Through a Song Darkly

Reed Hey everybody, and welcome back to the recap. This is the show where we follow one band of very stressed mercenaries as they chase a song nobody can quite remember the notes to. I'm Reed.

Quill And I'm Quill, the resident lorekeeper, here to remind you all that this campaign takes place in a world where the dead get arranged into art exhibits and that's considered a respectable career path.

Reed We're going to get to that, oh, we are absolutely getting to that. This is session zero, by the way, in the in-universe sense — well, the digest calls it triple-zero, through a song darkly.

Quill A title that, in hindsight, is doing a great deal of foreshadowing. But let's not spoil our own ending.

Reed No, let's not, because the ending of this one is bonkers. But we earn it. The whole front half is the crew doing housekeeping before the big trip.

Quill Right. So the framing for this whole session is that the Strider is about to depart toward the Voidsong. And the crew — that's our heroes from Iconoclasm — they've got about a week before it sets off. A week to make friends.

Reed And the gang's all here: Anzu, Argyle, Benny, and Johnny. The four horsemen of awkward networking.

Quill Quick context, because not everyone retains this. The Strider. In the setting, striders are these giant mobile caravan-cities. They come from Istria, a land that's so cursed you literally cannot stand still or something called the Stillness turns you into a statue.

Reed Wait, is that the purple-crystal thing? Where people's joints crack and burst?

Quill That's the Stillness, yes. Anything that lingers too long in one place gets caught and corrupted. Purple crystals from the joints, legs bent wrong, the face frozen mid-scream. Keep that imagery in your back pocket. We will need it later.

Reed Okay, you're doing the ominous lorekeeper voice, and I don't love it. Let's start with beat one, which is honestly just the crew reading a map.

Quill The most underrated activity in tabletop gaming. They review the layout of the Strider's top deck — specifically the sizes of each org's Fane, which is their base, and which factions are wired into the crew's skein network.

Reed The skein being their little web of connected hearts. Every org has a heart, you link it up, and it's this — okay, you explain it better than me.

Quill Think of it as a coalition ledger that runs on these magical hearts. Each org has a named heart, you tie it into the skein, and you've got a connection. It matters mechanically, and it matters socially. Who's in your network is who's got your back.

Reed And the neighbors are a who's who. There's Amber Call with this enormous base —

Quill Amber Call is a medical rescue and insurance company. The joke in the books is, you get a papercut, they show up with a bandage and a bill. Their base being huge tracks. Insurance money.

Reed A bandage and a bill. Then there's tiny little Garrick Textiles, the Pale Lantern Society, the Protectorate —

Quill Protectorate's a private army out of Brithwyn. Army-for-hire, peacekeepers when it suits them, war machine when the price is right. Their elite soldiers go into something called a battletrance and tear through encampments single-handed. Not the neighbors you want angry.

Reed And the Run Gunners, who have this border-spanning territory — which, mark that, because we visit them. And then the spooky note: Necrolog wouldn't even talk to them.

Quill Necrolog refused to speak with the crew, deferring instead to the Pale Lantern Society. Which is a tell. It says these two are aligned, and it says the Pale Lanterns speak for both. File that away.

Reed Okay, beat two. Downtime crafting, which is my favorite kind of beat because it's quiet and nobody dies. Argyle's the team doctor, right?

Quill Argyle is our Eternal Pulse devotee, the medic. He arranges to craft two holy waters and speed up a healing potion. Standard prep.

Reed But the interesting part is the twins. Anouk and Anaïs, who have Magical Crafting, whip up a rank three Dream Message scroll.

Quill And the scroll is for Anzu. He wants to contact his sister, who's believed to be among the followers of the Herald.

Reed The Herald. We don't know much about the Herald yet, right? That's a thread.

Quill We don't, and I'm not going to pretend we do. All we know in-session is Anzu's sister is somewhere in that orbit, and a Dream Message is how he's reaching out. That's a man using magic to text his sister and hope she answers.

Reed Which, honestly, relatable. And then beat three — Chuck the butler shows up.

Quill Chuck the butler. A real one.

Reed Chuck delivers a blue crystal totem that's linked to the crew's own heart, which is named Eerie. And it lets them talk to the heart telepathically from a distance.

Quill So their heart, Eerie, becomes a phone. And the Gamemaster takes the moment to remind everyone there's a formal gala at the end of the week, when the Strider makes its first jump toward the Voidsong.

