Age of Ruin — Ashray
Ashray — Making Port
Varga’s warning carries the expedition from the Temple to the coast. Another conflict between Good and Evil is approaching, she says, with Evil at a disadvantage. Warlic wonders about the spells he developed, while Tara struggles to imagine her sister gaining the advantage over the Empire. Varga directs them toward the Voice in the Sea and the Champions invited to the coast by the Greenguard Crown.
Captain Rhubarb confirms that he carried Aria, her father, Galanoth and Artix to Ashray after the Mana Crisis as a favor to the Queen. He swore to keep their passage secret. Aria nevertheless asked for Tara and even offered him her allowance to sail back for her. Uneasy about the port himself, he was ready when Muusa told him where to find the new expedition.
Maya and Tara arrive nauseated from the voyage. Warlic and Lady Celestia have gone back to Swordhaven to investigate the Crown’s activities, a suspicion Maya finds difficult to express without sounding treasonous. Tara insists that good intentions should withstand scrutiny. The Hero offers an innocent possibility—a doctor treating the Champions in secret—before considering the worse alternative of Swordhaven monopolizing them to match Evil’s power.
They divide the work. Maya will research at an inn and correspond with the Lorekeepers, Warlic and Celestia, while the Hero and Tara search the village. Rhubarb keeps the Red Betty available for an emergency in Neso’s waters. He warns that the Mana Crisis has disturbed the ocean and that neighboring sailors are coming uncomfortably close to Greenguard.
Ashray — Uninvited Guests
After Loaded Resume, Tara’s five once-only tasks begin with Big ol’ Eyes. Eight Kitefin Shark Bait must be caught to clear a path for Maya. Their huge, unblinking eyes trouble Tara, and the creatures die soon after being netted. Rather than the easy fish-stick stop she imagined, Ashray presents animals behaving outside their ordinary habitat.
The fishermen resist questions and raise their gear against the uninvited. The next task, called Angry Angler in the cached account and Angler Anger in its captured native definition, asks for four tridents and conversations with Talis and the doctor on the dock. Tara reads fear rather than malice in the villagers: one opens a Shark Bait to display the tentacles in its belly, trying to frighten the visitors away.
Talis Mikaels recognizes the Hero as the brave outsider who helped Astravia’s survivors. Now he is the outsider, running Ashray’s Seaview Inn. He promises a room but asks that their stay remain secret because the village has orders against uninvited guests. Astravian refugees sought a home in Greenguard; one of their doctors negotiated aid with Victoria in return for settling here with her family.
His hospitality also answers an old failure. Talis says he once abandoned people who needed him and will not repeat it. He has quietly taken Mi and their family into his care without telling the other Astravians, acknowledging their harm alongside his own inaction. Miss Aina gave him the inn’s deed, taught him its management and ensured the refugees were comfortable before visiting her other inns.
The doctor is much less welcoming. She claims the Crown’s protection for Ashray, rejects the Hero’s recognition and threatens the local militia. Maya supplies a different perspective: the peninsula once housed Water Elves who disappeared during the Planar Conflicts, and its recent growth includes unusually generous shipments of grain and fruit. Celestia intends to question the noble organizing that supply.
Slimy Scavenger clears eight Ghostly Eels from the beach. Rhubarb associates them with mass drownings, yet Tara sees no wreck when she looks over the Red Betty’s side—only an unnerving drop into deeper water. Troubled Waters then clears eight Stagnant Water Elementals from strange rocks and brings a torn page to light. Its warning of trapped elves accompanies a faint song emanating from the rocks.
Ashray — A Sign from Below
The torn account describes weeks without sunlight in a place from which nothing seems able to escape. Food could last a year, longer with rationing, but silence and fear threaten the captives sooner. Children ask Aquella whether the intruders have gone and whether they may sing themselves to sleep. Whispers bring renewed blows against the barricades and a voice urging the writer to open the doors.
