The old gods built the house and left. The new gods grew up in the house. They know which floorboards creak and where the roof leaks. Whether that makes them better landlords or just more dangerous ones remains to be seen. - overheard in a tavern in Asylum, Year 47 of the New Reckoning
Fifty years have passed since the Confrontation, and the world is still working out what that means. The empires are renamed. The gods who keep the world running once carried mortal names half the city remembers. Asylum endures as it always has - chaotic, ungovernable, and alive.
What follows is the present-day record: each arc of After Asylum: Hubris as it unfolds, with the recovered materials and the Loremaster's notes for it. New arcs will be added as the chronicle continues.
Fifty years have passed since the Seal Bearers defeated the Great Devastation at the Confrontation of the Kraken. The old gods are gone, and the new gods, once mortal heroes, now walk among the people of Aevum. On the island city of Asylum, midway between Solorien and Tenebris, the Festival of Revelation has begun: a day for exposed lies, hard truths, public confessions, confrontation, and debts of honesty finally paid. In the Docks, beneath the lanternlight and noise of the infamous Harlot’s Triumph, five figures gathered around an oval table at the invitation of Cirrolius Skye, a scrappy halfling with a mysterious job and even more mysterious client.
There was Coal, an Aasimar laborer from the sugarcane bayous of the Southern Federation. There was Alaric Voss, retired Port Authority official, scholar, wizard, and late-blooming servant of Vitana. There was Arvo Worthington III, a sixteen-year-old bard raised in the shadow of the Harlot’s Triumph, surviving by charm, and lies well enough to become the truth. There was 1RONW-O0D, a Warforged druid following the strange heartbeat of the living world through the streets of Asylum. And there was Jorda LittleDream, changeling storyteller who spent years reading adventures to children before stepping into one of her own.
Cirrolius hired the group to recover a series of research journals, written by one Alistair Greenfast. Their destination was Sailor’s Folly, a treacherous graveyard of wrecks, reef, and broken hulls. After a night of revelry, suspicion, first impressions, and uneasy fellowship, the party took the rowboat Cirrolius had arranged and made their way toward the Folly. The place fought them at every step: rotten planks, hidden pits, open gaps between shattered ships, and a wilderness that seemed almost personally opposed to their passage.
Their first discovery came within the wreck of the Amber Crown, its ruined hull transformed into a makeshift research base and claimed by a massive hive of bees. Rather than burn them out or force a fight, 1RONW-O0D reached toward the living world and, through the bee language of interpretive dance, managed to communicate with Barry, the hive’s guard, and secure permission to enter the hive from Queen Beatrice herself. With Arvo’s encouragement, Jorda’s guidance, and Alaric’s careful search, the party recovered the first of the Greenfast Research Journals, wrapped safely in oilskin beneath a film of wax.
Inside, Greenfast wrote of the Lodestone: a living ship of vine-threaded wood, rustless metal, and impossible origin, once tied to the legendary pirate Jon Sixfingers and later to Liam WindChylde, now worshiped as Vitana. Greenfast believed the ship did not merely drift through history. It had purpose. It was going somewhere. Carrying that revelation with them, the party pushed deeper into the Folly and reached the wreck of the Pale Sister, only to find another crew already aboard: Magpie Delacroix and her companions, sailors under the legendary privateer Thaddeus Strongarm. For a brief moment, tense introductions held peace between the two groups. Then a halfling in an enormous hat burst up from belowdecks, a parrot in a smaller matching hat on his shoulder, and an oilskin-wrapped journal clutched in his hands.
“Found it!” they cried.
When last this tale drew breath, our heroes had explored deep in the jungle of Sailor’s Folly, knee-deep in the ribs of a dead ship called the Pale Sister. They were not the only scavengers among her bones. Across the wreck waited the crew of the privateer Thaddeus Strongarm, fronted by the charming Magpie Delacroix. In the halfling Rodrigo’s hands, his parrot of the same name on his shoulder, lay the prize: one of four research journals penned by the lost scholar Alistair Greenfast.
For one held breath, it seemed words might win the day. Then Arvo Worthington III, golden of tongue and ever certain of his own legend, loosed a lance of sparkling violet light, and Magpie and her dwarven companion Barnacle Pete dropped where they stood into enchanted sleep.
What followed was no contest. Strongarm’s people wanted the journal, yes, but not at the expense of their crew. When the heroes hammered poor Rodrigo into the dirt, his crew leveled their pistols and named their terms: take the journal, leave the halfling, let us go. So they went, but not before Coal, quick to mischief, plucked the hat clean from Magpie’s head. The look they traded sat between fury and perhaps something else—the kind poets like to remember.
Deeper into the green they pressed. Jorda, whose knowledge of the green and growing world had heretofore been primarily in books, marked a reptilian hunter in the underbrush, and the band slipped past untouched to the Gilded Eel. The wreck’s bow heaved skyward, its stern drowned in rainwater and ringed in great blue blossoms. Beautiful, and merciless. The flowers’ sweet, heavy scent took the heroes one by one: Jorda by the hull, Coal mid-carving, Arvo in the mud. Only 1RONW-O0D, who needed no breath, stood untouched, hauling Coal back to waking while old Alaric Voss, ever the keeper of his young charge, shook Arvo from the dream.
They woke into nightmare. A serpent thirty feet long, grown fat on its quiet pact with the flowers, erupted from the flooded hold and sank its fangs into Jorda. Alaric’s warhammer rang against its scaled flank, and Coal’s farmer’s hoe carved a long red ruin down its side. But it was Jorda, the one whose blood had spilled first, who ended it: she took the shape of a great venomous serpent and tore the beast’s jaw clean from its skull.
In the captain’s drowned cabin waited their reward: a wax-sealed tin and a second research journal within. Coal, for reasons of his own, pocketed a fistful of the blue seeds before they left. The shape of the journals’ narrative rose into view at last: the Lodestone is no mere prize, but a ship that hungers for a captain, bound to a purpose the heavens have not yet named.
A short respite, rain murmuring on blue petals, and then the path to the Cormorant’s Rest. Upon it they met two travelers, northern by their tongues, an elf and a human in ranger’s leathers, who gave the names Vance and Jerik and a tale of simple treasure hunting. But a liar must keep faith with his own lies, and these two could not. Coal saw the seams at once. The parties parted in peace, while a hawk of 1RONW-O0D’s calling slipped away to follow.
The Cormorant’s Rest was the most devoured of the wrecks, so wound in vine and canopy it rose from afar like a green hill crowned with masts. Across it nested a clamoring colony of seabirds, a living alarm. Heedless of their shrieking, Coal set his axe to a tree grown up through the hull, and the sound woke a sleeping thing. Up rose a corrupted mechanical guardian, long severed from its master and long since mad, rebuilt from salvaged timber and iron, half ship and half island now. A dark mirror of 1RONW-O0D it was, and like a mirror it answered: one blow, another, and the mechanical druid fell senseless. Alaric, leaning on the wisdom of his years, hauled himself aboard, pried the control amulet from a dead man’s shriveled throat, and reached for the creature’s fury with a word of command. But that word was eaten by rust, and his will alone could not still it.
And there, beneath the rising wrath of the guardian, we hold the line.