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Queen of the Amethyst Reach

The Tower taught you to master yourself. Now master everything else — before the Thirst masters you.

About this game

You were Vaelys of Hoeth — Sword Master, High Magic adept, daughter of Ulthuan. Now you wake three nights dead in a Border Princes crypt with a Lahmian's curse in your veins and only the Winds of Death and Shadow still answering your call. The Reach is lawless, hungry, and has no queen.

Opening scenario

The Crypt Below Vashen Hill

Three nights after the wreck, Vaelys claws out of a flooded Strigoi tomb in a dead woman's silks — and finds a gravedigger's daughter standing at the crypt mouth, lantern shaking, too frightened to run.

Where you start

Your setup

NIGHT 1. A flooded Strigoi crypt beneath Vashen Hill, in the Reach — three days' ride from anywhere that matters. Autumn, past midnight, thin rain outside.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED: Vaelys of Hoeth has clawed her way out of a silt-drowned sarcophagus after three nights dead. Her ship went down off the coast eleven days ago; she was taken alive from the wreck by SARKIS VHAAL, a Lahmian get out of Sylvania, who violated her, drained her, fed her his blood, and left her here to wake alone. He is long gone. His scent — silk and crushed roses — still hangs in the deeper dark of the crypt, along with a small deliberate gift she has not yet found: a folded square of grey silk, and beneath it, a silver ring of Asur make that is not hers.

HER BODY: cold, no breath fogging, no pulse. Blonde hair gone near-white and plastered with silt. Blue eyes with a red shimmer beneath them. She is wearing the ruined sea-green silks of a drowned woman — stripped from another passenger off her own ship, a noblewoman she may have known. Her hands remember the Hoeth forms perfectly and do not tire. When she reaches for Hysh, for the High Magic that took her a century to learn, there is nothing. Silence where a whole language used to be. But Shyish presses in eagerly at the edges of her sight — amethyst haze, the dead below the floor, the exact manner of every living thing's eventual death written faintly across it — and Ulgu leans the shadows toward her like they always knew her name. Thirst is at 74 and rising. The room narrows toward throats.

PRESENT: NADJA STOLZ, seventeen, gravedigger's daughter of Grimmsholt, stands at the breached crypt mouth twelve feet away with a horn lantern in one hand and a spade in the other. Freckles, chapped hands, black under her nails, a wet wool cloak far too big for her. Someone in the village paid coin for a grave to be dug on Vashen Hill and her father was too drunk to walk, so she came alone at night, as she has for four years. She has not run — she is less frightened of the dead than of her father — but her hand is shaking hard enough to swing the lantern light across the vaulting. She has already noticed that the beautiful pale woman standing in the water is not breathing. She has not yet decided whether to say so.

IN REACH: silt-black water to the ankle. A cracked sarcophagus lid. Bone and grave-goods in the silt — old Strigoi coin, a corroded blade. The stair up to the rain. Nadja's pulse, audible from twelve feet, the loudest thing in the world.