Prologue: Anchor

• Azosh-ek, an exile from the Divine Kingdom, has arrived in the city of Ennuost Yrg
• He murders one of its citizens as a ritual sacrifice

Chapter 1: Payment

• Near-dawn, at Rahelu’s family’s hut in the Lowdocks, on Petition Day. Once a year, the Houses have an open recruitment contest. Anyone who has completed their Guild training can Petition to join the Houses.
• Rahelu, a daughter of poor fisherfolk, is agonizing over her Petition, worried about her ineloquent answers, inadequate Guild ratings, and lack of a House sponsor. She has not slept all night.
• Her family has not paid the lease payment that was due on their fishing sloop because they spent the money on authenticating her Petition.
• A clerk and a bailiff from House Isonn show up and physically threaten her mother and to revoke their fishing licence for nonpayment.
• Rahelu uses her magic to stop them and negotiates an extension to their deadline.

Chapter 2: House-born

• Rahelu and her mother arrive late to the market and discover Hzin, a long-time rival, and his son Bzel have claimed their usual spot and they are forced to set up in a bad location.
• Rahelu has been coaching Bzel in magic in preparation for his Guild entrance test. She escorts him to the applicants’ line at the Guild and goes to join the very long common-born queue to hand in her own Petition, does her best to suppress her resentment of the House-born candidates who get to skip the line.
• Nheras of House Ilyn and her cousins show up and make various disparaging remarks about the common-born candidates. Rahelu takes it badly and provokes a verbal confrontation with the House-born.
• The confrontation escalates to physical assault, a chase through the streets, brawling, public humiliation, and Rahelu’s Petition being destroyed by Nheras.

Chapter 3: Help

• Rahelu takes the torn scraps of her Petition to the Tattered Quill, in hopes of convincing the scrivener, Xyuth, to help her reconstruct the document.
• The shop is unattended when she arrives. Impatient, she starts searching through his wares for the supplies she needs but doesn’t find anything.
• She uses Seeking to locate Xyuth. He’s in the back room with an unknown woman deep in mage trance.
• Xyuth gets very upset and starts shaking the mage. Rahelu bursts in and discovers the mage has been performing an Augury of Xyuth’s possible futures. The unknown mage, however, is gone.
• Xyuth agrees to help Rahelu with her Petition in exchange for her manipulating probability with Fortunement to avert the futures where his family is murdered.
• She does so successfully by using the unknown mage’s Augury as the basis for her working.
• The Augury dissipates and leaves behind a strange, glittering black gem.
• Xyuth urges Rahelu to throw it into the sea but she thinks it might be rare and valuable. She takes it with her, along with the scrivener’s gift of the supplies she needs to reconstruct her Petition.

Chapter 4: Sponsor

• Rahelu goes to her favorite meditation spot, a large boulder on top of the Eastcliffs
• She uses Evocation to recall the past and makes an exact copy of her Petition using the parchment, brushes, and inks from Xyuth
• By the time she’s done, it’s almost sunset. She makes it to the Guild gates just in time.
• One of the Dedicates in charge of the Petitions is Tsenjhe, a childhood friend from Rahelu’s village back in Chanaz, now sworn to House Isca, a minor House. The other is Keshwar, a Dedicate of House Ideth, a major House, and the son and heir of Atriarch Ideth herself.
• Tsenjhe and Keshwar are obviously in a relationship. Thanks to gossip from Nheras and her cousins, Rahelu is aware that they are not considered to be well matched by the Houses.
• Rahelu discovers that all unsponsored Petitions are automatically discarded as there are too many Petitions for the Houses to consider. She is visibly disheartened and turns to go.
• Tsenjhe takes pity on her and takes her Petition. Keshwar spots the forgery and interrogates Rahelu, who admits the forgery as her work.
• Keshwar offers to sponsor her if she can reconstruct the original Guild seal.
• Rahelu succeeds but explodes her training crystal as a result.

