The episode appears to begin with the worst possible future.
Alyviel stands defiant in the Baroness’s throne room, smiling as she draws a porcelain mask from her bag, the symbol of rank of the Taimavar, the elven nationalist mercenary company that helped Emperor Rose rise to power during the Great War. The Taimavar burned cities, murdered elves, and have since been granted dangerous autonomy as Rosenhallian special forces. They answer not directly to the Lords’ Alliance, but to the Eldamari embassy of their fascist state. They are the people Rosenhall sends when it wants a dirty job done quietly.
But this future has not yet come to pass.
The image pulls back, revealing the party outside the collapsed ACE factory, watching the scene unfold through the Prophet’s crystal ball. The Prophet has seen what Alyviel is about to do and rushed into the Sapest to warn the party before the future can lock itself into place.
The party races to the Sentinel’s tower, arriving just as Cecile Addison and Alyviel emerge. Alyviel’s expression hardens the instant she sees them. She was not expecting the party to interrupt her grand reveal.
Behzad sees the porcelain mask and immediately points at her: “I don’t like that.”
The party starts pressing Alyviel. When was she going to tell them who she really was? Alyviel tries to defend herself, snapping that she is not a “goddamn blood elf,” but the party has already seen the future. She tries to regain control of the conversation, but the situation slips away from her. Furious, Alyviel teleports away, leaving Cecile and Baroness Liliana Sev alone with the party.
Cecile immediately declares that the Baroness is under arrest for high crimes against her people and the state.
Liliana pleads her case. She did not create ACE’s pact. By the time she inherited power from Benedict, the machinery was already in place. If she had tried to stop it, the Investor would have collected the souls of Azmar. She was trapped inside a system she inherited, forced to preserve a city built on a crime she could not undo.
The party believes her, or at least pities her enough to stop Cecile.
Cecile is outraged. To her, this is exactly the problem with adventurers. They claim to fight evil, but when confronted with a ruler whose government fed people to a demon, they suddenly want nuance. She argues that law and order must mean something, and that Azmar’s nobility cannot be allowed to decide for itself whether consequences apply.
Fable counters that the Lords’ Alliance bears responsibility too. The Sapest has been neglected, cornered, and denied the support it needs. Cecile fires back that every time Rosenhall steps into the Sapest, people attack them. When the Magearms went to Crackjaw to destroy the Golden Rat Syndicate, a known criminal enterprise, the party butchered Crown soldiers.
Fable argues that Crackjaw was not just criminals. There were civilians. Children.
Cecile, exasperated, does not see that as a meaningful distinction. To her, they were monsters. Children or not, they would have grown up into more Golden Rat raiders, killing and looting travelers on the road.
That is enough for Fable.
As a “monster” herself, she attacks.
The fight is swift and brutal. Cecile cannot gain momentum, with the Prophet counterspelling her magic and the party overwhelming her. One of Rosenhall’s highest-ranking officers is beaten to death in front of the Baroness.
The party does not need to threaten Liliana after that. They simply let the weight of what happened hang in the room. The message is clear: she will cut whatever support remains for ACE, rebuild the residential district, restore order, and face her people when the truth comes out. Whether they forgive her or hang her is not for the party to decide.
They leave Liliana in power, not absolved, but condemned to answer to Azmar itself.
Afterward, the party returns to the tavern to drink with the Prophet and celebrate saving the city. In a moment of drunken sentimentality, the Prophet wishes Vulmer were there, and accidentally casts his highest-level spell, summoning Vulmer from wherever he was and dropping him directly into the bar.
The party immediately witnesses the danger of the Prophet’s careless relationship with magic. Fable and Vulmer tear into him for using world-shaking power like a parlor trick. The Prophet shrugs it off, explaining that he has always been naturally gifted, and therefore has trouble understanding the difference between low-level and high-level magic.
Suddenly, several things make much more sense: his casual use of high-level domination on Ollie, his treatment of prophecies as trinkets, and his general habit of handling catastrophic magic like a toy.
Vulmer apologizes for his earlier coldness. As the Prophet suspected, Vulmer had been trying to keep the party away from the inner workings of their organization. He did not want new people dragged into their war, and he did not want the Prophet distracted from rebellion by another band of adventurers.
But now the party is involved. Their heels are dug in. So Vulmer decides it is time to bring them up to speed.
He congratulates them for saving Azmar, but also frames the situation more cynically: the Baroness is now effectively under their boot. The party grimaces at that language, especially because it sounds uncomfortably close to Alyviel’s plan. Vulmer sighs and explains that if they intend to win a war, they have to start somewhere. Azmar is politically vital, defensible, wealthy, and controls three vassal states, including Wolford, the northern city that protects the world’s largest diamond mine.
Vulmer had recently been in Wolford trying to negotiate with the clerics who govern the city, but had made little progress. Just as he was beginning to get somewhere, the Prophet’s accidental summoning spell pulled him away.
He suggests that Behzad may have better luck there. Wolford is governed by a council that includes clerics of Bahamut and Tiamat, with a cleric of Gruumsh currently present to help adjudicate and find common ground. The crisis is worsening: no miners have been sent into the depths for several days, and something has stopped diamond production entirely.
The timing is too suspicious to ignore.
The party sets its sights on Wolford. They will go north with Vulmer, find Malcolm, tell him that his father Hugo Monsterblade is alive, and investigate whatever has stopped the flow of diamonds, and with it, the flow of resurrection itself.