In Play

Every thread the party could pick up next · as of the top of session 8

Isa, after the grave

• Who: Isa Varga, Emil’s daughter. She lived through the grave fight on Haxami’s healing potion and is home. Nonne stayed the night to keep her safe; Trill left goodberries and flowers (session 8).
• If they go: she heard Jory’s men while she was held: the casks burn now. She avoids Miriam: she saw Tuck speak to Miriam after her father’s rite and thinks Miriam sold him. Dita’s rumour that Haxami forged a page in her father’s book reaches her by morning.
• If they don’t: open.
• Built: the session 8 sheet. Emil’s sealing-iron is hers to give at the end of the arc.

Losam

• Who: Losam Ferrante. He wants out from under Sai. He knew something was wrong at the warehouse and chose not to look.
• If they go: Haxami’s version against Dita’s, which has had two nights to land. Losam will pretend he has not talked to her (Jack, 2026-10-14). If Haxami makes him look, Losam pays him, takes the warehouse from Dita, and asks for one thing: the warehouse burned (Jack, 2026-11-01). Stopping the shipment and going to Kestrel are the party’s counter-offers. Any of the three brings the vent.
• If they don’t: open.
• Built: Losam’s page, the session 7 sheet, Losam’s one chance.

Trill knows about Haxami

• Who: Trill. On the night of the grave Dita came to Trill’s door, over tea told Trill that she and Haxami are part of the same organization and not to trust him, and gave Trill the Second Thought for Nonne. She did not name the organization. It is the Ophidian, and it is true of both. Only Trill knows (Jack, 2026-11-08).
• Why she said it: both at once. She likes Trill and Nonne and is warning them off him, and it is her strike at Haxami from inside the party (Jack, 2026-11-08).
• If they go: what Trill does with it is the player’s.
• If they don’t: open.
• Built: the session 8 recap. Her moment alone with Trill fired there.

Dita strikes back at Haxami

• Who: Dita. Haxami forged a page in Emil’s ledger and she caught it, he fired her in her own tavern, and he took 800 gp off her with the Inquisitor threat. She hits back, playful but dangerous, and never evil (Jack, 2026-10-14 and 2026-11-01). Telling Trill is one face of it (Trill knows, Jack, 2026-11-08).
• What she does: she calls the swindle. Before the party reach Losam she tells him the clerk he trusts forged a dead man’s book, and she tells Yusuf Kar, who cannot keep a secret for an hour, so the quay knows it by morning. The point is Isa: it is her father’s book, and it reaches her (Jack, 2026-11-01). This still runs alongside what she told Trill (Jack, 2026-11-08).
• What it costs: every Persuasion check Haxami makes against Losam is at disadvantage (Jack, 2026-11-01). Isa in Losam’s room is no longer advantage; she is the question in the scene.
• And a gift to Tam (Jack, 2026-11-01): the Lantern Band, Dita’s third bracelet. Whistle through it and it glows green, enough to read by. A trinket, not money: rich, cute, and a twelve-year-old cannot refuse it. Tam keeps running Haxami’s papers; that is the point. The bracelet is the message. Haxami knows her bracelets on sight, and he sees a small green light go down the quay at night. What she says when she puts it on him is Jack’s.
• If they don’t: nothing more from her. It is done, and it keeps working on its own. Haxami can get ahead of it by telling Losam himself, first; that is a choice at the table, not a rule.
• Built: the Losam night.

Nonne and Thor

• Who: Thor, Wat’s partner. He wants to bury what is left of Wat and help put Emil’s grave right.
• If they go: the Second Thought is no longer his to give: Dita gave it to Trill in session 8 (Jack, 2026-11-08). His thanks for the Cold Kiss is open.
• If they don’t: open.
• Built: the session 6 sheet, the session 7 sheet.

Miriam

• Who: Speaker Miriam Dol. She sent for the Inquisition and expects them to investigate. She came to the grave but had been drinking since the black pearl and was little help in the fight. She told Haxami she had lost her nerve and would try to stay sober (session 8).
• If they go: her offer to wake the Cold Kiss once, so a marked soul can speak, has not been used.
• If they don’t: open.
• Built: the session 7 sheet, the session 8 recap.

Tuck and Kestrel

• Who: Oswin Tuck, who threatened Miriam into silence, and Rosamund Kestrel, Sai’s factor, who knows what the casks carry and prices it. They want the route kept open.
• If they go: Kestrel offers double rent first and calls the casks contraband from the south. Pushed hard, she writes to her principal, and the week that takes runs out at the vent.
• If they don’t: Tuck comes with Kestrel’s writ to arrest the burners. That fight is built and has not run.
• Built: Kestrel’s page, the register fight.