Chapter 5: Lowdocks

• Keshwar and Tsenjhe escort Rahelu home to the Lowdocks in a palanquin. They spend the trip quizzing Rahelu on her preparations and strategy for the challenges ahead.

Chapter 6: Challenges

• Rahelu reports to the Guild’s training yards for the challenges, shocked to discover the challenges are team-based.
• As the only common-born applicant present, she’s at an immediate disadvantage; the other House-born applicants have come with pre-arranged alliances.
• The first challenge is a test of their Seeking skills: ten tokens have been hidden in the city, and the team who finds the most tokens wins
• Rahelu resigns herself to being a team of one, only to be accosted as she leaves the training yards—Keshwar, her sponsor, has arranged for his cousin, Lhorne, to team up with her.

Chapter 7: Concordance

• Rahelu and Lhorne head to her favorite meditation spot, which Lhorne knows as Stormbane’s Rest. They are joined there by Dharyas of House Isca, Lhorne’s long-time friend and Tsenjhe’s protege.
• Dharyas has an invention she wants to test out: a set of miniature Obfuscation barriers with a built-in short-range relay that allows them to communicate mentally
• They pool their magical abilities in a group working—a Concordance—to conduct a Seeking and an Evocation to discover where the tokens were hidden
• Lhorne works out that the tokens are part of an Obfuscation barrier formation, which means they need to locate a key and disarm the barrier in a specific order. If they can do that successfully, they can take all of the tokens

Chapter 8: Bait

• Since they are outnumbered by the other teams, Rahelu, Lhorne, and Dharyas disguise themselves. They’ve found four tokens so far, none of them the key.
• They split up to regroup at the Sunset gardens where they expect to find the fifth token.
• Rahelu gets there first, only to discover Elaram of House Issolm has already located the token: it’s stuck inside the mouth of a carp in the fish pond.
• Rahelu tangles Elaram in her net. She retrieves the token, only to discover Elaram has freed herself and is aiming a crossbow at her.
• Rahelu calls for help through the relay but Lhorne and Dharyas don’t answer.
• Rahelu tricks Elaram into disarming by tossing the token away with her Obfuscation barrier.
• They race for the token, only for Lhorne and Dharyas to recover it first. They were delayed because they had stopped to steal another token from Elaram’s brother, Ghardon, and now have six of the ten tokens.
• Impressed, Elaram asks to join their team and truthfully answers all questions posed to her under Seeking.
• At a severe disadvantage number-wise, they allow Elaram to join the team, though Dharyas has reservations.
• Lhorne sends Elaram to draw off the other teams and persuades Rahelu and Dharyas to go to the Temple district to search for the last four tokens in an aggressive bid to secure all ten tokens.
• The last four tokens are in the Temple district guarded by Nheras’s team. Lacking the necessary level of ability in Obfuscation to dismantle the last part of the barrier formation, Rahelu is to distract Nheras and the Ilyn girl’s team mates.
• The plan is successful, but Lhorne and Dharyas accidentally set off the alarm. They get back just in time to save Rahelu from being beaten by Nheras two days in a row and flee with all ten tokens.

