Faith and Pain

The session begins with Edwinn's arm eviscerated, his hand cut to the bone as though something inside had fought to keep its grip. Cailynn and Marik pour Cure Wounds into the wound, but his body only half accepts it; the bleeding stops, but necrosis creeps in behind it, leaving four fingers and the palm permanently black and numb, dead weight at the end of his arm. Zepharos confirms the gauntlet's connection to edwinn is gone for good, though a faint thread still lingers. He names it for what it is: a relic of the Va'Gro liches, sentient and hungry, the true source of the voices that have followed Edwinn for years. There's talk of drowning it. Instead they decide to carry it to Faithspire and let the Church of Unity destroy it. Xanthe claims the watch as hers alone, the gauntlet pinned beneath her bident day and night, hers to guard and no one else's.

They are picked up by Geran Veltaris on a Veltaris ship and after a few days at sea, Faithspire rises to meet them on the 16th of February. What follows there is closer to a massacre than a ritual. The priests attempt to destroy the dark magic within the gauntlet but it retaliates; several don't survive the attempt, briefly rising as something worse before they're put down again. It's the phylacteries that finally break, thirty-six unbroken hours of grinding, sacred work, until even High Arbiter Cadeaus collapses from the strain.

For the gauntlet, unable to be destroyed, they must rely on Mehpestio's contact. When the angel finally comes for the gauntlet, it arrives in a wash of white light at a nearby temple. The angel takes it, and is gone. Xanthe goes down like a puppet with its strings cut, carried off by Crownclaw hands; a price paid on a vision from Circe, who saw that Xanthe alone would not fail that task.

Talon cracks like old plaster under Edwinn's questions about Davion's death, admitting at last that every secret he's kept has been in service of a single vision: Cersei's, Via's mother, the late queen, warning him that the truth would kill his children where his silence merely costs him their love. Via chases that truth through her divination magic, and witnesses Talon's death from his eyes. She is lifted off the ground and begins to choke. Cailynn dives into the veil after her and finds Talon on the gallows instead, five silhouettes standing in judgment over him. Talon puts her to sleep rather than let her see more.

Alone with Edwinn afterward, he finally gives him the truth, a fraction of it, at least: his mother was never truly gone, only hidden, Cassia Draven, granddaughter of the King in Crimson, spirited across the world as a child and given a stranger's name, Zara Calista, still alive, this whole time. The gauntlet finding him at eighteen was never random. Someone who knew exactly what blood ran in Edwinn's veins put it in his path on purpose.

When everyone else has gone, Talon draws out a length of copper wire and sends the only words he has left: *"It is done. They despise me. Circe; please, there has to be another way."*