Reed Nothing bad ever happens at a gala.

Quill Nothing. In the history of fiction. Has ever gone wrong. At a formal event with a countdown attached.

Reed So let's do the visits, because beats four through nine are basically the crew going door to door like the world's most heavily-armed welcoming committee. First stop: the Run Gunners.

Quill And their Fane is spectacular. It's built as a fortified racetrack — a trench, really — with an enchanted eighteen-wheeler garage.

Reed A magical eighteen-wheeler garage! That's the most metal sentence I've said all week. And they meet Ceres.

Quill Ceres, an unemotive fetchling in oily overalls. Friendly, but declines an alliance and declines to share information.

Reed But — and this is the sweet part — Argyle offers his medical services, hands over a business card, and the two of them resonate.

Quill Resonate being a connection that isn't quite an alliance but isn't nothing. A spark. Argyle, the doctor, networking by being kind. On brand for a Pulse follower — their whole edict is heal wounds, never abandon the dying.

Reed And there's this lovely bit of lore the crew recalls — the Run Gunners' mythic desert city of patchwork hearts and religions.

Quill Which is a gorgeous image and one I want to know so much more about. Patchwork hearts and patchwork religions. A whole city stitched together. The digest doesn't tell us more, so I'm going to sit here and ache about it quietly.

Reed Ache quietly, that's the Quill brand. Okay, beat five, and this is where it starts getting sad. Garrick Textiles.

Quill The tiny one from the map. And when they arrive, the Fane is half-finished. It literally ran out of energy mid-construction.

Reed Which, in a session that is all about energy and what happens when you don't have enough — that's not a coincidence, is it.

Quill It is not a coincidence. Hold that thought with both hands. They meet Letov Obratz, an old-money purple-skinned tiefling who came in place of his sick nephew. And his poor, overwhelmed sprite secretary.

Reed And the crew immediately clocks it. They're like, this man is going to die. He is not equipped for what's coming.

Quill They are certain of it. So they try to convince him to move in with them. For his safety. And Letov — politely — refuses.

Reed Because he's got a dream. He wants his fashion shows. He came all this way for the fashion shows.

Quill An old man living his nephew's appointment, dreaming of runways. There's something genuinely tender about it. The crew connects his heart — and his heart is named Whirling in Rags —

Reed Whirling in Rags! For a textiles guy! That's a perfect heart name.

Quill It's perfect and it's about to break my own. They wire Whirling in Rags into the skein and they move on, having done what they can, which is not enough.

Reed Okay. We move on. Beat six. The Pale Lantern Society, who we have been teasing this whole time.

Quill Oh, I've been waiting. So this is a larger, well-built operation. They staff it with skinless undead drones —

Reed Skinless. Undead. Drones.

Quill — and they pose corpses into a columbarium diorama. And here's the lore, because this is real established setting material. The Pale Lantern Society might be the oldest organization on the entire continent. Older than the Gods, even.

Reed Older than the Gods. That's wild.

Quill They started in the Dark Ages as a cabal of warlords and aristocrats dabbling in necromancy. Then the firmament cracked, the Eternal Pulse spoke, and declared the Society her presence in the world. Overnight they went from clandestine cult to prestige outfit.

Reed And the columbarium thing — explain that, because it's so deranged and I love it.

Quill It's an art form. Wealthy patrons donate their bodies on death, an artist preserves and arranges the corpse into a work of art, and they're displayed for the public while they wait.

Reed Wait for what?

Quill For the Society to perfect resurrection. The whole pitch is, once true resurrection is possible, you get returned to your body. The corpses on display are, in their minds, just sleeping. Beautifully arranged, indefinitely, sleeping.

Reed That's so much worse than I thought. Okay. So in this columbarium the crew meets two physicians.

Quill Two pale elf physicians. Manas — who, the digest is very clear, smells of formaldehyde —

Reed A character detail that tells you everything.

Quill — and Brienne. And Manas is the one who does the talking, and he is not interested. He declines to join the network, and the way he frames it is sharp: he calls it a competition. Over information-gathering.

Reed Which is so cold. Like, we're not allies, we're rivals fishing in the same pond.

Quill And then the crew asks about the reincarnation ritual. And Manas admits he has it. He possesses it. And he refuses to share it. And dismisses them.

Reed He just has the reincarnation ritual in his back pocket and goes, nope, not for you, please see yourselves out.