Chapter 9: Allegiance

• Thanks to their standout performance in the first challenge, Rahelu’s team wins a significant advantage for the second challenge: the best fortified position in a mock battlefield.
• The challenge is to defend their team’s banner (worth 3 points) while trying to capture the banners of the other teams (1 point each).
• The other applicants form into nine teams based on birth allegiances, except for those born of House Issolm, all of whom, like Elaram, have mixed in with the other teams. Rahelu’s team makes the tenth.
• The rules: anything goes, except for lethal force.
• Lhorne proposes another daring plan: Dharyas and Rahelu are to scout the field (aided by Dharyas’s invention) whilst leaving Lhorne and Elaram to defend until the two Ideth teams arrive with their banners.
• Rahelu disagrees but he manages to persuade her with his logic.
• Since she exploded her focus stone, he also loans her his resonance crystal pendant, a priceless family heirloom, for the challenge.
• Teams skirmish throughout the training yard. Rahelu discovers the Isonn teams have hidden their banner and set up a false decoy. She retrieves it but sets off an alarm that brings down every single Isonn applicant upon her.
• Lhorne sends the majority of their alliance to rescue her, leaving only Elaram and himself to defend their three banners. The rescue is a success
• However, while Ideth and Dharyas are thus occupied, Elaram attacks Lhorne; he goes down and Elaram absconds with all three banners. Issolm applicants everywhere follow suit
• Chaos ensues in the wake of the betrayal. The ambient resonance spirals out of control as a result.
• Rahelu spots Elaram fleeing through the melee and recovers her team’s original banner.
• The challenge ends and House representatives begin handing out spheres to indicate those who get to move on to the next stage.

Chapter 10: Puzzle

• Lhorne leads their entire alliance to a nearby tavern for lunch. He’s buying.
• Conscious of her lack of coin and her promise to go help her mother at Market Square, Rahelu refuses a meal and opts for water instead of ale.
• Lhorne deliberately orders an extra platter on the pretext that he’s feeling particularly hungry.
• Cseryl, Lhorne’s cousin, gives him a hard time for being too trusting of Issolm.
• They spend the meal analyzing their performance: they ended up equal first with Houses Isilc and Isonn, but Lhorne (and all of the House-born) considers the result a failure and he apologizes for letting everyone down.
• When Cseryl and the rest of the Ideth applicants leave, Rahelu returns Dharyas’s invention and Lhorne’s pendant, and moves to leave as well. Lhorne convinces her to stay with speculation of what’s involved in the next stage of Petitioning: invitations to individual audiences with the Houses. 
• They discuss audience strategies: whether to accept all their invitations or to only accept an invitation from their preferred House. To be accepted as a Petitioner, they must pass a majority of their audiences.
• They speculate that they are meant to use the spheres to perform some sort of Augury.
• Rahelu has received invitations from three Houses: Isca, Ideth, and Issolm
• Lhorne has already decided he will only accept the House Ideth invitation.
• Dharyas is undecided: she has invitations from Isca, Ideth, Imos, and Isonn. She confesses she’d rather take her mage licence and operate as an independent mage with her own workshop but Rahelu’s further questions reveal that Dharyas has no idea of the practicalities involved.
• Annoyed that Dharyas doesn’t seem to appreciate her good fortune, Rahelu excuses herself. Aware she has no focus stone, Lhorne offers to loan her his pendant. Though the generous gesture shocks her, Rahelu cannot afford to turn down the offer.
• Rahelu exits the tavern with Lhorne’s pendant. Before she departs for Market Square, she goes to the back and waits until the server throws out the uneaten remains of their meal so she can scavenge it for her family.

Chapter 11: Suborned

• Rahelu’s mother refuses her help with selling fish, so she spends her time attempting Augury with the spheres.
• Frustrated with her lack of success, Rahelu loses her temper. She voices her deepest fear to her mother: that she will not be able to convince the Houses to accept her, and wonders whether they could return to Chanaz.
• Her mother says there is nothing left for them in Chanaz and leaves Rahelu to try again.
• After more unsuccessful attempts, Rahelu is interrupted by Dharyas, who wants to know why she wants to join the Houses so much. Rahelu’s answer is straightforward: her parents gave up their lives for her sake so she could join the Houses.
• Dharyas thanks Rahelu for her honesty and gives her a few hints on Augury in exchange before she leaves. She suggests Rahelu practice first on someone else
• With Dharyas’s guidance in mind, Rahelu is finally successful at performing an Augury on Hzin. She is horrified to discover he plans to visit a Suborned den—a pleasure house where patrons pay to wield absolute mental control over another person, usually a slave.

