The party regroups at the tavern in Azmar, finally catching up with Vulmer after rescuing the Prophet from Crackjaw. By all rights, this should be the moment where the job ends cleanly: report success, collect payment, and decide what comes next.
Instead, Vulmer is colder than before.
He is standoffish, evasive, and surprisingly unhappy to see them. When the party tells him the job is done, he thanks them for their help but makes it clear he has no intention of paying them. The Prophet, as it turns out, had no real money to his name. Whatever reward Vulmer implied was either exaggerated, misunderstood, or simply a lie used to get desperate people moving.
The party is understandably stunned. They fought through Crackjaw, survived the Crown’s attack, rescued the Prophet, and exposed a conspiracy, only to be told that there is no payday waiting for them.
Vulmer advises them that it would probably be best for everyone if they simply returned to whatever lives they had before this all began. Then, with the flip of a card bearing the symbol of a door, he vanishes through magic, leaving the party behind in the tavern with nothing but unanswered questions and a growing sense that they were used.
Before they can fully process the betrayal, Alyviel suddenly reappears in a puff of Feywild mist.
She looks completely transformed. She smells of perfume, her face is made up, her nails are manicured and painted, her robes are freshly pressed, and she carries herself like some strange fae harlequin returning from a secret courtly performance. She clearly expects the party to be fascinated by where she went and what happened to her.
They are not.
Alyviel spends nearly an hour trying to bait the party into asking about her mysterious Feywild escapade, humblebragging and prodding them with variations of, “Aren’t you curious?” But the group has more urgent problems: they were stiffed by Vulmer, Azmar is under the thumb of ACE, Sand has leverage over the Baroness, and someone was burned alive in the Sapest.
Finally, Nys cuts through the performance and tells Alyviel, with affection but no patience, to shut up. No one cares about her field trip. There are more important matters at hand.
Nys then reveals what truly happened in the Baroness’s throne room. When Sand looked her in the eyes, he sent her a telepathic message: if she did not stay quiet and leave the city, she would end up burned alive in the Sapest — just like the corpse Hugo and Benedict found at the crossroads on the road to Azmar.
That threat changes the shape of the mystery.
The body at the crossroads was not just a grim warning from the desert. It may have been an execution. A message. A precedent. And if Sand knew enough to reference it directly, then ACE is almost certainly connected.
The party leaves Azmar’s wealthy marketplace and heads into the residential district, where the city’s glamour falls away. The homes are crumbling, the paint has been stripped by sandstorms, roofs are patched with tarps, livestock are penned behind rotting fences, and the only public feature is an old, weathered well.
At the edge of this neglected neighborhood stands a two-story ACE factory, its smokestacks rising over the poor district. Most disturbing are the upper-floor windows, all sealed with lead shutters.
Alyviel, still leaning into her Feywild harlequin persona, arranges a meeting with Jasper, founder and president of ACE Hardware, pretending to be an interested noble buyer. The plan is to gather information. Instead, she immediately gets into an argument about bows being superior to firearms while the rest of the party watches in pained silence.
Jasper tries to connect with her, explaining that ACE was born from tragedy. His parents were murdered by criminals, and he founded the company because he wished, as a child, that he had possessed the power to save them. He wanted to bring order to the Sapest so no family would suffer as his had. When he suggests Alyviel must understand because her parents were also murdered, she cuts him down by saying she is not nearly that childish.
The meeting nearly collapses, but Alyviel pivots. She claims she saw ACE’s bounties posted in the Sheriff’s office and reveals that she is actually a bounty hunter. Jasper explains that ACE has issued bounties against former employees who stole proprietary inventions and fled, hoping to sell them on the black market. He invites her to return in the morning in her adventuring gear to discuss terms.
While Alyviel is fumbling her way through the meeting, Nys sneaks upstairs and finds the truth behind the lead shutters: a blood-soaked factory floor. A man in rubber boots and a cigar complains about his work while feeding barrels into an infernal engine. The machine fills them with hearts and blood, which are then loaded onto a conveyor belt and fed into the smokestack machinery below, where constructs assemble ACE firearms.
The party does not yet know the full process, but the implication is horrifying: ACE’s Peacemakers are not just manufactured. They are fed.
Realizing the conspiracy is bigger than they can solve alone, Fable uses her totem to return the party to the Prophet’s purple demiplane, seeking his help against the bloody machine at the heart of Azmar.