Godwin

• Who: Piers Godwin, the Ophidian’s Handler, at the counting-house across the strait. He wants Haxami turned against Nonne. His unsigned notes reach Haxami in Tam’s papers. The first named no one, and Haxami does not know who it is about.
• If they go: Haxami wants to talk to him at the counting-house.
• Next session: the second note arrives in the papers (Jack, 2026-11-09). It is not “kill him”. It tells Haxami more about the man, or points at who he is. Its wording is Jack’s.
• Still open: Petra’s rumour about Nonne still needs a new way to reach Trill.
• Built: Story Beats, act three, the session 7 recap, Petra on the session 6 sheet.

The Inquisition

• Who: the Sanguine Inquisition. Miriam sent for them. They are delayed, but coming. Serrin is in the dreams.
• When they arrive: open.
• Built: Story Beats, act two, the Sanguine Inquisition, Serrin.

Jory and the Ophidian

• Who: Quiet Jory, and the Ophidian behind him. They want the Cold Kiss. The black pearl at Miriam’s door was the Ophidian’s calling card.
• Where he is: badly hurt, he swan-dived off the cliff at Emil’s grave. Nobody saw him land (session 8). He went over on 1 hit point. Before he jumped he said to Emil’s spirit: “You were supposed to die a little bit earlier. Long time ago and still. You obeyed us.” What he meant is open.
• If he lived: he is the hauler. He is the Sai man who carries the packet’s casks up to the vent in session 10, and the body at the vent’s mouth in session 11 is his, with the order from across the strait in his coat (Jack, 2026-11-01).
• If he died in the fall: the hauler is another knife and the body is a stranger’s.
• The raven: Soot. Went over the cliff after the Cold Kiss when Trill threw it; Trill got the Cold Kiss back. It crosses the strait either way.
• Kestrel: not shocked that her knife took the buyer’s orders. House Sai is decentralised, and she knows enough not to ask. She keeps hauling (Jack, 2026-11-01).
• Built: the grave fight, the session 8 recap.

Toto’s cousin

• Who: the cousin of Tomasi “Toto” Tousa, Trill’s friend from the Juhasa. A tinker with a shop by the quay who fixes Champ’s gig and made the brass in Toto’s blowgun. The reason Trill came to Onda. Owes Trill a debt for Toto’s life and is glad to pay it. The players build who they are (Jack, 2026-11-01).
• If they go: the shop, the morning after the grave. Bring the Cold Kiss and the cousin reads its iron: cast whole in no smith’s forge, bone-white and scarlet under the grip, Unåian rite-work. Free. It points at the Inquisition before Serrin ever arrives. If the burn road is taken, Champ’s gig is on this bench the night before.
• If they don’t: the cousin comes looking for Trill, because of the debt. The Long Crossing, or wherever Trill is. A line, not a scene.
• Built: the cousin’s page; the Cold Kiss’s origin is on the items page.

The vent above the town

• What: the act one climax Jack picked on 2026-10-04, shaped 2026-11-01. The Ophidian answers Losam breaking the route by burning the next packet’s casks at the vent above the town, where Onda can watch. That much burning calls something up: a newborn spirit forged from the burned souls, wearing their faces. The party fight it on the hillside. Core stat block: Fire Elemental reskin, with the cask souls as the second wave.
• The fuel is the next packet, due at Losam’s berth within days, whichever road the party take. Burn the warehouse and there is nowhere to land it. Stop the shipment and the party are holding the casks when Sai come for them. Go to Kestrel and her week runs out when it docks.
• Ends: they send it down; it walks into Onda; or they leave before it is lit. Whichever, Sai’s men who hauled the casks are dead, and what is left on them says the order came from across the strait.
• It is a dungeon (Jack, 2026-11-01). The vent is a place the party travel to and delve into, not a hillside they arrive at. Getting there takes time, and the delve can run more than one session. The thing forged from the burned souls is what waits at the bottom. The climax is a keyed site with its own page, not a scene on a sheet.
• Open: its name and look, the read-aloud, the site itself (how far, how deep, what is on the way down), which sessions (sketched as 10 and 11).
• Built: Losam’s one chance. Not on Story Beats yet; the quay line there is stale.

🌊 Fluid · what could happen next · what happened is on each session’s recap