The Evolve Archive

A dead ship started calling six days ago. Somebody wanted it answered.

The tug Kestrel’s Promise and its found-family crew answer a distress beacon from the colony transport Amaranth Vale, dark in the Long Dark for six years. Someone woke the beacon days ago. Aboard, the crew finds a drive gutted on purpose, two hundred colonists asleep, a chief engineer who is one crewmember’s estranged mother, a survivor whose story keeps changing, and a sealed cargo vault holding a prototype that could terraform a world without a licence. A conspiracy wearing a rescue’s face wants it back quietly, and the crew has four sessions to decide what they owe to strangers, to each other, and to the truth.

A dead aunt’s mansion, a locked library, and a debt owed to something that predates the family name.

Eleanor Blackwood is dead: found at her desk in Nethermoor House, pen in hand, a letter unfinished. Her will leaves the house, its debts and its very particular household arrangements to relations she may have met once, or never, chosen with unsettling precision. She leaves no explanation for the locked library, the portrait gallery that is subtly and systematically wrong, or the groundskeeper who flinches whenever anyone mentions the well-house. In the starving winter of 1699 the family’s founder bought two centuries of prosperity from something older than the family name, and once a generation the account is settled with a willing signature that quietly unwrites its signer from the world. Eleanor was this cycle’s overseer. Her death has started a clock the heirs did not know was ticking, and a society of the town’s founding families means to see the ledger signed on schedule, by someone else’s daughter if not by a Blackwood.

A new crew takes one score too many from a foundry whose glass burns on the dead, and Ashgate starts collecting its due.

Cindermoor Works is the biggest foundry under the Lid, and two years ago its Boiler Seven blew: eleven workers died, Baron Rennick Vayle wept at the inquest, and the Works’ stormglass burned a third brighter the month after. An anonymous client wants the Baron’s real ledger, the one he keeps under his own floor. The dead of Boiler Seven, never salted and chained under the furnaces, want something too. Four sessions: the casing, the score, the comedown, and the night Ashgate calls every debt at once.

A washed-up wright, a stolen spellbook, and a derelict star-barge crewed entirely by the polite, patient dead.

A century ago the Concord’s wrights attempted the Great Working, one casting to carry every ship and soul to safety. It failed in the casting, and the Severance flung the Concord across space and time. The star-barge Providence never arrived: a refugee transport still mid-Working, drifting in the Gentle Shoal, crewed by one hundred and eleven people who have been dead for a hundred years and are still, politely, on shift. The hedge-wright Aldous Rime hires the party to recover the Doldrum Codex, stolen by his apprentice Sable Quinn, and her beacon leads aboard. Deck by deck the ship gives up three secrets: the crew died slowly, the wreck was no accident, and the sealed cargo hold is not ballast. The Codex’s last page is the one thing that could let the crew finish what they started, safely or catastrophically, and a scavenger guild with a very personal reason to want this wreck forgotten is already inbound.

A border town’s last free harvest, three warring claims to a buried fey crown, and a keep that remembers being betrayed.

Hollowmere is the last free harvest town before the land turns wrong. This season a grey blight spreads through its fields in widening rings, and the only story anyone agrees on is that it started the week rumours of a buried crown came back to the taverns. The crown is real. Four generations ago Lord Corin Ashwrack bargained with the fey lord Aurelic Thane, who loved Corin’s sister Maren, to bind Aurelic’s power into a crown of salt and iron shared between fey and mortal lines. At the rite Corin broke the bargain and trapped Aurelic alone; his garrison killed him before dawn. Now three claimants converge on the vault: a council that wants the crown’s power for the harvest, a free company that wants it for a distant duchess, and a hedge-witch who hears a grieving voice in her sleep and believes her bloodline owes it a debt. The vault’s only ward is an oath. What is inside is a person. What the party decides to do about him is Hollowmere’s last word on what happened here.

The rails are two miles from the Hungry Hill, and something under it has started to breathe.

Coldwater Territory, 1878. The Coldwater & Pacific is driving its line up the valley toward a bare blue-grey mountain the Ohanni call the One Who Sleeps Hungry, and as the rails come closer the river runs warm, calves are born wrong, compasses swing, and a revival preacher heals the sick with a stone that leaves a mark. An outlaw gang robs the railway and only the railway; the Ohanni hold a treaty line the company is about to cross; the director has known what is under the hill for a year. The party rides into the middle of it as payroll guards and must decide, across six sessions and a map of side tales, what the valley owes the dead, what the hill is owed, and who gets to drive the last spike.

Two generations after the sky was lit, a walled water works sends its walkers into the ash to find out who struck the match.