Chapter 12: Audience

• Rahelu arrives at the Issolm headquarters in Westgate, fresh from a disastrous audience at the Isca headquarters in Blackforge and on the verge of falling asleep on her feet, thanks to a sleepless night spent on failing at further Auguries on her three spheres.
• Elder Anathwan of Issolm welcomes her warmly and asks her a series of vague and open-ended questions regarding her opinion on House politics and how House Issolm should respond to House Ideth’s recent initiatives.
• Rahelu bluffs her way through the questions and leaves for her audience with House Ideth in the Temple district. This audience proceeds along similar lines except Atriarch Mere Ideth asks for Rahelu’s opinion on House Imos’s initiatives.
• Rahelu tries to bluff her way through again but Atriarch Mere Ideth has no patience for it and demands honest answers.
• Rahelu accuses Atriarch Imos of planning a coup. Her suspicions are confirmed by Atriarch Ideth, though when the Atriarch presses Rahelu on her understanding of House Imos’s motives, Rahelu is unable to answer satisfactorily.
• Atriarch Ideth concludes the audience with a riddle Rahelu also answers incorrectly, a very personal question regarding Rahelu’s relationship with her nephew, Lhorne, and requests her consent for a direct Seeking in exchange for a favor owed.
• Despite her reservations, Rahelu agrees.

Chapter 13: Augury

• Rahelu arrives at the Guild’s grand hall to await the Houses’ announcement of the applicants who will proceed to the next stage as Petitioners. She spots Nheras, hovering around the fringes of a circle consisting of Lhorne and the other Ideth applicants, but Dharyas is nowhere in sight.
• Guardian Maketh, a Dedicate of House Imos, announces the names of thirty successful applicants. Included are Elaram of Issolm, Ghardon of Issolm, Lhorne of Ideth, Cseryl of Ideth, Nheras of Ilyn, and Dharyas of Isca—but not Rahelu.
• Rahelu departs the Guild, shattered. On her way to Market Square, she is contacted by Onneja, a Conclave journeymage she met during her family’s journey from Chanaz to Ennuost Yrg.
• Onneja invites Rahelu to join her in meditation at Stormbane’s Rest, where Rahelu consents to act as a focus for Onneja’s Augury: a grand working to look into the future of Ennuost Yrg in the next decade and beyond.
• While Onneja works, Rahelu performs her own Augury to try and decide what she ought to do now that the Houses have rejected her Petition. All of the possibilities she Augurs are dead ends.
• Rahelu ends her working in tears and gets caught up in Onneja’s Augury. She is overwhelmed by thousands upon thousands of futures. One of them stands out: it is a vision of her mother being murdered.
• She tries to ask Onneja for more information about the Augury and for help. Onneja is troubled and leaves in a great hurry. The only advice she gives Rahelu is that she must Seek the answers for herself and that the key to her desires lies in her Guild and her family’s salvation lies with her House.

Chapter 14: Answers

• Rahelu searches the Guild for Guardian Maketh, hoping he would have answers for her.
• Unsuccessful, she stops by the grand hall once more to look at the resonance board inside. It’s a public assignment board, listing all of the Petitioners in rank order, from the most assignments completed to the least.
• Believing it to be the key Onneja spoke of, Rahelu manages to bypass the security measures on the board.
• Maketh catches Rahelu in the act just as she finishes adding her own name to the authenticated list of Petitioners and hauls her off to an interrogation chamber, where he contacts Houses Isca, Ideth, and Issolm to confirm whether she should be considered a Petitioner, as he suspects her of being a Chanazian spy and an intelligence threat to the Dominion.
• Both Atriarch Mere Ideth and Elder Anathwan vouch for Rahelu’s innocence, reaffirm their votes in her favor, and instruct Maketh to induct her as a Petitioner without further delay.
• Begrudgingly, Maketh issues an elated Rahelu with a Petitioner’s armband and leaves her with the warning that if she does not want to be eliminated next week, she needs to work harder.

