Hina of Asclo back from looking for her sister. Found the body, died from a fall, but couldn’t recover. No plaguespawn activities.

Carolinus Redeye brought in a wagonload of debris from the dig at Gaston’s Fork. Some unidentified arcana that may be of interest.

And more, all in that vein. Gyre flipped through one after another, then tossed them aside.

He’d made the decision when he was eight years old. Lying in bed, skin slick with fever sweat, the gash where his left eye had been swollen and leaking pus. His father had cared for him. His mother, he’d learned later, hadn’t been able to look at him without weeping.

Even at eight, he’d understood what had happened and what had to be done. If the Twilight Order could do this—if they could reach into his quiet, peaceful farm, unbidden, and destroy his family’s happiness in an afternoon—then the Order could not be allowed to exist. It was that simple.

Only, of course, it wasn’t. People fought the Order—or the forces of the Republic, which amounted to the same thing—all the time. Bandits, rebels, smugglers, dhakim cultists. None of them amounted to anything, no more than mites on a warbird. How could they? The Auxiliaries were ordinary men, even the Legionaries were only soldiers kitted out in Chosen relics, but the centarchs were something else entirely. They had deiat behind them, the fire of creation, and nothing could stand against that. And the power was inborn—if you didn’t have it, no amount of wishing or training would ever let you wield a haken.

When he was twelve, he’d left home. He’d done what he had to do—been a thief, a bandit, a whore, a spy. Always working his way north, in the mountains, toward Deepfire. He’d come chasing a pair of rumors. The first was that in Deepfire, even after the failure of Kaidan Hiddenedge’s rebellion, there were people who stood up and fought back against the authority of the Republic. The second was that there were wonders still to be found in the tunnels under the Shattered Peaks, ruins so deep that even the Order had never cleaned them out, where the lost power of the ghouls still waited. The only power that had ever been able to stand up to deiat, the power to topple the Order itself.

He’d made the difficult journey through the mountains, and it had nearly killed him. The master of the caravan he’d joined had dumped him on Lynnia’s doorstep in a delirious fever. Once he’d recovered and gotten his bearings, it hadn’t taken long to discover that the first rumor was true enough. Yora’s crew was always in need of steady hands who were willing to take risks and do what was needed, and he’d done well.