A city remembers
what you bring back
Leave the walls. Risk the road. Return with something that matters.
The Veil
Nine shapes in the dark. Only one of them is real.
Nine figures step out of the dark, and they all move alike - quick, light, half-seen. One of them is the Veil. You will not know which until your blade finally touches it, and your blade will rarely touch it: nothing beyond the walls is harder to hit. But the Veil wears no iron and has no stomach for pain. The moment it is truly struck, it folds. Everything is in finding it.
One candle against the whole dark
Leave the walls
Past the last gate the lanterns stop. What light you carry is all the light there is, and every step into the dark spends a little more of it.
Risk the road
The deep ground pays best where you can see least. Out here wounds do not close, and a guttering wick decides how whole you can ever be again.
Return
Nothing is yours until the city holds it. Fall on the road and the dark keeps all you carried. Walk back through the gate, and the city remembers.
What waits past the gate
The dark is pushed back by many hands
No one holds the Reach alone. The delvers of Ombrenna pool timber, stone and iron to carry the road further into the dark and to raise camps where the next ones can rest. What one walker spends, every walker after them can use.
Build the roads
Every stretch laid past the road-end is ground the whole city can walk without burning a candle.
Raise the camps
A camp at the edge of the dark means the next walk starts deeper, and the walk home is shorter.
Reach the same deep
Each season the city pushes toward one shared goal, and every hand that carried a stone is counted.