The Shattered Sky: A Campaign Primer

“The Fire and the Fold”

A novella-style dialogue introducing central elements of the campaign

The sky-barque Vestige's Grace skimmed along a silk current, her bonewood hull creaking like an old violin. Slate-wing gulls pin-wheeled in her wake, silhouettes against clouds that glowed faintly with script-lines—daylight catching the afterimage of someone else's prophecy.

On the forward deck, Rin Nimveil pressed gloved fingers to the rail. She tasted iron on the wind: probably dust from mines far below. Every motion of the vessel sent ribbons of hair across her cheeks, smearing ink flecks that still clung to her skin from last night's vigil. The fragment they'd given her—You will call forth a fire no rain can quench—lay folded inside her coat, warm like a feverish heart.

Across the deck sat Master Thellen, hood drawn, boots planted wide, as steady as the mast itself. The pages of his grimoire fluttered in restless intervals, but his hands—knotted, quill-scarred—never moved. At his knee a cracked lantern throbbed with pale blue phosphor: a captured Skyran whisper-light he used as a reading lamp.

"Still pacing?" he asked without looking up.

"I'd stop," Rin said, "but the future's keeping time." She glanced at the grimoire. "What are you reading?"

"Things that used to be true." Thellen shut the book; its cover smelled of old parchment and seafoam. "Walk with me."

They crossed the deck to a narrow companionway that led onto a balcony-plank jutting beyond the hull. Below, churning cloud-reefs parted to reveal a glimpse of Cael Dural—the Fract of the Grand Archivum—distant, golden, impossibly still. Above them, a single Wordbound sentinel drifted past on invisible tether-lines, mask blank as an unwritten page.

Rin shivered. "They always know where to look."

"Not always," Thellen murmured. "They can't see an unwritten line. That's why they circle—hoping uncertainty will blink first."

He reached up, snapped the lantern shut, and the Skyran light extinguished with a sigh that felt like someone remembering how to cry.

They walked along the plank until it narrowed to a point, sky on every side. The barque's wake carved a spiraling contrail across the firmament. From here the lush green of Verid Hollow Fract was just visible, but Rin imagined trees reaching for the sky, trying to escape the grip of the Archivum.

"You said I could ask blasphemies," she reminded him.

Thellen stroked his beard. "Ask."

"Why do people still call it the Grand Mercy?" she asked.

"The Archivum," he said. "They mean it."

"Even when it scripts death?"

"Especially then," he said. "A fate-bound world is... comforting. If your child drowns, the pain is still unbearable—but the reason is written. The chaos shrinks."

She shook her head. "That doesn't sound like mercy."

"Not to us, perhaps. But to the broken? To the poor? To those who have seen the whims of men leave justice flayed and laughing? Fate promises that every weight is balanced. That those who suffer now may be lifted later."

She frowned. "That's not justice. That's karma with bureaucracy."

"Exactly," Thellen said. "Which is why it comforts accountants and priests alike."

"If the Archivum is just, why does it tell children they must burn towns, break vows, or love the wrong person?"

A wry smile cut across his weathered face. "Justice isn't gentleness, little one. It's balance. The Founders built a scale, not a cradle." He pointed toward Cael Dural. "The good balanced by the bad."

"So my fire is… compensation?" She spat the word over the rail.

A Wordbound drifted silently overhead, its mask emotionless. A flicker of red ink shimmered across its robes—scroll-skin-armor stitched into the seams. It neither turned nor paused.

"They always know."

"And if I disobey?"

"They won't stop you."

"But they'll record it?"

"No," Thellen said. "They'll revise the moment it happened to make it fit. That's their greatest cruelty. They won't fight you. They'll insist you meant to burn the city all along."

Rin pulled a folded scrap from her inner coat. It shimmered faintly in the wind. Her fragment. Her line.

"Do you know if any of it can be changed?"

"Some think so. Some try."

"And you?"

Thellen opened a small velvet pouch. Inside was a single shard—curved like a sliver of glass, dark as dried wine.

She stared. "Is that—?"

"Cinnavyr," he said softly. "Or so I was told. I've never dared test it. They say it only exists in the red ink of the Archivum. But a trader from the edge-fracts gave this to me in silence, in exchange for nothing but a question. I've kept it for years. I still don't know if it's real."

"What question did you give him?"

"I asked if he ever regretted obeying."

"What did he say?"

"He didn't. But he cried."

Rin reached a finger toward the shard and drew back. "Why don't you use it?"

"Because if it's false, I lose nothing. But if it's true, I might lose the only tether left keeping this world in its orbit."

She sat beside him.

"If fate is fixed… does anything we do matter?"

"Morality is the art of walking well—even when the path is already drawn."

"But if I'm going to do a terrible thing, what point is there in being kind now?"

"Because even in a fated world, how we treat each other is the only domain left truly ours."

He tapped his heart. "Your fragment says: 'You will cause a fire.' But it says nothing of your hands. Or your reason. Or your tears. The fire may come. But whether it scorches or sanctifies—that is your mark upon the world."

"So there's no escaping it. Just coloring it."

"Exactly. You are not a prisoner, Rin. You are a brushstroke."

She held the script again. The ink glimmered faintly under the first stars.

She whispered:

"You will call forth a fire no rain can quench."

"Let it be a hearth."

Thellen's eyes closed.

Far away, something stirred at the edge of the Spiral—an echo, a ripple in a place no cartographer dares name.

And above them, the Wordbound did not descend. Because the moment had not yet decided what it would become.