Quill And remember Necrolog deferred to these people. So the most secretive, oldest, death-obsessed faction on the boat is the one holding the keys and slamming the door. That's a power dynamic the crew is going to have to reckon with.

Reed Mark it. Okay, palate cleanser — beat seven is so much nicer. Alkahest Freight.

Quill A modest operation. Led by a soft-spoken elf named Caddo Floak, who wears silver Compel raiment.

Reed And this guy's a thinker. He's the one who actually noticed something's wrong with the boat.

Quill He's a logistics man with a logistics concern. He's been watching the Strider's spinning arms, and he's observed they drain roughly half of the ambient energy around them. Fifty percent. Just pulled out of the air.

Reed Half the energy in the room. And we just heard Garrick's Fane ran out of energy. These threads are braiding together.

Quill And then Caddo offers a theory, and this is the heart of the whole episode for me. He thinks the lost nation of Raelion was thrown voidward — past the wall — and that the Voidsong is them. Crying for help.

Reed Oh. The song is people. Trapped on the other side.

Quill That's his theory. And I want to be careful — that is Caddo's interpretation, not a confirmed fact. But it's a striking one. Because the Voidsong, in everything we know, is described as this dirge full of loneliness and longing. A funeral song that's also a call to action.

Reed And it visibly moves Johnny. That's the detail. Johnny hears that theory and it lands on him.

Quill It lands on Johnny specifically. The digest doesn't tell us why, and I won't guess. But the table noticed. The character noticed. That's a thread with Johnny's name on it now.

Reed And they connect Caddo's heart — Chromatic Drift — to the skein. Friendly elf, in the coalition. Good visit.

Quill Chromatic Drift. These heart names are doing more poetry than most of the dialogue.

Reed Right? Beat eight is the visit they don't make. Turney and Heavy Industries — or Tourney and Heavy Industries —

Quill The digest spells it both ways, so we'll let it ride. The crew spots them assembling a small airplane on a rudimentary airstrip, and they decide to steer clear.

Reed And the reason is politics. They've got an alliance with someone named Hildebrandt, and Turney and Heavy are Hildebrandt's competitor.

Quill So approaching them risks the Hildebrandt relationship. It's mature, actually. They're thinking about their existing commitments instead of just collecting everyone. Restraint.

Reed A whole airplane being built on a moving city, and they just walk past it. The discipline.

Quill Whereas beat nine, they show no discipline whatsoever, and it rules.

Reed Radiant Arms! The gun people!

Quill Radiant Arms. A firearm manufacturer out of Calaria, specializing in high-caliber, enchanted weapons. Their actual motto in the setting is, just a tap'll do ya.

Reed Just a tap'll do ya. And their Fane is a fortified brownstone covered in guns.

Quill Decorated with firearms, yes. And they meet Y'shael, an openly mechanical android representative. They talk shop — the firearm market, and a rival, Sable and Sons.

Reed Hold Sable and Sons in your mind, because that comes back at brunch. But first — Benny test-fires the prototype.

Quill Benny test-fires a point-seven-five caliber hand cannon.

Reed A point-seven-five caliber hand cannon. That's not a gun, that's a small artillery piece you hold in one hand.

Quill And when Benny fires it — outside, thank goodness — the barrel peels back from the blast.

Reed The barrel peels back! The gun fails! It just opens up like a banana!

Quill Just a tap'll do ya, indeed. And evidently a tap is all it could survive. But despite the prototype unzipping itself, Y'shael agrees to join the coalition.

Reed And they connect Radiant Arms' heart — Final Caliber — to the skein. Which, of all the heart names, Final Caliber for the gun org is just so clean.

Quill It's almost too on the nose, and I respect it completely. So let's tally the recruiting drive. Run Gunners and the Pale Lanterns said no. Garrick, Alkahest, and Radiant Arms said yes.

Reed And Turney they skipped on purpose. Not a bad week of door-knocking.

Quill Now we get to the morning of the gala, and beat ten. Anzu finally uses that Dream Message scroll.

Reed Right, the scroll the twins made. He casts Dream Message to invite his sister to brunch — at the restaurant, Giacomo's — the morning of the gala.

Quill And being a careful man, he sends Othello to scout ahead. Othello spots nothing unusual.

Reed Othello being his — what, familiar? Companion?

