Shadowhearth

Shadowhearth

Act 1 - The City in the Golden Grass

South of the Gloomwood lies the Goldenrod Grasslands, where the grass grows seven feet tall and yellow as old gold. Nothing rots properly there. The soil is too fertile, too awake. The air is too still. You can make a whole village disappear in that grass and never find it again. That is why no birds sing there, and why the nicest place in the city is the gate out.

The city is Shadowhearth. It is the crime capital of the continent not because its people are cruel, but because they have been forgotten. Its castle, the Castle Haunt, is collapsing in on itself, stone by stone.

The rot here is older than Aurum's.

Act 2 - The Mother Remains

Long ago, the Magisters found something in the soft grass. Aurelyth, the Goldenrod Matriarch, ancient gold dragon, daughter of Aurix himself. She was gravid, heavy with egg, and she had been sleeping where her father told her to sleep: "Sleep, my daughter, I will wake you when it is safe." He never woke up.

The Magisters were the first of The Scalebound. And they did not wake her kindly. They bound her with infernal chains forged in Ferrum and sank her beneath what would become the castle. For years they siphoned her magic to feed their work, telling themselves they were preserving something sacred.

When she died from abuse and neglect, they learned why the oldest draconic law says never kill a gravid mother. In draconic magic, mother and unborn are one soul. When Aurelyth broke, her magic did not fade. It poured into the dirt, twisted by pain and by chain, and poisoned the Grasslands themselves.

Under the castle, in a bricked-up crypt no longer on any map, her massive skeleton has become part of the stone. Her ribs are pillars. Her spine is a wall. And inside her ribcage are three petrified dragon eggs, held in the dark where her heart once beat.

The city is nominally ruled by Lord Erphius Fogg. Everyone thinks he is a sniveling snake who ignores his duties to read forbidden books in his tower. What no one knows is that he found the original Magister's ledger, with a drawing of a dragon and three words: THE MOTHER REMAINS.

He knows something is poisoning everything. He is desperately trying to find it. His tower is full of dictionaries and half-finished notes, because every text is in Old Draconic or Deep Infernal, and Fogg speaks Common and bad Elvish. He has been working painstakingly slowly for years, getting seventy percent of it wrong.

Act 3 - The Black Hand and the Rat

When Fogg retreated to his tower, trade stopped and the treasury emptied. His goblin advisor, Gribble,was supposed to polish silver and nod. Gribble is a genius at logistics who grew up in Aurum's sewers. He started trading day-old bread for protection, and in three years every shop had two sets of books. Fake ones for Fogg, real ones for Gribble. He calls his network the Black Hand. It is the real government of Shadowhearth.

In that Hand works Scrub, who tends bar at the Shattered Mug. Most call her strange and leave it there. When she was six, a rat came to her - old, blind in one eye, chubby. Jett. He slept on her chest every night. Her brother failed to hunt a boar, came home humiliated, and kicked Jett hard by the fire. Jett was old. He did not get up. The clan said it's just a rat. Scrub left that night and never went back.

She talks to Jett because in Shadowhearth, where the veil is thin because of Aurelyth, dead things linger if loved enough. Jett is a ghost only she can see at first. Translucent, one cloudy eye, still chubby.

Gribble runs the Hand and is the most competent person in a hundred miles. He is painfully in love with Scrub.

He built a shrine for Jett in the back room of the tavern to impress her. Polished river stones, stolen gold candlesticks, tiny carved bed, fresh cheese every morning, sign that says JETT'S SPOT - NO SITTING. EVER. He spent three weeks on it.

Scrub's reaction: "The cheese could be stinkier."

Jett, however, loves Gribble. Loves the shrine. Sits on it like a throne. Which you can only see once you have enough ale.

Gribble would burn Shadowhearth for Scrub. And Scrub hardly notices him.

There is another resident of note. Kethos, a Cambion, came to Shadowhearth because he likes it here. Everything is sinking, everyone is desperate, and desperate people are his favorite. He runs the Church of Avernus out of a black chapel that is always open. He grants wishes. Can't afford medicine? Sign here and she will be healthy - he will take your ability to taste sweet things. Black Hand shaking you down? Sign here and they will forget your name - he will take your memory of your first kiss. He sells pacts like a genie who leaves out one important detail. He came for the suffering, and stayed to make more.