Cold Thunder: Castle Eblana

Castle Eblana — Guests of Queen Iona

The hostages reach Skye to a meal that is itself a warning. Lieber serves roasted Bananach raven, a bird Celestia’s Draconic acquaintances refuse to eat because it is sacred to the land. Iona dismisses the value of a belief she considers untrue. Introduced as Queen Iona Lothian, she calls the arrival of the Hero and Dragon Priestess a happier surprise than the Queen she expected. Their reminder that they were kidnapped does not disturb her claim to be offering an honest conversation.

Iona knows about Undine, the Ashray and Sparagmos. Iseul and Indradeep stand with her, confirming that the spies’ work served Skye’s crown. She describes a land abandoned by the Plane of Energy and still suffering starvation and disease after Duncan’s invasion. The Hero distinguishes that king from Victoria, but Iona asks how anyone can trust Greenguard after the Ashray’s fate. At least five Elemental Champions born there look to her like preparation for world conquest. The Hero calls that a leap in reasoning, yet cannot promise either the weapon’s destruction or kindness toward every Elf. During the appeal, Iona takes hold of the Hero’s hand.

The Queen asks them to come to her capital, where other Champions are waiting. Together they could force Victoria to attend, return what Greenguard took and perhaps destroy Sparagmos. The Hero and Celestia postpone an answer, then privately agree that something is missing from this apparently truthful account. They find Felix Taylor in the room to which Lieber has led them. His first question is whether the door is locked. It is not, and there are no guards outside. Once he learns that they too are hostages, he urges immediate escape. The convenient opening may be a trap, but he will not wait to find out.

Castle Eblana — The war behind the welcome

Away from her guests, Iona gives Iseul orders that expose the purpose her appeal concealed. She wants Greenguard’s forces lured through Eblana and Loughshine and both towns burned with no survivors. She calls the inhabitants remnants of the rebellion. Their deaths can be blamed on Greenguard, unite her “real subjects” and destroy the hostages’ trust in Victoria. Iseul offers to force the guests into a carriage, but Iona treats Lieber’s opinion as beneath notice despite having promoted him for his useful abilities. Courtesy to valuable prisoners and contempt for disposable subjects are parts of the same policy.

Iseul plans to leave Indradeep behind because distance from Felix distracts him. Iona expects Abel’s ice to trap Victoria’s fleet and declares herself the eye of a storm from which nothing can escape. Across the water, Victoria calls the landing intimidation rather than an attack. Henry credits Miko’s sailors with making their rapid pursuit possible, while Granville has his men map their allies’ ships in case friendship later changes. Victoria tells him to focus on the present. Muusa notices how unnaturally quiet the coast is, and Victoria orders the fleet dispersed before lightning begins aiming for the ships. The scene cuts to darkness and Muusa calls for Victoria.

Castle Eblana — A stolen medical record

Skye’s Raindrops begins the escape through the castle. Felix asks the Hero to spare Indradeep’s patrolling warriors where possible: they treated their prisoner kindly, and he fears meeting their commander. Doctor’s Orders then leads into a storage room containing Iseul’s stolen Undine research and technology. The Hero collects five books and reads the medical records Felix was meant to use to fulfill Iona’s ambitions and strengthen her army. His remark that Skye and Greenguard are racing toward the same finish frames the records that follow.

Song’s report says Galanoth accepted examinations so a healthy Champion could help researchers understand the injured ones. Tests found that he could survive starvation and sleep deprivation while still suffering hunger and exhaustion. Song notes the conflict with histories of Champions dying of old age and halts the study for his mental health. Mi then discovers that Galanoth has stopped eating and sleeping, believing provisions wasted on someone who can survive without them. Mi invokes the example he sets for a certain nonhuman friend and insists that survival need not mean suffering. Noelle reads the same ability as something spells and procedures might reproduce in Greenguard’s defenders.

Aria’s record is an equally sharp contrast between care and exploitation. Song says Aria can still wield magic despite declining mobility and severe exhaustion. Healing spells do not mend the damage, and surgery and physical therapy bring only limited gains. Mi and Fa use board games to help her rest, while other patients’ accusations that she is faking her injuries undermine her confidence. Mi sees a child weighed down by the title of Champion. Noelle instead asks whether reproducing the means of her injury could protect Greenguard from hostile Champions. The medical observations and the proposed military applications come from different writers and should not be treated as a shared purpose.