The writer says the Water Elves off Ashray have hidden since their ancestors’ time. Their secrecy now means no one knows to rescue them. Others begin to consider the enemy’s honeyed promises and look to the writer for guidance. This is the testimony of people trapped below, not proof that the surface expedition already knows where to find them.
A Delphyne Oracle has long predicted that the writer will become Champion of Water, seeing threads of fate that reach beyond creation’s first point. Now she repeats the promise to comfort herself, sometimes sobbing and apologizing. The writer refuses to blame her, judging their own decision to wait instead. With or without a Champion’s abilities, they resolve to act against the voices or send a sign to someone on the surface.
Washed Ink brings eight more repelled fishermen and a return to Maya. None of the Champions has been found. Tara cannot tell whether the elves described on the torn page are still in danger or already lost. At the inn she notices a man watching without blinking, and tries to hurry upstairs before he approaches.
The stranger introduces himself as Dr. Caesar Mostyma, an expert invited by Swordhaven. The Hero laughs at the name and nearly calls him Dage, while Tara and Maya remain ready to defend themselves. Maya recognizes the page’s kind as Water Elf writing, once stolen by Greenguard’s previous dynasty. Its authors’ disappearance may belong to the Planar Conflicts, but Mostyma insists that this particular page is far from ancient.
His damaged invitation offers a route onward. He is supposed to meet the Vice Head of Research but says a fire destroyed the necessary directions and description. If the Hero helps find that person and validates the papers, he will introduce them as his assistant at the research base. Tara still trusts Victoria but chooses to see the secret project herself. Maya stays at the inn as their contact and emergency alarm.
Ashray — Doctoring the Invitation
Mostyma’s five main tasks continue after Washed Ink. Fishy Hospitality uses five portions of Goopy Shark Meat to make the villagers feel indebted. He knows that Kitefin flesh becomes inedible after reaching the surface, but the fishermen accept it anyway. Their answers confirm Ashray as a meeting point for the Queen’s guests, who are escorted elsewhere by a researcher whose route even the villagers do not know.
Doctoring Papers clears eight eels and brings them to Dr. Ganx. She supplies the meeting’s time, place and details, then offers to vouch for Mostyma’s invitation. He proposes disposing of her once the forgery is finished. The Hero intervenes, and he grudgingly invokes a doctor’s duty to do no harm.
Ganx has her own arrangement in mind. Openly aligned with Chaos, she wants the Hero’s silence in exchange for leaving the base intact and sharing useful discoveries. She says the Champions are being treated there and regards the trip as a chance to obtain medicine. Her talk of a secluded leader whose wing burns are spreading, and a sister keeping him distracted, reveals a concern beneath the opportunism without establishing a cure.
Psychic Pollution gathers three Water Samples and examines the rubble near Ganx. Mostyma identifies broken sculptures of the Water Avatar, once worshiped locally, and Elementals carrying organic sediment from the deep sea. It resembles the material in the Shark Bait’s bellies but is fully dissolved, and he rules out ordinary plant or fish matter. The shared contamination links the shore’s separate disturbances.
At the meeting, the Swordhaven Doctor finds that the forged papers call the Hero both Mostyma’s assistant and his sibling. Family members are encouraged as emotional support, she admits, before abruptly deciding to welcome someone she clearly recognizes. Duck Dive boards a bright yellow duck-shaped submarine that Mostyma distrusts. Its captured completion account finds it sturdier than expected but not airtight; an altered Seafoam Elemental has slipped inside.
Faces in the Foam requires the creature’s defeat before it destroys their transport. The tentacles and stronger outside influence make it unlike the solitary, dainty Seafoam Elementals Mostyma describes. His explanation of seafoam—water churned while rich in dissolved organic matter—makes the monster’s appearance another warning about what lies beneath them.
Ashray — Familiar Faces
Inside the duck vessel, the Hero confronts the tentacled Elemental and notices it chewing its own appendages. It attempts an attack on their psyche, provoking a splitting headache. Mostyma watches with scientific interest and turns the earlier rule against the Hero: real doctors, he says, do no harm. The Hero presses the attack and knocks out the lights.
