The Wreck
Cold open 2 · Trill goes aboard the ship Nonne came off, some days after the shore, and finds one man alive on it
At a Glance
- Who’s in it
- Trill, playing their past self. Nonne, Haxami and Marellius are at the table and not in the scene — they watch it happen. Nonne is watching his own ship from outside it, and that is the reason this is a cold open and not a recap.
- When
- Some days after Trill found a stranger on the shore below Onda (cold open 12, which sits before this in time). The stranger is asleep in Trill’s care and has not said where he came from, because he does not know.
- What has to be true first
- Trill is working a trading boat on the routes around Onda. The boat sights a packet hung on the reef with nobody at the rail, and Trill is the one who goes across.
- The occasion
- Salvage. A drifting ship is money, and a trader looks. What Trill finds is what a fight leaves, casks in the hold, and a man in the forepeak who should be dead.
- Runs
- Five to ten minutes
- Boxes
- Four, numbered below.
- Rolls
- Four — two texture, two reach, which is the ceiling.
- Reveals
- That the ship is real, that it was carrying the route’s casks, and that a man walked off it alive. Trill has stood on Nonne’s worst day and never told him.
The one thing to know before running it
Trill does not put it together, and the scene never asks them to. A stranger washed up a few days ago; a ship is on the reef today. Onda has strangers and Onda has wrecks, and nothing on the deck says him. The connection belongs to the table, who can see both halves, and to Nonne’s player, who is watching the inside of the thing he cannot remember from the one angle that shows him nothing. Do not have Trill say his name aboard.
And the day itself stays held. Canon says the second self keeps what happened aboard. This scene is the aftermath, days late: it shows what a fight leaves and never who did it. If a player narrates what must have happened, that is theirs to think. Nothing here confirms it.
The opening
The opening line
You’re swimming.
Right away, to Trill: DC 10 Athletics — how well they swim. Then read box 1.
Read-aloud 1 — the packet on the reef
She is hung on the reef by the bow with her stern to the swell, a two-masted packet with her sails still bent on and nobody at the rail, and the trading boat hangs back past the break where it cannot follow, and you climb her strakes out of the swell. The deck is dry. It has had days of sun. There is a dark stain the length of the waist that the sun has not shifted, and a hatch cover lying in two pieces where nothing should have been able to put it, and the gulls, which will land on anything, are all on the far mast and none of them on this one.
Then, before Trill moves: read the deck. DC 12 Survival — on a success they can see which way it went. Not who. Which way.
Read this to Trill’s player. The other three are watching. Let the player say what a trader does first on a ship like this, and let them be right: they look for the cargo.
What happens
Beat one — the deck
The waist is where it happened. Roll Survival here, and on a success give Trill the shape of it without a single name in it: it started amidships, near the mainmast, in one place, and everything else on the deck runs away from that place. Marks on the planking that are not blade marks. A sword lying where a man dropped it rather than where he fell. Nobody aboard, and no bodies, and the sea has had days to take what went over.
Play the silence. The ship creaks and the swell lifts her stern and nothing else happens. A Spree raised in a jungle knows what a place sounds like when something has emptied it. This one sounds like that.
Beat two — the hold
The hatch cover is in two pieces; the hold is open to the sky. Roll Investigation as Trill goes down, then read the box.
Read-aloud 2 — the hold
The cargo is casks, and it has not moved: two tiers of them chocked and lashed the way a careful mate lashes a load, hooped in black iron, every head stamped with the same cooper’s mark. They are sealed and they are heavy and when you put your ear to one there is nothing to hear. Whatever happened on the deck did not come down here. The ladder is clean. The lashings are tight. It is the only part of this ship that looks like somebody meant it.
The casks are the route. Trill does not know that and does not need to. What matters in the scene is that a trader has just found two tiers of sealed cargo on an abandoned ship, and salvage law says it is theirs if they can get it off. Let the player want it. What they do about it is in Still open.
Beat three — the forepeak
Coming back up, Trill hears it: something in the forepeak, the little cabin under the bow where the cable is stowed, and it is not a gull. Roll Medicine when they find him, before the box.
Read-aloud 3 — the man in the forepeak
He has wedged himself in behind the anchor cable with a water cask that is nearly empty and he has been there, by the state of him, since it happened. He is awake. His eyes find you before the rest of him does anything, and they are the eyes of something that has been listening to a ship for days, waiting to hear a particular set of footsteps come back. What is wrong with him is not a cut. When he sees that you are not who he was listening for, he lets go of the cable, and says, very clearly, tell him it wasn’t him. Then he is out.
He does not say who him is. He does not say it again, and if Trill asks, he is not awake to answer. The line is the whole of what the scene gives, and Trill’s player carries it out of the memory without knowing who it is for. The table knows.
Do not describe the wound in detail. The Medicine roll says whether Trill notices it is not a blade’s work. It does not say what made it, and nothing on this page does.