Artix’s condition, Song writes, resembles nerve damage and is less severe than Aria’s or Abel’s. His refusal of Darkness-related treatment and of rest could still make it worse. Mi finds a way through his insistence that he can simply endure: Aria has begun copying him. Artix becomes more open to care when he understands that example. Noelle admires a different lesson in his relentless attacks on the undead, imagining a single Knight conquering a country if that willpower could be redirected. The notebook makes the distance between helping these patients and manufacturing soldiers visible in the signatures beneath their records. The final opening shows Abel’s portrait opposite a torn-away page, leaving no matching report to read there.

Castle Eblana — The court mage’s second captivity

Felix identifies himself as a former court mage of Dethrix. He says the king discovered a secret and held the people he loved hostage to force his service. He became both a practitioner of forbidden magic and a caretaker of its victims, regretting that he did not free them at the cost of his own life. Alteon’s exile seemed undeserved leniency to him. Later he discovered that the magic had stopped his aging and deprived him of sensation and taste, with sight and hearing beginning to fade. After a fall failed to kill him, Skye villagers burned him at the stake as a malevolent being; Indradeep rescued him from further executions. These are Felix’s accounts of his condition and guilt, rather than proof that no power could ever kill him.

Iona made the rescued mage part of her court, and Felix found purpose in helping Indradeep and his family. The parallel with Dethrix became unbearable when she asked him to manufacture a Champion of Energy. Shockwave’s Ripples brings Iseul’s Executors down on the fugitives; Felix warns that they would break the escapees’ legs or summon lightning onto themselves to alert their commander. Caretaker’s Shadow clears the feasting hall so that Mabel can help without being implicated. Felix would like to take her and others away as well, but finds their will to resist almost extinguished.

Castle Eblana — Mabel’s last ladder

Mabel provides a rope ladder through the window, a craft she once supplied to rebels. She insists this is the last favor: if Iseul catches her, losing her hands would count as mercy. She wants to be able to hug her children when the crown takes them to its schools, even if she will not live to see them return. Mabel is mostly human, poor and barred from the capital; her uncertain trace of Elven ancestry gives her no standing in a court reserved for pureblooded Elves. Her assistance is courageous precisely because she no longer believes escape from that hierarchy is possible for herself.

She explains Eblana’s inheritance: the old first capital traditionally goes to the ruler’s second child, and Iona’s adopted daughter Iseul now holds it as Warden of the West. Mabel calls her the most beloved and brutal of Iona’s children, someone who will become a pragmatic hero in public eyes when she fights invaders. She then recounts Skye’s rebellions as failures that exposed the people to Dragons, Duncan and now Victoria. She repeats the account that Iona’s ancestor saved Skye by slaying Naoise and that Rory’s own village executed him for provoking disaster. Celestia has not heard of this supposed Draconic takeover, while the Hero finds the timing of each invasion suspicious.

For Mabel, dependence on the nobles has become a lesson history keeps forcing on the poor. She questions her ability to raise her children better than the crown could. Celestia calls compulsory surrender of children for re-education a form of control disguised as help, observing that the rich would never be treated the same way. Felix insists that something more sinister is happening and wants to contact Victoria through the remaining rebels. His faith in Alteon’s successor is hope for an alternative, not evidence that an invading army cannot cause harm.

Castle Eblana — Those who still shelter rebels

Outside, Harbinger’s Tears asks for gentleness toward the Bananach ravens. Calm birds shed tears for people in pain, and Felix wishes the periodic electrical punishment Haeos laid on them could end. Spectre of Hunger leads through a town haunted by Fear Gorta and famine. Quince directs the fugitives into Stormview Inn while remaining behind to evacuate residents. The scraps taken from the creatures are skin, euphemistically called rags; Felix’s nervous tangent does little to make the landscape less distressing.

