Nonne — what came into him

Thread page · the source of the wild magic, and what the second self is

Settled, in one line

A Shifter by blood — one parent carried it, hidden from birth until the ship — walking the Path of Wild Magic, who will not rage because the magic is not his to steer and a second personality surfaces when it does: more aggressive, effectively a different person, the one who acted on the ship, and the keeper of everything Nonne lost that day. It does not sleep when he does. He washed up on Onda where Trill found him. That is the dossier. Everything below is mine.

The open question

Canon leaves Nonne two explicit blanks — where the wild magic comes from, and what the second self is. They are treated here as one question, because they fire on the same trigger and the ship is the only time we know they fired together.

The question is not answered here. That matters, because candidate C is under development and it is easy to mistake it for a resolution. C says the bite woke magic that was already in him. So it explains why the power fired that day — and leaves untouched the question of how it got into him in the first place. Canon’s he does not know where the wild magic comes from stands, and A, B, D and E all remain live answers to it.

Answered 2026-09-13. G answers both halves: who the second self is, and where the magic comes from. The paragraph above is kept for the record.

Candidate answers

A · Something rode him aboard the ship

A spirit got in. Jinjara already runs on spirits, rogue spirits, and the Ino.

Buys: the setting’s own machinery, no new cosmology; explains magic and second self with a single object, and eventually gives a who to meet.
Costs: leans on the Pact and the Wheel, and notes/back-pocket.md records that trade being cut twice for ballooning a regional story. Also converts a wild-magic story into a possession story.
Interaction with C: compatible — the bite could be the moment the passenger took hold rather than the moment magic woke.

B · The second self is older than he is

Not arrived — dormant. The magic is its, and he is the newer of the two.

Buys: the nastiest reading, and it makes canon literal: he does not know where the magic comes from because it was never his to know.
Costs: raises then who is Nonne, which is a great deal of weight to hang on a player character without their buy-in.
Interaction with C: strong. C already says the bite woke something pre-existing. B names what was waiting.

C · The magic is a wound — superseded 2026-09-08

Kept for the record. Jack replaced this with F: the bite is out, the survivor stays. Nothing below is live.

There is a man in Nonne’s past — either a long-standing friend or someone who had befriended him recently; which is not decided. He is a Shifter. Aboard the ship, he bit Nonne.

The bite did not give Nonne the magic. It woke what was already in him. The magic reacted to being bitten, and that reaction is the blackout — everything after it, including what he did to the people around him, is gone.

The man survived. He is the record that canon says exists: not a manifest and not a wreck, but a person. He knows what Nonne is, he knows what happened aboard that ship, and he is findable. Nonne does not know he is alive. Nobody does.

C1 · He wanted it

Nonne asked for the bite, or consented to it — for kinship, for a rite, for something he thought it would give him.

Buys: complicity instead of betrayal. The guilt is his own and he cannot put it on anyone, which is a harder and more interesting place to stand. It also separates him cleanly from Haxami, whose defining wound is being sold by someone he trusted.
Costs: needs a reason he wanted it, which is currently unwritten. Risks making the friend sympathetic enough that the reunion loses its edge.

C2 · He was attacked

The friend turned on him without warning.

Buys: immediate, legible, and it gives the survivor a motive to stay hidden.
Costs: this is Haxami’s shape a third time. Betrayal by someone trusted, on top of amnesia, on top of rescue by a stranger — see the standing risks. Taking C2 means accepting that echo deliberately and making the two feel different some other way.

D · The second self is what survived the ship — CANON, promoted 2026-08-13

The personality that emerges in rage is the one that acted; Nonne is the part that could not carry it, and the amnesia is the second self keeping it from him. Chosen. The dossier now carries it: the amnesia is custody, the aggression runs the same direction, it is aware of him, and it does not sleep when he does.

The cost recorded here still stands as a warning: D makes the gap easy to open, which spends the best thing on the page early. Guard the reveal — hook 6 (its first words go to somebody other than Nonne) remains deliberately unspent.
Interaction with C: compatible, and sharp: the second self would be keeping the memory of a friend’s bite specifically.
Interaction with B: B is not killed, but it now reads against D — if the second self is older than Nonne, it is also the one who acted, and B becomes a claim about what was waiting rather than a rival account of the ship.

E · There is no source

It is wild. The question is a trap, and the arc is accepting that no answer is coming.

Buys: honest to the subclass, refuses the mystery box, costs nothing to maintain.
Costs: nothing to reveal, which disappoints a table that has gone hunting.
Interaction with C: compatible and quietly good — C gives the ship a cause while the magic itself stays sourceless.

F · Piers Godwin saw him — CHOSEN for the ship, 2026-09-09

The man aboard was not a Shifter and had no designs on Nonne. Piers Godwin is an academic of the Academy of Tenai Kata travelling as a passenger, and across the crossing he and Nonne became friends. Then the chore boy was dragged up, and he stood close enough to see what came out of his friend. He did nothing to cause it. He watched. The wound Trill cannot read is what the second self did to a man who only stood too close.

