Previously…

Battered from Tymon’s fall and ambushed on the Sellen, the Ruinlords reached Salisgrad carrying the skull of a fallen High Councilor and the shattered Amulet of the Worldbreaker. The Black Gauntlet took notice.

Inside the warded halls of iron and crystal, the party faced more than questioning—they faced the dead. Through the Vox Eidolon, Damaris channeled the bitter voice of Voragon Drakon, revealing grim truths: unfulfilled prophecy, cursed relics, and the Faceless One still pulling strings.

Then the room cracked. A rift tore open. An Emberwrought Shade of Dahak surged forth. Bound by chains of scorched memory, it fought to silence the past. The Ruinlords answered in blood and soulfire—and won.

But victory was brief. A woman in red arrived. Authority overturned. The skull, the amulet, the party—all claimed in Prince Eli Voronov’s name.

What am I reading?

Want to know what happens when death speaks, dragons burn without fire, and princes play gods? Follow our Age of Worms Pathfinder 1e campaign right HERE, where memory is a weapon, prophecy is a noose, and no one walks free.

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23 Erastus (July), 4725

The Prince’s Summons

A blessed angel led the party from the interrogation chamber to a waiting carriage—black wood, gold trim, six midnight horses. As the reins cracked, the horses burst into flame, and the entire carriage levitated above the cobbles. It shot through Salisgrad, parting magical traffic like a blade through silk. Oathgar sniffed the air, caught the sharp tang of spilled liquor, and muttered a bitter curse for the waste. Cal’s eyes flared with magic sight. Everything in this city seemed to pulse with runic power. Even the horses were no ordinary beasts. Devil-born. Smoke-cloaked. Infernal.

At the palace, purple-and-black-clad guards escorted the party deeper into the prince’s domain. The halls grew more oppressive with each step. Portraits of Prince Eli Voronov stared down with demonic hands, flanked by statues of Asmodeus and black-iron braziers that never burned out. 

Audience with Eli Voronov

The throne room was vast and silent. Most of the party knelt. 

Alfie stood.

Oathgar offered only a nod. 

Prince Voronov sat upon a throne of stone, encircled by a ring of molten metal floating overhead and flanked by two blessed angels who did not blink. Behind him, a relief carved into the wall showed Asmodeus placing a crown upon his brow. A beautiful elven woman with silver hair and golden eyes watched them silently from behind the throne. Leylines converged beneath the prince’s seat. A nexus of power. A cage, or a conduit—Cal wasn’t sure. 

Voronov questioned them. They answered. Voragon Drakon’s skull had whispered secrets—the Ebon Triad, the artifacts, the resurrection of Kyuss. One relic destroyed. Two still in play. Cal gave them names: Lucius Blackthorn and Erisa Shadowveil. At the mention of Lucius, Voronov’s expression flickered. Recognition. Hate. The Demi-Cardinal of Egorian. Traitor. Asset. Maybe both. 

Declan sang for the prince—something loungey, something smooth. Voronov claimed the Ebon Traid were fools. They could not summon something that was already claimed by another. By Him. Malgorath was already in chains, and his hands belonged to the Prince. Still, the ritual could not be allowed to succeed and potentially free Malgorath from Voronov’s control. He might want his hands back, at the very least. Most inconvenient. The molten crown hovering overhead pulsed. A sudden psychic lash, unseen and unheard by the others, cracked the two who had failed to show the proper reverence to Prince Eli Voronov. Oathgar crumpled. Alfie, shielded by divine grace, stood unmoved. The prince stared, cold and final, and then dismissed them. 

Thexan’s Lab

Thexan Voronov—son of the prince—led them into a twisting warren of corridors until they emerged into a four-story laboratory. Magic warped the space. Constructs. Golems. Arcane diagrams and unfinished projects surrounded them. Oathgar noted dwarven rune-magic etched into the scaffolding. Alfie heard a woman’s voice coming from a bow on the wall. 