Interlude: Starbound

• Azosh-ek murders another citizen in a second ritual sacrifice.
• He is interrupted by a tall, white-robed woman with scarred hands.
• Azosh-ek attacks, intending to leave no witnesses, but the woman threatens him in turn.
• They strike a bargain: Azosh-ek will let her examine his anchor—a black chain with jagged resonance crystals that drains emotions—in return for her help to open the Endless Gate.

Chapter 15: Assignment

• Rahelu has accepted the closest, easiest assignment available: she is to recharge forty-five sacks of resonance crystals for Tsenjhe in one week.
• Progress is slow: after almost two days, Raheu has barely made a dent in the first sack. After some experimentation, she finds several methods of speeding up the process, at which point Tsenjhe gives her a comprehensive rundown of the flaws in her methodology.
• An upset Rahelu recalls a similar incident from their childhood. She forgets their relative stations and acts upon the memory: she tries to knock Tsenjhe over but ends up on the ground instead. Horrified at her lapse, Rahelu apologizes profusely.
• Unwilling to let Rahelu revert to formality, Tsenjhe reaches out to hug Rahelu and reassures her that while life won’t get easier, she will grow stronger.
• They spend the rest of the week catching up on the years of each others’ lives that they missed: their childhood, the journey to Ennuost Yrg from their village in Chanaz, their years as a Guild trainee, Petitioning, Tsenjhe’s years as a Supplicant.
• Rahelu asks if Tsenjhe had ever thought perhaps they should have stayed in Chanaz and tried apprenticing to the Conclave instead. To Rahelu’s surprise, Tsenjhe reveals Keshwar had once performed that Augury for her. Tsenjhe also answers a question Rahelu does not ask: she and Keshwar will not consort, as he will consort for the good of House Ideth.
• Tsenjhe concludes that things are what they are and there is no use getting lost in Augury.
• Rahelu completes the assignment within the week and invites Tsenjhe to dinner with her family once Petitioning is over.

Chapter 16: Team

• Rahelu returns to the Guild for the first week’s evaluations. She is ranked fifth from the bottom. Nheras is ranked ahead of her, Lhorne and the other Ideth Petitioners ranked somewhere in the middle, with Elaram and her brother, Ghardon, of Issolm in equal first position. In last place is Dharyas of Isca, who has not completed nor checked out any assignments.
• Guardian Maketh announces the elimination of the bottom three ranked candidates, who hand in their armbands and depart. The Imos Dedicate also announces a change going forward: due to a shortage of available personnel, the Petitioners will be required to complete assignments of greater difficulty that would not normally be assigned to them.
• Rahelu scans the new assignments. One jumps out at her: an urgent request from the city guard for help to track down and apprehend the killer responsible for three murders. The victims were killed in the same way she saw her mother die in Onneja’s Augury.
• Rahelu manages to convince Ghardon and Elaram to help her with the murder investigations, but the Ideth Petitioners, other than Lhorne, refuse to work with the Issolm Petitioners. Lhorne agrees only because he believes she would take the dangerous assignment with or without him and he does not trust the Issolm Petitioners.
• While they’re agreed on the assignment, they can’t agree on their next steps and they’re all exhausted from their previous assignments.
• Rahelu forces everyone to recognize they need to take the night for rest and preparation.
• Ghardon takes issue with her shabby attire and Lhorne points out she’s still missing a focus stone.
• Rahelu objects but is overruled: her three House-born teammates drag her off for a shopping trip.