He survived. He is the man in the forepeak in The Wreck, listening for its footsteps because he was terrified they would come back. Tell him it wasn’t him is the truth as he saw it — not Nonne, the thing in him — and it is the last kind thing he says. He is afraid of Nonne. He believes he is a murderer. He is right about what he saw and wrong about who did it, and he will go out of his way to have Nonne known as a killer. Once he has sworn, Serrin’s clerks will write him as Godwin the Witness, and the quay will pick it up.

He is the Ophidian’s Handler (Jack, 2026-10-12). He was on a route ship carrying the casks, Hester’s among them, because the route is his business; studying tides and currents is the work. He had no designs on Nonne before the crossing. After it, he has a vendetta. It is his own and off-book: the Collectors want Aldric’s soul, and a dead Nonne loses it. As the Handler he may have recognised Aldric for what he is, a torn soul the hook missed, which is another way to read tell him it wasn’t him. Where he went after port: the counting-house across the strait, where he holds the route’s records (the Game).

The notes (Jack, 2026-10-12). Godwin sends Haxami notes through Tam, plain hand, unsigned. The first, a line of Thieves’ Cant in Tam’s morning sheets, named no one, so Haxami does not know who it is about. The second is not kill him (Jack, 2026-11-09). It tells him more about the man, or points at who he is. Where the notes end up is open. Haxami does not know they come from the Handler. Port talk still reaches Trill as well, so the two hear it from different sides. The wording is Jack’s. See Haxami’s hook 7.

Where he takes it, decided: into Onda’s port talk first (hook 2, made hostile), and to Serrin and the Inquisition. A sworn witness who saw Nonne kill makes Serrin’s guilt-reading of his sleep look correct, which is act two material and the sharpest thing on this page: the one man who can corroborate the Inquisitor is the one man who knows it was not Nonne, and will not say so.

Buys: a personal antagonist for the one character who had none, and not a villain — a frightened man telling the truth as he saw it; a Marellius tie at no cost, since it is his school; and Serrin’s wrong reading gets a witness.
Costs: he must stay a man with a fear, not a faction, so he does not crowd the Ferrantes or the Collectors.
Interaction with D: exact. He saw the second self and calls it Nonne. The party’s argument that it was not is the argument Nonne has with himself.
Interaction with A, B, E: untouched. F says who saw the magic fire; it still says nothing about where it came from.

Open: where he went from the quay. He studies tides and currents (2026-10-11). Named 2026-09-09. Port talk starts in session 6, through Petra (Jack, 2026-10-05): Petra Vell tells Trill that a scholar is saying the man off the wreck killed men on that ship. She does not have his name. See the session 6 sheet.

G · His father rides him — DECIDED 2026-09-13, DM only

The second self is Aldric Ashby, Nonne’s father. The Ashbys saw the route’s northern landing. The Collector’s people branded Aldric and Hester with the Cold Kiss as they killed them, and staged the rock slide — cold open 23, with cold open 4 as the same afternoon from the boy’s end. Hester’s cask was ready: her soul went into it and was sent south on the route. No cask was ready for Aldric. His claimed soul went to the nearest thing that shared his blood, his son, instead of becoming an Ino.

The wild magic is two souls in one body. It fires when rage pulls Aldric forward, which is why Nonne cannot steer it. The Shifter blood is Nonne’s own, inherited from Aldric — in him since birth, as the dossier has it. It stayed hidden because it needs the rage to surface and he had never raged, so the ship is the first time it showed. The hey! on the ship was his voice, protecting a beaten boy. He keeps the day from Nonne because he killed for him.

He wants to protect his son and to reach the people who killed him and took Hester. He goes wild near the route’s casks. Godwin’s tell him it wasn’t him is literally true.

The sight — ruled 2026-09-17

In rage, Aldric is forward and sees the spirit world. Claimed souls are visible to him, casks included. Nothing new is needed for this: under the Cold Kiss rules he is himself a claimed soul with nowhere to go, and one sees the others. The more claimed souls are near him, the harder he is to pull back. Hester sealed in a cask is the top of that scale.

What Nonne keeps: nothing. Ruled 2026-09-17. The sight goes out with the rage. Outside it he sees no spirits at all, and that is the default — never narrate one to him at any other time. The exception is rare and the DM’s to offer, not the player’s to ask for: he may attempt a History check to recall something he saw while raging. It is an exception, not a standing ability.

The consequence is worth holding on to. He is in the one place in Onda where the truth is visible and he brings none of it back, so whatever he saw reaches him only if somebody else at the table tells him. That is hook 6’s shape again, and it is now the normal case rather than a single planned moment.