Quill The digest just says he sends Othello to scout, so I'll let listeners fill in the species. The point is, recon comes back clean. Which, in my experience, means absolutely nothing is clean.

Reed And beat eleven proves it. Brunch happens. And the sister?

Quill Never appears. Anzu sets a table, sends a magical dream invitation, scouts the location, and his sister simply does not come.

Reed Oof. That's quietly devastating. He did everything right and she just wasn't there.

Quill And instead, brunch hands them someone else entirely. A battle-scarred tengu named Lark Crow.

Reed A Sable and Sons gun salesman! There's the Sable and Sons callback.

Quill And here's the gut-punch — they later realize Lark Crow is the contact who armed the bandits and the ghosts.

Reed The guy who armed the bad guys is just having brunch! At the same place! Casually!

Quill Sitting down for eggs, apparently. And then folks from Hildebrandt drop by too — Pavo and others. So their ally's people are around as well. Brunch is suddenly very crowded with plot.

Reed And then beat twelve is the creepiest little moment in the whole front half. The compulsion.

Quill There's an unremarkable man drinking coffee. And the crew feels a mental compulsion not to approach him. Something is steering them away.

Reed And they push through it. Which is the brave, stupid, correct move.

Quill They push past the compulsion and find a glamour-masked man. He's Giannis, of the Ministry of Cultural Progress.

Reed The Ministry of Cultural Progress. And he's a big deal, right?

Quill He's described as a high-level devout of the Host — the Iridescent Host. And he coldly rebuffs the network invitation, same as the others. Prefers competition over coalition.

Reed That's the third no in the same flavor. Pale Lanterns, Run Gunners, now Giannis — everyone serious keeps framing it as a competition.

Quill And that's a theme worth naming. The little guys join hands. The powerful players want to win, not cooperate. As for the Ministry — the crew recalls it began as an offshoot of the Iridescent Church and that it controls Calaria's radio waves.

Reed Which, given how much of this world runs on radio — the Voidsong shows up in broadcasts, the lore says Calarian radio plays from every antenna — controlling the airwaves is enormous.

Quill It's enormous. The Iridescent Church is the single most powerful organization on the continent, and the Ministry is a splinter of it that owns the airwaves. A glamour-masked man with that kind of backing, hiding behind a compulsion at brunch, is not someone you forget.

Reed Okay. So that's the whole week. Now the gala. Deep breath. Beat thirteen.

Quill The crew arrives on time — which the digest specifically notes, and I find charming, they were punctual — and they mingle.

Reed They end up talking with Braxton Hall of Ethereum Limited, and Ceres is there, and someone named Taz.

Quill Ceres being the Run Gunner from earlier. The fetchling in the overalls. Nice to see a familiar face.

Reed And then there's this parade of new mystery figures, and I love a good ballroom of weirdos. There's a too-tall man in a too-small suit.

Quill Arguing with a small rock-bodied, mossy-bearded being. Which — a rock-bodied being with a mossy beard reads like an earth elemental or something stonier. The digest doesn't name them, so I'll just say: someone made of rock is having an argument at a party.

Reed And there's a sylph in gossamer —

Quill A sylph being an air-touched being, gossamer being appropriately wispy. And then the one that makes me sit up — Sylvan Grayson, holding court with the Pale Lantern elves and the Necrolog Dompir.

Reed And there's our Necrolog connection again. The ones who wouldn't even talk to the crew.

Quill Exactly. Necrolog deferred to the Pale Lanterns at the start of the session, and now here at the gala you've got the Pale Lantern elves and a Necrolog Dompir clustered around Sylvan Grayson. That's a faction bloc forming in plain sight.

Reed And we don't know who Sylvan Grayson is yet.

Quill We do not, and I will not pretend. But whoever holds court over that particular crowd is worth watching.

Reed Okay. Beat fourteen. The Master of Ceremonies opens the gala. The rings spin up. First jump.

Quill And the tithe hits. This is the thing Caddo warned them about — the spinning arms draining ambient energy. Except now it's not ambient. It's everyone. The whole ballroom has to make fortitude saves.

Reed Argyle and Benny both come out fatigued. The boat is reaching into people and taking.

Quill And their keystone totem — that crystal Chuck delivered, tracking their heart — ticks down. From one hundred to eighty. Twenty percent of their reserve, gone, pulled out of the attendees in a single tithe.

Reed And then Letov Obratz.

