fallen, even the unworthy.

Corbin, meanwhile, fumbled for his healer’s kit, but his hands were shaking too badly from adrenaline and blood loss. “Rhen,” he said, holding up bloody tweezers, “your hands are steadier. Glass fragments, subdermal, right lateral ribcage.” It came out like a diagnostic order.

Rhen was already at his side. Her tweezers were cold and precise, plucking two decent-sized shards of green glass free while Corbin grit his teeth. One deeper sliver remained, hooked under a flap of dermis—but in the back room, under better lamplight, she worked it loose with a wet click. Corbin splashed distilled spirits over the wound, hissed, and allowed the Deva’s lingering warmth to seal the surface. Functional again.

While Orlick stammered out everything he knew—a dozen Green Daggers led by an ex-privateer named Kestrel, operating from the old fishmarket to the eastern pier—Corbin salvaged a crude map from the leader’s vest: the dock district with three buildings circled in green ink. Safe houses or drop points. Actionable intel. He folded it carefully and tucked it away.

Then Karn spoke, his voice flat and final: “Tribe.” He said it like a verdict, absolute. “We take what they had. Then we leave. More will come.”

The Sea Between

They departed through the back alley with Orlick’s written endorsement pressed into Corbin’s hand—The bearers broke three Green Daggers in my tavern and asked nothing in return…—and made their way to the merchant piers where the Merchantman’s Pride rocked against her moorings. Captain Hadwin, a stocky, sun-darkened man with a gravel voice, met them at the gangplank. Karn offered the vellum without decoration. Corbin pointed out a frayed block on the mainmast’s port-side tackle, demonstrating the sharp eye that would soon earn the bosun’s grudging respect. Rhen, attempting charm, learned quickly that Hadwin trusted bluntness over polish—and pivoted to cold fact just in time.

Three conditions: stay out of the crew’s way, play fair, and don’t bring Green Dagger trouble aboard. Then, “Get aboard. We sail with the tide.”

The five-day voyage etched new rhythms into the trio. Karn rose before the bosun’s whistle for his morning rituals, then hauled lines through a squall without complaint, earning the crew’s respect. Corbin fixed a dozen small things—barrel hoops, harness clasps, a squealing sheave—and learned that the ship’s deeper mechanics would elude him this trip, his land-dwarf stomach rebelling against the swells. He did, however, pore over the Green Dagger map by whale-oil lamplight, calculating patrol patterns and asset counts. Rhen kept her mouth shut and her eyes open, healing scrapes and rope burns with whispered touches of celestial warmth until the bosun, Mara, said quietly, “Hadwin was wrong about you. Don’t tell him I said that.”

By the time Phoenix City smudged the horizon, they were no longer strangers. They were a functional unit—muscle, magic, and maintenance. A tribe.

A Contract in Copper and Rose

Phoenix City rose from the coastline in warm oranges and dusty reds, its harbor bustling with legitimate commerce, its air spiced and sun-scoured. Captain Hadwin clasped Karn’s forearm in the sailor’s grip and told Corbin he’d take him on as shipboard artificer any day. To Rhen, he said, “You talk less than I expected. That’s better.” High praise from a hard man.

At the foot of the gangplank waited a broad-shouldered, soft-middled man with a leather satchel and shrewd eyes: Volothamp Geddarm. “Word does travel fast on the docks,” he said, smiling like a man who’d found exactly what he was looking for. “I need capable people to escort a caravan to the Starmetal Hills. Dangerous territory, but the pay is good and the contract is honest.”

Karn named the price: twenty gold each, half now. Corbin demanded parameters—terrain, threats, logistics, and why the merchant wanted them specifically rather than standard caravan guards. Rhen, reading the hesitation behind Volo’s polished pitch, asked the sharper question: “What haven’t you told us?”

The answer: rumors. Missing tools from prospector camps. Strange drafts from old mine shafts near the Asymmetrical Mountain. Two mercenary crews had already turned down the job, spooked by whispers they couldn’t name. Volo admitted he’d held back the ghost story to let them judge the contract on its merits. “That was a merchant’s instinct. It wasn’t honest.”

Karn divided the thirty gold advance into three neat piles on a crate. Rhen slid her share into a hidden pocket near her heart. Corbin pocketed his and began calculating resupply needs—caltrops for area denial, oil for hostile terrain, powdered iron if something ethereal was stirring.

“One day to prepare,” Karn said. “Then we walk.”

Dawn at the North Gate

Dawn broke over Phoenix City in layers of copper and rose, temple bells ringing across the rooftops. At the north gate, Volothamp Geddarm waited with two sturdy pack mules and a small covered wagon—mining equipment lashed under oiled canvas, survey instruments in padded crates, rations packed. He’d traded his merchant coat for a reinforced leather vest and a wide-brimmed hat with a traveler’s plume.

Behind him, three figures stood in the growing light. A Goliath with ancestral storms behind his eyes, a greataxe gleaming clean on his back. A dwarf with fresh stitches in his side and a folded map of safehouses in his belt, fire waiting in his gauntlet. A half-elf with a deva’s warmth pulsing against her heart and a tongue sharp enough to talk past a sea captain’s scorn. Strangers five days ago. Something else now.

The road north stretched into the morning mist. The hills were stirring. And somewhere in the Starmetal dark, tools were vanishing from locked camps, old shafts were breathing foul air into the wind, and an asymmetrical mountain sat on the horizon like an unanswered question.

The tribe had a contract to fulfill. The walk began.