Chapter 17: Debts

• After being bullied into trying a dizzying array of outfits by Elaram, Ghardon, and the shopkeeper, Rahelu sneaks off to pay for the least expensive tunic and boots. She can afford them, just.
• While she’s at the counter, Lhorne picks out a new mage ring for her. Rahelu overrides him and tells the shop assistant she only wants the tunic and picks a lower quality ring. The total is still more than she can afford.
• Lhorne instructs the shop assistant to charge the ring to his account instead so Rahelu can buy the tunic and boots she picked out. He tells Rahelu that if she feels bad, then she can pay him back by buying him dinner tomorrow night. When he sees how distressed she is, he apologizes and tells her not to worry, that he’s sure she’ll get an offer from House Ideth at the conclusion of Petitioning and when that happens, he’ll ask that the cost of the ring be considered as an advance on her wages as part of that offer.
• Unexpectedly moved, Rahelu asks him out for dinner anyway.

Chapter 18: Bet

• The next day, Rahelu and her teammates arrive at the Temple district to investigate the first murder site.
• While Lhorne and Elaram begin door knocking to interview possible witnesses, Rahelu and Ghardon try to Evoke the murder itself.
• Their second attempt, which requires Ghardon to lie down and dirty his clothes, yields a few glimpses of the event but no new information.
• Rahelu suggests they help Lhorne and Elaram with the interviews but Ghardon wants to go to a bathhouse to clean up instead; he thinks they would just get in the way.
• They make a bet: if Rahelu can convince someone to open the door and talk to her, he’ll do the next thing she asks of him for the assignment without any objection or complaint.
• Over lunch at a nearby tavern, Rahelu, Lhorne, and Elaram review their dismal progress: out of the five people interviewed, only one man saw the body and he had the details Obfuscated from his memory by a healer due to the trauma.
• With no other leads and both Rahelu and Ghardon at risk of resonance backlash, their next hope is finding an Augur willing to help them narrow down possibilities for the next victim.
• After Ghardon arrives, Elaram invites Rahelu to dinner that night with their family, but Rahelu declines, citing the need to file updates on their assignments and her parents—all of which Elaram has an answer for.
• As Rahelu is still reluctant to accept, Elaram figures out she has dinner plans. Hungry for gossip, Elaram presses Rahelu for further details.
• Rahelu deflects the queries and the conversation moves on to her absence from the graduation party, which was hosted by House Ilyn and open to all graduates, House- and common-born alike. Rahelu does not remember Nheras ever giving her an invitation.
• Ghardon recalls their bet and asks if Rahelu was successful. She opts to leave and get started on finding an Augur instead of answering, which he concludes means he won.

Chapter 19: Plans

• Even after making multiple inquiries, Rahelu and her teammates are unable to find an Augur to help them. They agree to regroup at the second murder site early the next day and try running an Evocation through a Concordance.
• Rahelu excuses herself to go check in with her mother at Market Square and Lhorne offers to walk with her. They leave together, to the teasing of the two Issolm siblings.
• After a stop at Market Square, where Lhorne is interrogated by Rahelu’s mother and Rahelu acquires some fish and firewood for dinner, they head to the parkland in the Highdocks. Rahelu cooks dinner, badly, but Lhorne enjoys it anyway.
• After dinner, they go for a walk along the pier which is interrupted by Nheras.
• The next day, Rahelu heads to the second murder site early. She wrestles with her conflicted emotions along the way. She decides to be glad that their dinner was interrupted and begins preparing for the Evocation alone.

Chapter 20: Dharyas

• Rahelu is in the middle of Evoking the second murder by herself. She manages to get a more detailed image of the murder weapon but her Evocation goes awry. She loses herself in time and it takes her teammates to pull her out of it.
• They yell at Rahelu for her reckless behavior. She apologizes but Elaram accuses her—correctly—of being unrepentant. Rahelu admits she was wrong, promises not to do it again, and says they’ll do the next one together.
• Ghardon uses his win from their bet to force Rahelu to sit the next one out for her own good—she’s exhausted herself and can’t help without injuring herself.
• They are able to glean some more information from her Evocation: the murderer is using a specialized Obfuscation barrier, which implies they have wealthy backers, and the murder weapon is a Free Territories ritual knife.
• They agree to visit the third murder site and then ask Dharyas of Isca for help since she’s got Free Territories family and she’s an Augur.
• Their Evocation at the third murder site confirms their suspicions but they have trouble finding Dharyas of Isca: while she attended her audiences with Houses Isca, Ideth, and Isonn, she did not arrive for her audience with House Imos. Guardian Maketh confirms she collected her Petitioner’s armband the day after but he is still awaiting its return.
• While waiting for the others, Rahelu reviews her earlier Evocation and connects it to one of the futures she saw in the Augury of Xyuth’s futures where his consort was murdered. Thanks to Rahelu’s Fortunement, a different woman died instead.
• She realizes that in the future that had come to pass, Dharyas had visited the Tattered Quill.