How it fires: flat. Ruled 2026-09-17. No action, no roll, no resource, nothing to spend. The rage is up, the claimed souls are visible. He pays for it on the way out instead, by keeping none of it.

Open: the range, and the DC for that History check. The Cold Kiss senses marked souls at 30 ft, which is there to borrow if you want the man and the iron on one number.

The ship was arranged — ruled 2026-09-17

Aunt Bea put Nonne on that boat on purpose. She is Aldric’s sister, the family hid the Shifter blood from Nonne and not from her, and she knew Hester’s cask was on that shipment. The errand to Ehn is real — the document exists and the contact exists — but it is not the reason he sails. Before the Shore records what Nonne knew, so nothing there contradicts this.

Open: how she knew the cask was on that manifest, and whether she knows Aldric is in her nephew.

What happened on the deck

Aldric was asleep until the chore boy was beaten. The boy is what brings him forward, which is how Before the Shore has it, and only then does he see what is in the hold. He tried to take Hester’s cask off the ship. He did not try to open it: bursting a cask destroys the soul in it. A man hauling cargo up out of a hold is what the clashing steel and the dead crewmen in canon are. The wreck took her before he was clear.

The machine is worth keeping in mind. If the boy does not steal food, Aldric never wakes, and Hester passes her husband and her son in the dark.

Where Hester is now

In that hull, on the reef below Onda, with the rest of the route’s casks. Trill has already climbed that ship and gone into that hold — see The Wreck, which is written and not yet run.

Open: whether Aldric knows she is still out there.

Nonne does not know. The player does not know. Before the Shore says rock slide, and Nonne keeps believing it. Hook 6 stands: Aldric’s first words as himself go to the party.

Payoff: speaking the truth of Aldric’s death over him lets him go on, as with Emil’s grave. Nonne would lose the rage-self. That is his choice.

Open: the name the party use for him (“Old Ash” is a placeholder) and which act the reveal lands in. Aunt Bea is answered in part — she knew enough to send him; see The ship was arranged.

Hooks

Each names where it could fire. A hook with no slot is a wish.

1 · Serrin in his sleep — the dream-walk

(Rewritten 2026-08-13 — the interview concept is dead; Serrin’s investigation happens in dreams, and every cold open is a shared memory he has read.) Nonne is the most exposed sleeper in Onda — his dream contains a blackout, a gap like Haxami’s, and against Nonne the guilt-reading is correct: Serrin has no way to tell the two gaps apart. But Nonne’s sleep is also the one place in the port where the visitor is not alone. The second self is awake in there — present in the memory as a figure that was not there in life, and it does not watch the memory. It watches the man at the edge. And it moves toward him. Serrin is safe in every sleep in Onda except this one, and he learns it before the party does. What he does about that — fear, fascination, or a note in a clean clerk’s hand — is his page’s business, not this one’s.

2 · The survivor surfaces — mid-campaign

Someone is asking after a man who came off that ship. Under F it is an accusation, arriving second-hand, in a port where questions travel: a man off a wreck is asking about a killer. The point is that Nonne learns he is findable, and named, before he learns by whom.

3 · He finds Nonne first

The inversion, and the better version if it can be afforded: the academic arrives on his own terms, knowing everything, while Nonne knows nothing. Under F he does not come to Nonne at all. He goes to Serrin, and Nonne meets him across an Inquisitor’s table.

4 · Refusing to rage costs someone — opportunistic

The pressure hook. A moment where his refusal is the reason somebody is hurt, and the table sees the cost of the thing he has been protecting them from. Do not engineer it twice.

5 · Trill has nothing to give him — anytime

Canon: she found a stranger and nothing more. The scene is Nonne asking the one person present at the end of the worst day of his life what she saw, and getting an honest, useless answer. Costs nothing and pays immediately.

6 · The second self speaks — to the party

Not to him, and not its first word — canon spent that on the ship (hey!, out of Nonne’s own mouth, heard by him and by the crew). This is the first time it speaks as itself, and it should be to somebody else, who then has to decide whether to tell him. That decision is worth more than the line itself.

What he'd trade for it

For the weave. Proposed, not confirmed — Jack has not ruled on this one.

He wants not to rage; that is stated. But the deeper price looks like knowing. He would rather not find out what he did. That is a live, playable cost, and it collides directly with Trill, who wants to know everything, and with Haxami, who reads people for a living. It also makes Nonne the object of other characters’ threads rather than the driver of his own — worth naming now rather than discovering at session four.

The sheet

Not recorded. Nonne’s level, AC, hit points, kit, and Shifter subrace are all unwritten — see the dossier’s Deliberately Unwritten. Paste his sheet here when it exists; do not put it on the canon page.

Promoted

What has moved off this page into canon or the spine, and when.

🌊 Fluid · thread page · speculative — the dossier is here