These were not a gift, Thexan told them. They were an investment. The Ruinlords were assets for Prince Voronov to use, and the prince wanted them strong. Each of them received an item – Declan, a headband attuned to charm and song. Oathgar, a belt that bolstered strength and presence. Tike, a pair of brutal rune-etched gauntlets. Cal, a cloak woven to resist magical assault. And Alfie… Alfie was handed Deathwhisper, a bow of living steel and dragon-scale patterning. The string hummed as he touched it. Alfie felt as if it knew his name. 

Thexan confirmed Damaris had survived the Vox-Eidolon. He then warned them—Salisgrad wasn’t safe for foreigners. The Crimson Glove hunted outsiders. The law protected only citizens, marked by ink burned into their left hands. Conflict meant death, unless you were lucky—or very fast. 

Arrival at Fellgate Tavern

The party was escorted to the Fellgate Tavern, where Kaelthar Vonn waited behind the bar. Scarred. Calm. Watching. The place was bigger on the inside, centered around a massive pit rimmed with glowing runes. “Don’t fall in,” Kaelthar said. “That’s the Undercity.” 

Cal remembered Kaelthar. Two decades ago, he emerged from the depths with the skull of a demon lord. That bought him the tavern. Now he watched the pit. Let others descend. Never followed. 

Their rooms had been paid for – yet another example of the prince’s good graces.

Alfie’s room, however, was not empty. Saint Alduin waited. 

Alduin’s Proposal

Steel gleamed beneath his cloak. His gaze cut through the silence. He spoke of Tymon – how it fell, how it could rise once again. The undead had begun to spread like rot. But there was a cure. Two gauntlets, part of the divine armor forged for Tynathria’s herald. Armor befitting Saint Alduin. One of those gauntlets, he could get on his own. The other lay in the north, with a lich named Calzurak. Reclaim the gauntlet, and he would cleanse Tymon. 

Saint Alduin came to them because he had to be sure they were strong enough. Killing the Silver Flight? That was the test. 

They had passed. 

Glimmerstone Curios

The party made their way to Glimmerstone Curios, nestled between a forge and a sausage stall. The shop’s wards were sloppy, its signage old. Cal cast an illusion of Clover, Damaris’ niece. Her image spoke. Damaris appeared and broke down when he saw her. 

Tike pinned the halfling against the wall. Damaris begged. Apologized. Muttered something about the bloodstone being a gift that had cursed him, and that he felt like he had “bugs in his brain.” Then the Crimson Glove kicked the door shut behind them, looking to do some business with the halfling. Four enforcers. No citizenship marks. No escape. 

Oathgar knocked one out with a “road beer” mug to the groin. 

Then came the rupture. 

The Faceless One’s Gift

Damaris convulsed. His jaw unhinged. 

A thick, bloody worm slithered from his throat, speaking in the voice of the Faceless One. Tendrils lashed out. Crimson Glove enforcers were instantly drained of their blood, their bodies liquefying and folding into one another. Flesh became horror. Damaris became something else. A red mass of eyes and mouths and mouths and mouths. 

The battle was chaos. 

Oathgar was nearly consumed, but Declan’s masterpiece performance gave him his freedom. Alfie healed. Cal unleashed fire. Potato bit. Tike’s fists shattered part of the creature’s mind. Then, he shattered the rest. Blood sprayed like steam from a cracked boiler. Damaris fell to the ground, detached from the creature. Dead? Hard to say.

But the worm, somehow still alive, spoke one last time: 

“Dragons don’t like it when their plans are foiled. Ilthane did not like having her carefully laid plan with the lizardfolk disrupted. She sniffed out the culprits, and guess where the trail led her?”

 Tike crushed it before it could say more.

Previously…

Battered from Tymon’s fall and haunted by sacrifice, the Ruinlords fled down the Sellen aboard the Sandfly. Captain Lorune, desperate and indebted, planned to sell his prized iron golem armor in Salisgrad to keep his ship afloat. Wounds festered, both old and new—Tike’s soul still scarred, Alfie’s healing stretched thin.