Chapter 21: Broken

• Rahelu and her teammates arrive at the Tattered Quill and discover Dharyas and Xyuth dead.
• The murders are recent enough that they manage to Evoke the whole event through a Concordance. There is not one murderer, but three: cultists who are in search of a person called Iweth-na and an object called the stargem—the glittering, black gem Rahelu has been carrying around. They are also trying to open the Endless Gate.
• After workers remove the bodies, they attempt another Concordance. This time, they are Seeking the whereabouts of the cultists. They pin the location down to somewhere near Market Square.
• Rahelu wants to go after the cultists before anyone else is murdered but Lhorne rightly points out they’re all completely exhausted. When Rahelu proposes escalating the investigation to Dedicates, Elaram says that doing so would mean they fail the objective of the assignment and therefore don’t deserve to be Supplicants.
• Rahelu has a heated argument with Lhorne about the unfairness of the Petitioning process.
• Eventually, Ghardon makes the decision: they are going to get cleaned up, eat, and rest, and then go with whatever idea they come up with after that, no matter how stupid. He orders palanquins to take them to a very expensive suite at a very expensive inn.
• Lhorne and Ghardon spend the rest of the night arguing tactics. A fed-up Elaram retires early while a heartsick Rahelu eats everything in sight. The argument gets personal and escalates into a duel where the winner picks the sleeping arrangements.
• Lhorne wins but Rahelu retires to the same room Elaram picked, leaving him to sleep in the other room alone.
• Rahelu tries to keep her feelings about Dharyas suppressed but Lhorne’s grief is palpable even from the next room.

Chapter 22: Darkness

• Rahelu wakes before dawn. The room is stuffy and hot. Thanks to Elaram’s snoring, she can’t get back to sleep.
• Rahelu thinks of Lhorne. With Tsenjhe and Keshwar’s relationship as an example, Rahelu resolves to not waste her time on anything beyond friendship. She permits herself one fantasy about what might have been had Nheras not interrupted their dinner and then gets up to go exercise while she waits for the others to wake up.
• They spend the day staking out Market Square. Rahelu notices Hzin is no longer hawking fresh fish but running a very successful food stall. While Rahelu is calculating how much it would have cost Hzin, she also notices his son’s absence and realizes she hasn’t seen Bzel for weeks. She concludes in disgust that Hzin must have sold Bzel to fund his new business.
• Lhorne and Ghardon return with news that nobody is talking about the recent murders, even though the strange manner of death and the number of them meant that rumors should be running wild.
• Plotting the murders on a map of the city reveals a pattern: if they ignore the Tattered Quill and join up each site with a line and add another point at Stormbane’s Rest, they get a half-circle centered on Market Square
• Out of time and ideas, they use a Concordance to run a Seeking in another attempt to locate the cultists. They pick up suspicious traces of resonance at Stormbane’s Rest.
• The worst is confirmed: the cultists have just murdered another citizen there.
• Elaram is unconscious, Ghardon has given up, Lhorne can’t stand, and Rahelu is exhausted. They won’t be able to get there in time to apprehend the killers.
• Rahelu makes a further connection: the location of the murders and the way the victims’ bodies are arranged are related. She theorizes that the cultists have split up because they still need one more sacrifice for their ritual at Market Square.
• She’s proven correct. They sight two cultists just before sunset, closing in on the only people still in Market Square: Hzin and Rahelu’s mother.
• Rahelu saves her mother by killing one of the cultists with a thrown spear. She’s now out of weapons and convinces herself that there’s nothing else she can do to save Hzin.
• Lhorne, however, finds Ghardon’s bow and quiver. Together, they manage to kill the other cultist, but not before Hzin is killed.

