5. Wrecks

The Infernal Current

Before dawn ever reached Oakhaven, the Silver Void seemed to flinch. Perspective ripped across its mirrored skin at impossible speed, skimming past hunting flotillas and drifting shards toward a colossal wrought-iron gate crowned in hellfire. Beyond it, under Avernus’s ash-lit sky, a winged fiend in an admiral’s chamber turned glowing contract pages with clawed precision, checked each infernal seal, and dispatched an envoy toward one small fragment adrift in the dark: Oakhaven.

The Price of a Dead Engine

The echoes of Pea’s gunfire were still rolling across Moonlit Cove when the cost of Silas Kross’s raid came due. Kezreth’s severed body had left the captured Githyanki skiff without a true engine, and the vessel dropped hard into black water. At the helm, grim and desperate, Tink discovered a bitter mercy: the spelljammer no longer felt alive, but it no longer fought him either. Feeding measured arcane force into the hollowed core, he coaxed the ship into a crawling glide and dragged The Watch back to shore.

Oakhaven Weeps

They landed to rain, panic, and smoke. A second column rose from Taproot Hamlet, the outlying farming settlement grown around one of Oakhaven’s Wayfarer Oaks, while the sky above the shard wept in sympathy with its wounded people. During the Watch’s absence, Iron Forge raiders had struck fast, stealing winter stores and abducting three green-fingered fey: Ithwain, druid firbolg and elder of the hamlet; Yalana, dryad guardian of the central Wayfarer Oak; and Tardan, a halfling farmer whose hands had fed half the valley.

The elders split along familiar fault lines. Elder Drax demanded hard certainty, steel discipline, and immediate fortification. High Warden Valena urged a return to older Feywild protections and living magic. Both demanded action. Neither trusted the silence after the fire.

The Bell, the Scholar, and the Warning

At Helios’s clinic, Master Elizar finally met the people who had cut him free from the skiff’s arcane harness. Pale but lucid, he named Pea’s silver bell for what it was: a cursed abyssal relic of the Blood War. The warning came too late. Pea had already tested it, already felt its authority over the porcelain-masked crew, and had no intention of surrendering it.

Elizar threw himself into the stolen charts, using scholarship as shelter. What he translated struck like cold iron: Oakhaven had been marked in Gith military script as viable creche ground. The patrol that captured him had already logged the shard as a priority target. They would return.

Working beside Lindon, Elizar uncovered a second revelation. Nearby lay the drowned towers of Candlekeep – or what remained of them – close enough to reach, and potentially rich with lore, maps, and answers.

Before The Watch departed, Nana Fogbreath sent Cloe to fetch Veyer. The hag did not ask; she proposed. Soon, the three of them would gather for a protective ritual over Oakhaven. To prepare, Veyer was tasked with finding petrified aether-coral, vacuum-frost, and void-skulker chitin before the next turning.

A Trail of Smoke

With too many crises and too little time, the Watch argued hard. In the end, Pea and Tink carried the choice: secure a fully functional spelljammer first, or lose every other option afterward. They launched into the Void following only the smoke of the burning Warp-Spite and closed on a wreck already being stripped by Iron Forge salvagers.

As they approached, a larger silver-and-bone Gith sloop slid in to intercept. Commander Zar’rekh, a red wyrmling draped across her shoulders like a living standard, hailed them. Kaymos’s magical disguise bought only a heartbeat; his reply made her wary. Tension became terms: the Watch would drive off the dwarves, and afterward both sides would discuss the salvage.

Thin Alliances

The dwarves were given one warning shot, though they were already running from a Bone Devil that had escaped its cage. They broke for their small but rapid landing craft, only to be run down through a combination of Tink’s deft helmsmanship, carefully aimed fire that clipped the dwarven helmswoman, and thorn-and-briar magic that entangled the entire launch. With the skiff cutting off their escape – and Veyer looming over them like judgment – the dwarves resigned themselves to their fate.

Through threats, bargains, and hard-eyed desperation, the wider truth emerged. King Torvald had not ordered the raid for conquest alone: the dwarves of Iron Forge were starving. This was a desperate move before their shard had to put distance between itself and the growing storm of the Tempest’s Maw, before they were caught in its pull and unable to escape. Leaving scrappers behind to catch up in faster launches, the Iron Forge had already turned away from the Maw and was trying to break free of its grip. The salvagers were taken prisoner, fed Nana’s mushroom sandwiches and toadstool crisps, and their launch taken in tow.

Silas Slips the Net Again

Mid-truce, Silas surfaced from the Silver Void and slid into the Warp-Spite’s captain’s cabin. With careful persuasion shouted across the gap between wreck and skiff, the Bone Devil was convinced to investigate and drove him out through shattered windows in a spray of ooze and glass. Silas escaped again – wounded, furious, and still loose.

Moments later, the devil returned with parchment and quill in hand, eyes bright with delighted malice and bureaucratic intent.

Bargains in the Dark

The bitter truth came late. The kidnapped fey had already been moved to the Iron Forge’s exposed Greensward, where they were being forced to keep crops alive on volcanic stone. This was no longer going to be a simple rescue mission.

As Zar’rekh’s vessel withdrew to a watchful horizon and the Warp-Spite settled deeper into ruin, The Watch crossed one more line they could not easily uncross. With a Bone Devil at the table and every faction hungry for a ship, they opened negotiations on infernal terms.

The shape of the offer was simple: aid for passage, violence for ownership, and a final price left politely unspoken.