Session Recap
Back in Dawnwatch, Lady Ysabet authenticated the financial records from Highcourt while Voss compared the names attached to Valec’s payments with Guard assignments. Enough overlaps emerged for Queen Maelin to convene a closed council. The party entered expecting a political confrontation. Valec arrived composed, denied directing the payments personally, and challenged the reliability of evidence gathered by unsanctioned investigators. For several minutes the dispute remained procedural. Then signal bells sounded from three palace gates at once.
Guard units assigned to the council chamber turned on one another. Voss recognized the movement as coordinated rather than spontaneous and ordered the queen removed. Aster and Mira secured the corridor while Tomas identified colored lanterns in adjacent courtyards being used to direct rebel squads. Nyra led Maelin toward a hidden route documented in Seraphine’s correspondence. Corin remained with Voss after the captain was struck and badly wounded while holding the council doors.
The party split by necessity but kept communicating through runners and predetermined signals. Tomas reached an observation gallery where he could see the lantern network and began sending false instructions, redirecting one rebel unit away from the queen’s route. Mira reached a gatehouse whose archers had received contradictory commands under both Valec’s and Voss’s seals. She convinced them to hold position until they could visually confirm the queen, preventing the rebels from taking the western court.
Corin stabilized Voss after a wound that would have killed him without immediate healing. The captain could not continue command, leaving Marshal Iren Tor to gather loyal units. Aster caught sight of Valec moving through a gallery toward the old solar passages. He pursued and briefly cornered the Chancellor, but fighting elsewhere caused part of the gallery to collapse around servants and council clerks. Aster abandoned Valec to pull survivors from the debris.
Valec escaped carrying the royal seal from the council chamber. When Ysabet learned which seal was missing, she identified it as an authority token used in Seraphine-era infrastructure beneath the city. The surviving records named one mechanism specifically: the Sun Gate. Nyra connected the Gate to the hidden passages beneath the observatory, suggesting the conspiracy had been moving toward something under Dawnwatch since Caldus’s murder.
Maelin survived and appeared publicly before dawn, preventing Valec from claiming she had been killed or deposed. The coup therefore failed politically. It succeeded in other ways. The Guard was divided, Voss was incapacitated, Valec had escaped with an ancient access authority, and no one knew how many officers remained loyal to him. Maelin ordered the party to find the Sun Gate before Valec could use it. The session ended with Dawnwatch under emergency control and the investigation transformed into an open struggle for the capital.