At dusk beneath a ruined bridge, shadows struck. Ebon Triad cultists ambushed the ship, joined by a worm-ridden Seer and the devil Arnyx—now branded with the Triad’s mark. He demanded Voragon Drakon’s head. He got steel and fire instead. Cal’s flames tore through the ambushers. Potato silenced a fleeing cultist. Alfie bled, Oathgar struck true, and Tike crushed the devil to ash.

By dawn, only questions remained—etched in worm-script and blood—as the Sandfly drifted toward Salisgrad.

What’s all this then?

Want to know what happens when the devil’s debts come due and the worm-prophets scream louder than the gods? Follow our Age of Worms Pathfinder 1e campaign right HERE, where fire answers prophecy, death isn’t final, and the river runs dark.

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23 Erastus (July), 4725 

Rain slicked the deck of the Sandfly as it drifted into Salisgrad’s harbor, the stormlight making the city’s magical runes pulse like veins beneath stone skin. The sky spat mist as two city watch and a pair of ironclad sentinels boarded the ship in silence, steel helms gleaming dull under cloudlight. Then came the Blessed Angel, wings of smoldering flame trailing smoke as she descended onto the gangplank without a word. 

Captain Joseph Lorune spoke first, eyes still tired and haunted. He admitted having fled Tymon as the city fell. The party mentioned their delivery for Bishop , Senior Officer of the Black Gauntlet, and interest shifted sharply. The name opened doors. The death of an Ebon Triad High Councilor—revealed, perhaps unintentionally, through Lorune—sealed their appointment with the Black Gauntlet. 

The Ruinlords were led through corridors of metal and warding runes to a chamber paneled in steel and veined with blue abjuration crystals, humming with restrained power. Bishop waited. Cold. Precise. He wanted to question the relic they carried: the skull of Voragon Drakon. When told of Dunner’s death, he nodded once and began arranging the retrieval of the body, belongings, and honors befitting one who had struck at the Triad’s core. 

What followed was not conversation. It wasn’t a ritual. It was an interrogation of the dead.

Damaris Glimmerstone—formerly known as Thistlefoot Glimmerstone—took the conduit’s seat beneath the arch of the Vox Eidolon, a device that blurred the lines between the arcane and the occult. Brass thorns pierced his skull as his soul and mind became one with the dead. Voragon’s voice returned, hollow and resentful, echoing through the halfling. From his withered skull, truths spilled like black water: prophecies still unfulfilled, the Triad’s unholy relics, and of the Faceless One—the architect threading the darkness between them. The Amulet of the Worldbreaker, shattered by the party, had crippled the Triad’s progress. The end goal was to use the three magic items possessed by the High Council once the prophecies were fulfilled. Now, one of the items was destroyed. The heroes rejoiced at potentially stopping the coming of the Ebon Triad’s Overgod known as Malgorath.

Then the rift opened, and the celebration died on the spot.

Ash boiled from the tear, and from it came the Emberwrought Shade of Dahak—a skeletal wyrm wreathed in fireless heat, its breath an entangling storm of iron chains and scorched memory torn from Voragon’s divine connection to the evil dragon god. Bishop sealed the chamber with a pulse of force, a protection protocol to keep the creature from escaping. 

It also meant the Ruinlords would be unable to retreat. Not that the option was ever on the table anyway. 

Declan’s voice rose like a battle hymn, magic and fate coiling in harmony. Alfie used his healing magic to undo the damage dealt by the shade while his owlbear Potato, wide-eyed but unyielding, darted through the fray. Cal, ever precise, whispered the syllables of Boneshatter and collapsed ribs with surgical cruelty. Oathgar drew blood, blade flashing through the smoke. Tike, bruised and growling, took the final steps, driving his fist into the Shade’s core. It exploded in soulfire. 

Silence. Then Bishop lowered the seal. 

Moments later, the door opened—no knock, no permission. A woman entered, skin pale, lips crimson, wrapped in a red negligee that defied armor and dared defiance. With a smile that wasn’t a smile, she informed Bishop that Prince Eli Voronov had summoned the party for a personal audience. Bishop started to protest, but he caught his tongue. The word of Prince Voronov was final. 

She took the skull. She took the broken Amulet. She took the party. 

And just like that, the balance shifted again.