Sixty years after the Long Burn turned the country west of the river to glass, three hundred people live inside the walls of an old water-treatment plant they call the Hearth, because water still runs from its pipes. The pumps are failing, the walls are thin, and the Zone beyond holds everything the Hearth needs: copper on the pylons, seed under a drowned arcade, a relay on a hill, books under the ash. It also holds a rival settlement that is dying of thirst, a road-cult singing its way toward a second fire, and scavenger lords who own every machine that still runs. Every expedition brings home a find and a question, and every question points up the gorge to Halden Dam, where the Burn was lit, where the Hearth’s water comes from, and where a woman’s recorded voice is still saying sorry.

Four villages, four customs, four things the customs hold back, and one hand quietly letting them go.

In the farm hills above Port Ransome, four villages keep four customs that are repairs: reeds burnt at first frost, bread and milk on a threshold stone, a millwheel that never stops, a bell rung only for the dead. This year, one by one, the customs lapse, and something comes. Investigators working out of a reading room above a Gull Lane bookshop take one village at a time: a hook, three scenes, a night nobody wants. Between cases the reading room grows, and a slim grey file shows that the four lapses share a handwriting.

The Lid breaks over the loneliest tower in the estuary, and the boats cannot come back until dawn.

A crew rows out to Stormwatch Tower to lift a deed and a strike log before the Tower Syndicate can, sharing the boat with a Magistracy inspector, a Lamplighter with a long crate, and a Ferrymen’s post-warden. An hour after the boat leaves, the first true break in the Lid in ninety years opens over the rock: lightning every minute, the sea over the jetty, and the unsalted dead rising out of the flooding cellars. Each of the three strangers has an agenda that collides with the job, and the only way off the rock is the quarter-hour of still water when the eye passes over before dawn.

A moon-sized machine is waking under the town that lives on its skin, and it keeps asking one question.

Anchorfall is three hundred scavengers bolted to the hull of a derelict Concord lane-anchor the size of a moon. The town lives by cutting the Engine’s outer levels and selling what it finds, and by one rule: nobody goes below the third level. Now the lights inside are following some people, cutters are coming back calm and sleepless, a cult in the overgrown gardens is leading the wright-born deeper, and a professional crew on someone else’s money is cutting a shaft straight for the core. Six expeditions take the crew from the rumour board to the cradle at the Engine’s heart, where a loyal machine asks whether the lanes are open yet, and the answer decides whether Anchorfall keeps breathing.

Pressed in a night, captains by spring, and under the ring a drowned queen is asking for her crown back.

Press-ganged off the Tallowgate quays onto a pirate brig whose hands vanish on calm nights, the crew rise by deeds from swabs to mutineers to captains of their own ship in the Brinescatter Isles. Three fronts move around them: a navy commodore hunting something under the reefs, a smuggler queen buying the pirate council, and a sea-witch’s choir feeding the drowned kingdom under the Drowned Crown. The queen beneath the ring is waking, and whoever carries her crown into her hall decides whether the coast drowns.

The lanterns on the road are going out one by one, and something in the old mine is eating the light.

Along the Lantern Road through the Hearthmarch hills, every half-day stands a shrine whose flame never gutters, and the waystation at Dimmet Post has gone dark for the first time in living memory. Carts that stop there do not leave. Bandits called the Unlit are prying the living cores out of the shrines and carrying them into Greyhollow Mine, where a hungry young dragon eats the light and grows. Four heroes from the inn at Lanternwatch must clear the dark post, follow the stolen light across a small country of farms, shrines and tariff posts, and go down into the dwarf-sealed deep to decide whether the Lantern-Eater is slain, sealed or sent away.

The valley buries no one. The orchard is always in bloom. The lord would like to know what you have lost.

The mist over Gloamvale has not lifted in eighty years, and the party has just walked under it. Below the castle an orchard of pale trees bears fruit in every season, and the town of Sorrowbend eats it so it need not grieve its dead, who are not buried but planted. The lord who rules from the crag has not aged a day since he put his daughter in the ground and asked for her back. A fortune-teller at the bridge lays five bone cards that place a knife, a lamp, a bell, an ally and the place where it ends. The lord keeps a calendar. Ending the curse frees the valley and kills the man, and every year the fruit withheld comes due at once.

A drowned toll-keeper collects a new fare, and the village pays in the missing.

Travellers who cross Miredeep Bridge after dark have begun to vanish, and the fog on the water now carries a voice demanding its toll. Decades ago the village drowned a corrupt toll-keeper rather than pay him, and something under the bridge has been keeping a ledger ever since. The party must trace the disappearances, uncover the old crime, and decide how to settle a debt the dead refuse to forgive.