Quill And then Letov Obratz. The old tiefling. Whirling in Rags. The man with the fashion show dreams who they begged to come stay with them.

Reed Who didn't have enough Voidsong. Didn't have enough energy reserve to pay the tithe.

Quill And so the tithe takes it from his body instead. He collapses. And he's horrifically wrung out — his body contorting, black-purple liquid leaking out of him.

Reed Black-purple. Contorting. Quill — that's the Stillness imagery. From the very top of the episode.

Quill It rhymes with it, doesn't it. Purple, joints, the body bent wrong, a person turned into something else mid-agony. I'm not going to claim it's the same force — the digest doesn't say that. But the campaign is clearly drawing on that same horror vocabulary. The thing that happens when something stays too long, or doesn't have enough.

Reed And the crew does the most crew thing imaginable. Beat fifteen. Argyle and Johnny try to save him.

Quill They pour healing in. Soothe, Heal — the medic's whole kit, and Argyle is a Pulse devotee, abandoning the dying is literally against his religion.

Reed But it doesn't work. It makes it worse.

Quill It only prolongs the wringing-out. Every bit of healing they put in just gives the tithe more to take. His lungs burst. They kept him alive long enough to suffer more.

Reed That's the cruelest possible outcome for a healer. Your gift becomes the torture.

Quill And then the black liquid congeals. And it births things. Monstrous deer-horse-chitin hybrids — the digest calls them Kirin, or Kyren — and slobbering Barghest-like dogs.

Reed A swarm of monsters. Out of a dead man. Onto the dance floor.

Quill They surge out and charge. And the Master of Ceremonies — who opened all this — simply leaves. Leaves the attendees to deal with it.

Reed He just bails! Spins up the death machine, watches a man turn into a monster pinata, and walks off!

Quill Which tells you something about how expendable the people in that room are to whoever's running this. And on that note — combat poised to begin, monsters charging, a ballroom full of panicking orgs — the session ends.

Reed On a cliffhanger! Of course! Initiative is rolled and then — credits!

Quill The oldest trick the Gamemaster has, and it works every single time.

Reed Okay, so let's do a little speculation before we go, because there's a lot cooking. Top thread for me: the tithe. The boat needs energy, Caddo says it drains half the room, and now we've literally watched it kill someone who couldn't pay.

Quill And the crew's own totem dropped from one hundred to eighty in one jump. How many jumps are between here and the Voidsong? Because at twenty percent a pop, that's a countdown clock they're now standing on.

Reed That's a great point. The totem is a fuel gauge and a doomsday clock at the same time.

Quill My thread is the network of nos. The Pale Lanterns, the Run Gunners, the Ministry — every powerful faction declined and called it competition. And the Pale Lanterns are sitting on a reincarnation ritual. In a world where the Eternal Pulse's whole promise is cheating death, that ritual is the most valuable object in the room.

Reed And Necrolog won't talk and defers to them, and at the gala they're all huddled with Sylvan Grayson. There's a death bloc forming.

Quill There's a death bloc, and the crew is on the outside of it. For now.

Reed My other one is the personal stuff. Anzu's sister didn't show. And Caddo's Raelion theory landed hard on Johnny.

Quill Those are the two I'm most tender about. The song might be a drowning nation crying for help, and that meant something specific to Johnny that the table noticed. I want to know what Johnny knows.

Reed And whether the sister not showing is a choice, or a problem. Did she ignore the invitation, or could she not come?

Quill And whether Lark Crow being at that exact brunch — the man who armed the bandits and ghosts — is connected to any of it. That's a lot of barrels pointed at one little restaurant.

Reed Giacomo's: best eggs in the Stillness, worst clientele. Alright, I think that's our episode. Quill, take us out of the lore.

Quill From the lore side: the Strider is moving, the song is calling, and one man has already paid the toll. The world divided itself into the faithful and the fearful. After this gala, I suspect our crew has moved a little toward fearful.

Reed And from the recap side — thank you all so much for listening. We'll be back to find out whether anyone survives the deer-horse-chitin situation, which is a sentence I never expected to say.

Quill Pour one out for Letov Obratz, who only wanted a fashion show.

Reed Rest easy, Whirling in Rags. We hardly knew you. I've been Reed —

Quill And I've been Quill. Keep moving. Don't stay still too long.

Reed Ominous! On that note — see you next session, everybody. Bye!