Fade in.

Wind stirs the clouds.

A lone bird veers from the thermals — startled.

Then the camera drops.

From a sea of silver sky, we dive through mist and sunbreak. Below, Sharn sprawls like a vertical dream — towers laced with bridges, airships drifting like jellyfish between steel and stone. Glyphs crackle in the air. Students spar. Professors lecture mid-flight. The name “Velas, Rina – Saltmarsh” flutters past on parchment as the wind pulls us east.

Across plains, mountains, jungle.

Through ruin and regrowth.

To the swamp-tangled edge of the world.

Saltmarsh.

Where memory coils like smoke, and something old sleeps beneath the mud.

Rumours in the Mist

As the Sea Ghost limps back toward port, blood on her decks and smoke in her sails, she carries more than prisoners. She carries answers.

In the brig, the Morgrave Five find Bertha, a six-and-a-half-foot tiefling with infernal blood and rage coiled like a spring. Once a field agent. Now a caged secret. Not for long.

Freed, Bertha shares what she knows:

• The Echo vanished six months ago. She came to Saltmarsh to find it.

• Her alias — Rina Velas — was meant to signal Kalen Voss, another agent.

• They were captured by smugglers tied to the Archimedes Estate, but Kalen escaped to seek aid.

• A hidden agent of House Kundarak, Ivar “Stonehand” Brannik, is somewhere in town.

• The smugglers were trading weapons for dragonshards with Cold Sun tribes — but the pirates found a new source, and it frightens them.

• Foul Frithoff believed the site to be cursed, haunted. “Experts” were being summoned. Priests, maybe. Or worse.

But The Echo has been spotted — adrift. Still Water, they called the place. Where the river dies into the sea.

Justice (and Possibly War Crimes)

With the pirates subdued and a ledger pointing to Still Water, the party reclaims the Sea Ghost as their own. Overhaul takes command with engineering glee. A crew is mustered — 18 strong. The Governor, perhaps reluctantly, agrees.

Two pirates are spared Bertha’s wrath — thanks to Roto, who chooses mercy and hands them over with a promise of work and redemption. It may have been a war crime. Or it may have been justice. Saltmarsh will decide.

Gift of the Emberwake

At the Archimedes Estate, a package waits.

Bertha unwraps it: a great axe, not forged but remembered into being. The voice of a fallen celestial whispers to her — not command, but recognition. The blade is called Ashfang, and it knows her.

“This is not redemption. It is permission.”

The fire within her — sacred, wild, righteous — finds form. And the storm around her finally meets a name.

Into the Fog

With new purpose and a ship under their command, the Morgrave Six set out for Still Water.

Fog closes around the Sea Ghost like breath. Hours pass in grey silence. Then — at sunset — they see it.

The Echo, listing in the waves, hull broken, mast cracked.

Empty. Silent.

A ghost of a ship.

And yet… in the captain’s quarters… a blue light moves.

The Captain’s Curse

They cross by longboat. Quiet. Tense. Even the chair comes with them.

Bertha leads. Roto scouts. And then — the captain’s cabin.

Inside: a ghost. A looping memory. A captain placing a chest, speaking to someone not there. Again. Again.

Roto, ever curious, reaches for the chest. His fingers brush it—

The ghost screams.

Reality twists.

The horror is real, and it burns its shape into their minds. Most flinch. Bertha falters. Roto and M freeze.

But Overhaul — calm, precise, heroic — reaches out and casts Heroism on Bertha, reigniting her fury with a spark of arcane clarity.

“Not today.”

The fight is brutal. The ghost lashes out with rage and regret. M unleashes arcane artillery. Roto regains his courage, aided by Overhauls Heroism (and possibly being asked for a borrowed cloak). Bertha, teeth bared, cuts through the past with Ashfang, fury blazing.

When the ghost finally fades, the cabin stills. The silence deepens.

And then the mist returns.

The Isle That Waits

The fog closes.

The air changes.

They sit — not in a cabin, but a boat. Ancient. Unfamiliar.

Their clothes are aged. Their weapons worn. Something has shifted.

They land on a black sand shore veined with bone-coral. The sky is purple and still. There is no sun.

Only one moon.

And it is watching.

A lighthouse rises ahead, cracked and pulsing with sickly green light.

Behind them, the mist seals shut.

The Brinewretched Appear

Laughter.

Three women step from the fog — beautiful, alien, wrong. They speak like waves and memory. Not to the party, but around them.

Yet every word is a hook.

They offer a service. A calling. A chance.

They speak of tides and knives. Of debts and breath. Of the Saltmother.

They give a coin — a gift, not a bargain. Not yet.

And then they vanish.

But the shore does not stay quiet.

The Drowned Choir

The coin is thrown away. The water answers.

A bell rings below the tide.

Pressure drops.

And the drowned rise.

A wight and three ghouls, remnants of those who came before, seeking what should never be found.

The Morgrave Six rise to meet them.

• Bertha, with Ashfang, tears into the undead like a storm given form.

• Overhaul is everywhere — calling plays, casting spells, keeping the line.

• Chair moves like a shadow at the fulcrum of need — just where he is needed most.

• Roto is a blur of fists and fury, gore-spattered and unrelenting.

• M, cold as fire, rains magic down like judgement from a far and silent god.

They hold.

They endure.

They win.

And as the last of the dead falls, silence returns. The inlet goes still.

And once again — the Brinewretched return.

“Well done. You’ve swept the causeway clean.”

“Now the bargain may be spoken.”

“Come. Come to the place where her breath lingers still.”

They lead the party to the base of the broken lighthouse.

And something behind that cracked stone wall…

is waiting.