The Pale Escort

The Hook

At the edge of Duskmere — a city drowned in a decades-old curse called the Wound, where anything pure of heart sickens and dies slower than everything else — a dying knight named Mother Cael Vane stops the party at the Beggar's Sump shrine. Wrapped in a filthy grey cloak beside her is a foal-sized unicorn, the last of her kind, coat dimmed with soot but still faintly luminous beneath the grime. Cael was bringing her to the Silvergate, a ring of standing stones on the city's far side that can open a path out of the Wound's reach — but the sickness she caught crossing the Weeping Quarter has caught up to her. She presses a stone token and a whispered warning into the party's hands: 'Her light gives you away. The sick will grab at her thinking she's a cure. The Guild will grab at her because she's worth a kingdom. And the city itself — the Wound — wants her most of all. Get her to the stones by the grey hour before dawn, or she dies here like everything good does.' Then Cael's grip goes slack.

🎭 The rest of this tale is the Dungeon Master's secret. You'll live it at the table.