Quince is a noble sympathetic to the Fianna. His family tried to reduce taxes and feed commoners, and he believes the Queen and other nobles arranged his father’s assassination because better treatment would threaten their luxury. He fears that Greenguard’s return has repeated the old pattern of discrediting rebellion by making the crown look indispensable. His account of Iona’s mourning also contains a question: after losing Taliesin, her mother and sisters, she adopted many orphans, but he now sees only Indradeep, Iseul and Illaria. He does not know what happened to the others.

InnJustice brings the Hero to Aisling with reagents for a charm that will discourage the Executors from knocking. The new innkeeper still believes in the Fianna, named for Skye’s inhabitants before Iona’s family ruled. She says the crown has taken generations of their children, including their leader’s daughter. Unknown outsiders supply food, weapons and information, and have urged the rebels to help Victoria. The previous innkeeper passed their letters to the leader before leaving on business from which she has not returned. Aisling sends the fugitives through the back door toward Loughshine. On that route, Find Shelter in... pauses at a broken statue: its surviving inscription speaks of living in Shadows, while the damaged names and meaning remain incomplete.

Castle Eblana — Felix and the Warden of the East

Indradeep blocks the escape route. Heavy Handed pits the Hero against his warriors while Felix struggles to raise a hand against people he wants to leave with him. Miserable Monsoon finally requires defeating the Warden himself. Brentan then arrives, having followed in his ship as soon as he saw the hostages taken. He has Knights near Loughshine and wonders, as the Hero does, whether Indradeep deliberately let him trail Skye’s fleet. The Warden does not confirm the suspicion. The Hero calls the fight half-hearted, but that assessment does not explain every earlier decision.

Felix confronts him with what he believes Iona wants: to produce the Champion her own lineage has failed to become and to wage war from spite toward both Greenguard and her rebellious subjects. Indradeep says he knows. He will nevertheless remain beside the mother and sisters who rescued a farmer from a destroyed village and made him a warrior. He also tells Felix that Galanoth has “escaped” from the East and joined the Fianna. Felix should find him before Iseul and Illaria do, then return to the Greenguard home he wanted. Felix answers that he does not want a dream without Indradeep in it.

Celestia and Brentan want the young man who helped reunite them spared. The Hero supplies a story Indradeep can take home: the escapees have seized Iona’s court mage and threatened to harm him unless allowed past. Their next meeting, they agree, will not permit the same restraint. Indradeep urges them to get Greenguard’s people under cover or underground because the storm’s eye sees everything beneath the sky. He already smells smoke. Felix leads the party toward Kieran’s rebels at Loughshine, hoping to persuade them to meet Victoria despite Greenguard’s history of invasion.

Castle Eblana — A conflict reaches the Planes

The final exchange widens the war beyond its armies. Fiamme says Skye has taken Galanoth and the others and is attacking their rescuers. Celeritas asks her to choose, naming her own decision and Voidstar’s. Haeos has refused to explain the increase in his power, while Fiamme’s Champion has asked for aid. Speaking also for her absent sister Neso, she announces that Fire and Water join Darkness and that Greenguard will have their blessing. Her promise that their conflict will be reborn in Skye leaves the source of Haeos’s power and Neso’s own participation unresolved.

Castle Eblana — Rain and the deadly muse

The optional Our Rain task turns knowledge shared in affection into cover for flight. Felix gathers reagents to reproduce the appearance of Indradeep’s storms so that Iona and her daughters will not recognize a separate trail. He recalls the Warden asking to become his protector, teaching him rain magic in return for spells to stay warm. The exchange makes his continuing attachment more than a declaration at the end of a fight, even as he rejects the ruler Indradeep will not abandon.

Celestia’s optional Deadly Muse addresses another danger on the road: Leanan Sidhe, who offers inspiration and fame at the price of life and soul. Celestia recalls a story of a Dragonlord who partnered a Great Dragon and died before twenty, leaving a Dragon unable to wake the soulless body. She doubts that Brentan, Felix or the Hero would accept this fairy’s bargain, but fears an omen in her attention. The task defeats the pursuing Sidhe and seals her wings beneath a rowan tree called Fid Na Ndruad. Celestia explains that such fae may eventually reform, so the sealing is protection for townsfolk and rebels rather than proof of permanent destruction.