Chapter 23: Sloop

• Lhorne finally calls for clean up crews. While they’re waiting, Rahelu tries to salvage all of the fish that her mother dropped when she fled.
• Palanquins arrive to take the three House-born home while Rahelu walks back to the Lowdocks.
• Rahelu and her mother don’t sleep. When her father returns, she convinces her parents to leave the city briefly. They spend a week sailing up and down the coast to recover.
• On her return to the city, Rahelu uses the money she earned from completing the assignment to pay off her Guild debts. When she tries to buy out the lease on her family’s fishing sloop, she discovers that someone else has done it already.

Chapter 24: Message

• On her way back to Market Square, Rahelu receives offers of employment from Houses Ideth and Issolm. The Ideth terms are less favorable than she expected and the Issolm terms are suspiciously generous.
• Another messenger has left a letter with Rahelu’s mother at Market Square: an invitation from Lhorne to attend a celebration party at the Ideth estate. Rahelu is reluctant, but her mother convinces her to go.

Chapter 25: Ideth

• Rahelu arrives at the Ideth estate. She is dressed in the tunic and boots her teammates made her buy, as well as new trousers and a new belt, however everybody else is wearing formal robes. Nheras and Lhorne are nowhere in sight.
• Intimidated, Rahelu doesn’t go down to join the party.
• Nheras arrives. They exchange insults that end with Rahelu challenging Nheras to a duel. Nheras refuses. Rahelu moves to join the party to spite Nheras. It provokes Nheras into revealing that she now owns Rahelu’s family’s fishing sloop.
• They strike a bargain: Nheras signs over the fishing sloop in exchange for Rahelu’s mage ring and Rahelu leaving the party.

Chapter 26: Breakers

• Rahelu spends the evening meditating on a boulder in the shallows of the Kuath Bay down at the Lowdocks.
• Lhorne comes to find her. He arrives shortly before high tide and falls into the sea while trying to reach Rahelu. He can’t swim.
• Rahelu jumps into the water to save him. By the time they make it to shore, it is dark, cold, and unsafe.
• On their way to the Sable Gull, they are ambushed by the Breakers, a gang affiliated with House Issolm.
• When the gang tries to rob them at knifepoint, Rahelu reveals she is now a Supplicant of House Issolm.

Chapter 27: Gift

• Inside their inn room at the Sable Gull, Lhorne and Rahelu argue about her decision to swear to House Issolm instead of House Ideth.
• Lhorne discovers she no longer has the ring he bought her. He doesn’t understand why she didn’t turn to him for help.
• Rahelu demands to know why he keeps helping her.
• Lhorne shows her his memories and Rahelu realizes just how much he likes her: he’s been trying to get to know her ever since he first saw her at their Guild entrance tests five years ago and she’s been completely oblivious.
• Rahelu is moved, but unwilling to bend on her decisions regarding her sworn House and to be no more than friends with him.
• Lhorne accepts her choice and affirms their friendship by gifting her his heirloom pendant.
• They both sleep fitfully.
• Rahelu sneaks out of the room before dawn, while Lhorne is still asleep, to go to the Highdocks, where she will join Elder Anathwan aboard the Winged Arrow and depart on a secret mission.

Epilogue: Void

• Azosh-ek, the only surviving cultist, has been imprisoned by House Ideth.
• He was successful in opening the Endless Gate but he didn’t carry out his final instructions.
• He tries to kill himself for his failure but is prevented by Lhorne—who now has the stargem.