Beat four — the close
Read-aloud 4 — back across the water
They get him down into the boat between two of you, and he does not wake for it. Behind you the packet stays where the reef has her, casks and all, with her sails still bent on and the gulls still keeping to the one mast. The crew are already talking about her as money. Nobody asks what happened aboard, because on this water a ship on a reef is a thing that happens, and the man in the bottom of the boat is breathing, and that is as much of the story as a boat’s crew needs. You are the only one who went below. You are the only one who went forward. You put your hand on the gunwale, and it is only then that you notice it is shaking.
That is the end of it. Trill comes back to Onda with a story about a wreck, a man who is not theirs to keep, and a line they cannot deliver because they do not know who it belongs to. The stranger is still asleep in their cot when they get home.
What’s rolled
Four, on the sheet in front of them — the character they have. No roll decides whether the ship is there, or whether the man is alive. It is. He is.
| Who & what | DC | Success carries | Failure carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trill — Athletics the opening line |
DC 10 | They come up out of the break and onto her strakes as though they were born to it, and the boat is still a long way back. If it carries: a Dream Inspiration die. | The reef opens the side of their leg, and they come up her side bleeding into the sea. If it carries: 1d4 damage on waking, and scrapes down the side of the leg in the pattern coral leaves. They never go away. |
| Trill — Survival beat one, the deck |
DC 12 | The shape of it: one place amidships, and everything running away from it. Trill knows this was not a boarding and not a mutiny. It was one thing, in one place. | A fight, and the sea took the rest. Trill reads it as pirates and files it, and the deck stays a deck. |
| Trill — Investigation the first reach, in the hold |
DC 12 | The mark comes out with them. The cooper’s stamp on every head, and the black iron of the hoops. The day they see that mark on a cask in Onda, Trill is the one at the table who has seen two tiers of it on a reef. | Casks, sealed, heavy, worth money. The mark was there and went unremarked. Serrin, who has read this memory, has seen it. Trill has not. |
| Trill — Medicine the second reach, in the forepeak |
DC 13 | Trill knows the wound is not a blade’s. Not a cut, not a burn, nothing a crew carries. They do not know what it is, and they know that. It stays with them, and it is the same thing they will one day see on other people. | A hurt man, days without water. Trill treats what they can see and never wonders what made it. The man himself knows, and he is the only one who does. |
Two reaches is the ceiling, and this scene spends both. The Investigation roll ties the wreck to the route in Trill’s head or in Serrin’s. The Medicine roll decides whether Trill has a reason, later, to look at Nonne differently.
What it reveals
That the ship is real. Canon says a record of that day exists and can be found, and leaves its form open. This scene is the record: a packet on a reef, the marks of one thing in one place, and casks in her hold. Nonne’s player sees the outside of the day the second self keeps from him, and sees that it was carrying the route’s casks, which nobody in the fiction can know yet.
That a man walked off it alive. He was aboard, he hid from something, and he waited days for a particular set of footsteps. He has one thing to say and he says it to the wrong person. Where he went after the boat made port is not decided, and the scene does not follow him.
And that Trill has stood on Nonne’s worst day and never told him. Not out of cruelty. They did not know it was his, and by the time they might have guessed, he was a friend, and it was a wreck. The table now holds a thing Trill’s character does not know they are holding.
Behind the screen
The casks are Emil’s, or the run before his: the mark is the one on the cask the party already carry, and the hoops are Ferrante iron. The packet was on the route and had called at Onda; Nonne’s errand to Ehn put him on a boat that was carrying the thing act one is about. The man in the forepeak is decided (2026-09-09): Piers Godwin, a Zorah academic travelling as a passenger, who became Nonne’s friend on the crossing and then watched what came out of him. He did nothing to cause it. The wound Trill cannot read is what the second self did to a man who only stood too close, and the footsteps he was listening for were its, because he was terrified they would come back. Tell him it wasn’t him is the truth as he saw it — it was not Nonne, it was the thing in him — and it is the last kind thing he will say. He is afraid of Nonne, he believes he is a murderer, and he will see that Onda and the Inquisition believe it too. The crossing is cold open 20, Passage; the rest is on the thread page. Nothing in the boxes above changes to run it.
Still open
Decide before you run it — none of these are invented here
What Trill does about the casks. Salvage says they are the boat’s. If the crew take them, two tiers of the route’s cargo came into Onda on a trader’s boat, and somebody bought them. If they leave them, the packet is still on the reef with her hold full, and that is a place the party can go. Both are good. Pick one before the scene, because the player will ask.
Where the man went. He is in the boat when it makes port and gone by the time anyone asks. Handed to the Gendarme, walked off the quay, taken by somebody with a reason to want him. The thread page has hooks for him; this scene only needs him to have left.
Whether Trill ever tells Nonne. Not in the scene. Whether the player chooses to, later, is the scene’s best consequence, and it should be theirs.
The ship’s name and the boat Trill was working. One line each, if the player wants them. Neither needs to be interesting.
The canon line. Settled: Nonne’s dossier now fixes the record as a wreck and a survivor, both (2026-09-08). Nothing in this scene is ahead of canon any more.