Tara steps between the creature and the operator, announcing that Warlic taught her chain lightning and that she needs practice. The operator urges flight instead. Then Tara sees her father: an apparent Alteon calls her body monstrously altered by Mana and promises to restore her. The vision attacks both her grief and her fear of what becoming Champion has done to her.
She rejects it. This cannot be fixed, she says, and her father would neither lie about it nor call her a monster. She orders the illusion not to put her own words into his mouth. Later she describes the intrusion as someone tugging chunks out of her brain; the vision felt real enough to obscure its impossibility. Experience with the Mask of Infamy’s bullying helped her recognize the danger.
Ganx joins the encounter with jokes about tentacles looking better purple rather than depressing blue. The Hero tells the others to stop “playing ping pong,” warning that they are going to crash. The operator reroutes every reserve to the engine and calls Sea Base Undine for an emergency docking port. Darkness and shouted alarm give way to a stabilized vessel with power restored.
Mostyma senses a barrier of arcane spells as old as the world. Ganx says it made their outfits slip, but both can manage the disruption. The dockside doctor’s concealment also breaks: the Hero recognizes Song, who is unimpressed by their reunion. She introduces herself as Sea Base Undine’s Vice Head Researcher, serving Queen Victoria and the greater good, then demands an explanation before she opens the submarine’s windows.
The Hero can only assemble the mounting questions—Champions, elves and the Voice—into a more alarming one: is Kathool down here? The journey has delivered them to a secret base and several familiar adversaries, while the source of the sea’s influence remains the next inquiry.
Ashray — The Safety of Secrecy
Song’s account confirms that something more than shoreline superstition is being concealed. Asked about the subject, she restricts access to herself and the head researcher, but says the Hero guessed correctly: the being is here, asleep. She claims the defenses repel its influence and dismisses the creature entering the duck as a fluke. Her confidence is a statement from the base’s leadership, not an independent demonstration that the danger is contained.
She describes a Crown-funded facility where experts can work safely in secret. Astravian technology, she says, made prolonged stays less dangerous and advanced its medicine. The villagers move supplies and keep the secret; many new arrivals are researchers’ family members. Fa and Mi are supposed to remain on the surface. Even admission to the Sunlight Reception requires protocols to convince her colleagues that she is the real Song rather than an illusion.
Mostyma now drops the pretense of being a human doctor before the Hero and insists that their bargain still stands. His account identifies the deeper purpose behind Dage’s disguise: spies traced Victoria’s spectral arrow to the base, and weapons that can sever a Legionnaire’s link threaten his rule. With the Alliance dissolved, the Legion and Nation are forbidden to seek the Hero’s aid. The supposedly chance meeting between a human doctor and an assistant lets him pursue the investigation anyway.
Tara remains protective of Victoria. She offers reasons a ruler might hide a valuable research facility from Evil or resentful nobles, without claiming to know her sister’s motives. She has already messaged Warlic with the spell he taught her and hopes depth will not interrupt communication. Song gives her a sweet after the psyche attack, but Tara’s resolve is harder on herself: having been unable to help in Astravia, she promises to study and work harder.
Ganx credits the family forgery to her own advice and Song’s sympathy, then resumes asking for a bargain of mutual silence and exchanged discoveries. The common destination has not made these travelers allies without conditions. Dage keeps his investigation separate, Ganx protects her pharmacy run, and the Hero must learn what the base is doing while relying on both of them.
Kalamari Kontamination is the optional, repeatable investigation after Faces in the Foam. Mostyma tests Song’s protective account by asking for seven Shark Fins, seven Ashray Blood Samples and one Seafoam Bubbles, yielding a Sur-gion Token. Swordhaven’s grain diet may stop the villagers eating contaminated fish, but his completion account finds another route: organic matter in the sea spray enters their skin pores. He predicts new limbs, leaving the cost of the coast’s apparent safety unresolved.