The Gray Morning

This is before the recordings, and is set down from the notes.

Westmarch woke one morning to fog. Not river fog — this came out of the Thornwood overnight, grey and cold, and it clung to skin like oil. It filled the Warrens, the poor district in the southwest corner where the city crowds closest to the trees, and it did not lift. People who stayed in it too long stopped making sense: they wandered, or turned on each other, or set off walking west toward the forest as though something out there had called them by name. The Watch cordoned off what it could. Hundreds of people were still inside the line.

Four strangers went in, for four different reasons, and came out knowing each other.

Four ways into the fog

Lyrique and Sammael were sent after a person. A councillor named Arissa, an ally of Lord Brennan Westmarch, had gone into the Warrens before the fog and not come out; Brennan wanted her found, and the job came down through the Watch to Sammael, who knows the district, with Lyrique attached to it. Sammael grew up in these streets. This was his home the fog was eating.

Kaelen and Quill came at it from the other side and met the forest halfway: a shrub tore itself up out of the cobblestones and came at them, roots and all, moving like it wanted to. They put it down. Kaelen is a Ranger of the Green and half-raised in the Thornwood; Quill is fey himself, an archivist sent down from the Archive by his mistress to see what the fog was. Neither of them liked what an awakened plant was doing loose inside the walls.

The four of them converged on the Wayfarers' Hall, the big refugee shelter the Temple of Avandra runs at the heart of the Warrens, and found it wrecked and half-empty.

Down into the Undercroft

The trail went down. Under the Warrens run the Undercroft — the sewers and tunnels the city forgets about until it needs them — and the party went down after Arissa.

They found her. She was already dead, killed by something that had come up from below, and what killed her was still down there: a thing that was mostly fog, that moved and reached and did not have a proper shape. They fought it in tunnels Sammael had walked a hundred times, and they won, and then they found what the fog had been leaking out of.

The stone

Set into the bedrock under the Warrens was a great stone, taller than a man, covered in carved script none of them could read. It was cracked, and light guttered in the crack like a lamp about to go out — and around the break were tool marks.

Somebody had done this on purpose. Somebody had come down here, into the dark under the poorest part of the city, and taken tools to a three-hundred-year-old stone until it broke, and the fog was what came out when it did.

The party had gone into the fog looking for a missing woman. They came back up with her body, a wound in the world under their feet, and the first hard fact of everything that followed: this was not an accident. It was done.

They went to report it — Sammael and Lyrique to the people who had sent them, Quill to the Archive — and the city's answer to a sabotaged stone was to wrap it in temple wards and hope. The wards would hold the fog back for a while. They would not mend the stone. For that, the Archive said, the party was going to have to go into the forest.