Sister Quessarine

Sister Quessarine keeps a small temple of Nikros in the old quarter of Crownhold, in one of the poorer districts where the god of death, war, and knowledge draws few open worshippers. The building is no great construction; its only mark is the six-pointed star of three crossing lines cut into one wall — the same sign the raiders wore. Within, the stone holds an echo, and she is most often alone. A high elf in her middle years, robed in dark grey and bronze and wearing a storm-mark pendant, she is composed and unhurried, given to deliberate pauses, and she treats every grave subject with the care of a grief well kept. Hers is also an archive: a small collection of texts the Great Library never catalogued.

To Quessarine, Nikros is the keeper of a cycle rather than a tyrant of the grave: life begins in one place, ends in another, and begins again, and death is the turning of that wheel, not its end. She received a goblin, a devil, and a blood-marked stranger beneath her roof without a flicker of unease — all, she said, are of a nature welcome here. Grave things she handles slowly, as though each were a grief laid into her hands.

In a city where her god is unfashionable, Quessarine is careful and orthodox. Pressed on whether the raiders who wear Nikros's mark act in concert with her, she neither defended them nor disowned the god they claim — the gods are many-faced, she allowed, and the faithful are not bound to a single cause. Of these particular raiders she knew nothing, and said so plainly.

Something has stirred at the edge of her sense that she cannot yet read, and it unsettles her the more for that. She has marked, too, how anxious the Concordate has grown — guards in ever more quarters, talk of martial law, a weight settling over the faith orders. She does not pretend to know what gathers. She only feels it gathering.

Orsday · 23rd of Octen, 412 Concordis

Three of the heroes came to her door in the old quarter — Tar, the goblin Magmaw, and the blood-marked Barney — drawn by the Nikros mark upon her wall, twin to the one the raiders wore. She welcomed all three without comment on what they were, answered Tar's questions on the raiders honestly, and confessed the unease she had felt moving in the threadlight. When the talk turned to old temples raised after the Sundering, something settled in her: she had heard of only one such place, the Temple of the Mind, said to touch the dream, lying somewhere up among the Fingers where the maps fail and the dark gathers. She offered her prayers, her ear, and an open door. Tar made an offering as he left, and pressed Magmaw to make a larger one than the goblin would have chosen alone.