Gramiel and the Dawn Vindicators: Hollowborn saga
Trygve: a rumor at a child’s grave
The Hero came to Trygve after hearing about a dying girl who stared toward the ceiling and begged an unseen presence not to take her. Rumors called it possession, or the work of something stealing children’s souls. The village’s bright welcome did not fit the gloom the Hero expected. A stranger named Lae offered an explanation: he was Hollowborn, and many of his brethren had lived, died, and been reborn there.
Lae said that the girl might have joined them. Her supposed possession had been a test of character, though the Hero was hardly reassured by a stranger admitting that connection beside a child’s grave. Lae suggested asking the townsfolk. Knights were waiting outside, and neither their gleaming armor nor their white horses persuaded the Hero that they were the safer company.
Trygve: those remembered and those left behind
Waelc, the village elder, welcomed the Hero as a Glorybringer. His people sought glory in life and purpose in death, believing that their Liberator blessed those who fought to the last. Alvi had lured invading Horcs away from the children’s ward and failed to escape. Though she had not become a Glorybringer, Trygve would remember her with the flowers she used to pick. Waelc admitted that their customs needed to change: only those visited by the Liberator were immortalized, and Alvi could not be buried beside the parents she had lost to disease.
The retired Dragoon Sólbiǫrt now tended the children’s ward. Warriors left their children there once they could walk, with older children caring for younger ones while the adults returned to battle. Alvi had arrived as an orphaned baby and later become their eldest caretaker. Sólbiǫrt wanted the survivors to stop blaming themselves for her sacrifice. The promise that she accompanied the Liberator did not erase another grief: even in death, she would not be reunited with her family.
Trygve: the promise of a human garden
Lae sent the Hero to confront outsiders who were pulling travelers into their sermons, then to speak with Waelc and investigate the town. The elder even allowed monsters nearby so that the people could train. At the shrine, the Vindicator flag bearer Genevieve condemned both Trygve’s abandoned children and its worship. Her proposed remedy was worse: she preached the purging of every beast in the name of her master’s lost love, until Lore became a garden for the human race.
Genevieve’s contempt extended to elves, Horcs, and Dwarves, whose children she treated as expendable. Sólbiǫrt had fought beside the Vindicators against beasts and respected their skill, but saw their ambitions worn away in service to their master’s vision. Lae, meanwhile, defended the Shadow Fiend’s welcome to people of any allegiance. His own answer to the ward’s needs was more immediate: gather materials for a stuffed toy. The warriors sent wealth home, he remarked, but the children might still want affection.
Trygve: Alvi’s trial
The Hero helped protect the shrine from the Vindicators. Inside, Lae explained that Glorybringer was an old name for the Hollowborn, whose individual names had faded into fables. Alvi had saved the other children, but the guards had reached her too late. On the brink of death, the Liberator had offered her another life and extraordinary strength. She accepted the trial and failed it.
The Hero pressed Lae about the cost: Alvi’s soul had been erased and her consciousness assimilated into the Liberator. Lae’s casual response provoked anger. Most candidates failed, he explained; they faced the trial confused and terrified at death’s door, as he once had. The Hero rejected the implication that a child brave enough to save others had somehow proved unworthy of life. Trygve had promised to preserve Alvi’s name even while the names of its successful Hollowborn slipped away.
Trygve: the living before the dead
Lae met the argument with a smile rather than resentment. He liked being questioned, and the Hero had given him something new to consider. Waelc interrupted: the Vindicators were moving toward the graves. They set the shrine and nearby buildings on fire, while the attack drove the town’s monsters into a frenzy. The Hero insisted on helping, and Lae joined in. However urgently they wanted to protect the graves, the living came first.
Once the immediate danger was reduced, the Hero fought back against the invaders. Lae had no quarrel with Hollowborn retaining different loyalties, but the Vindicators’ pattern troubled him: disrespect from master to followers, then from followers to everyone else. Some attackers were heading for the children’s ward; with their numbers thinned, Lae thought the townsfolk could handle them while he and the Hero reached the graves. He had found a home only after becoming Hollowborn, and meant to repay Trygve’s devotion to his brethren.
Trygve: Gramiel’s divine decree
At Alvi’s grave, the Vindicators claimed that her body was contaminated and had to be purged. Their commander Gramiel demanded something more deliberate than burning: the corpse would be dissected and examined to learn how the Liberator influenced Trygve. He dismissed the town’s deity and called his own order the protector of the pure. The Hero protested that they were violating a child’s grave while refusing to respect the townsfolk’s beliefs.
Gramiel answered that what lay buried was no longer a child, and that attracting the false deity’s attention showed wickedness. Lae and the Hero prepared to fight him rather than accept that justification. The grandmaster saw their resistance as further proof that humanity could not stand by itself and needed him to rescue it from its own foolishness.
Trygve: the diversion
The confrontation did not end with a simple victory. The Hero reported being hit while blinded and found Gramiel’s light more painful than expected. Gramiel, in turn, said that both opponents possessed power that should tear a mortal body apart. He declared them servants of the false Liberator and said he reserved his power for true threats to humanity. Lae countered with the danger of all of them fighting without restraint: destroying the forest would hardly flatter the Vindicators’ cause.
Gramiel withdrew, citing his injured soldiers and announcing that his main objective had already succeeded. He promised to hunt them down. Lae urged the bruised Hero to rest, and the Hero protested that being outside the Hollowborn did not make a bruise unbearable. Lae conceded that the Hollowborn were not wholly invulnerable either. Then the reference to another objective caught their attention: the battle at the grave had not been the Vindicators’ only operation.
Trygve: the children taken
Sólbiǫrt brought the news they had missed while defending Alvi’s grave. The Vindicators had taken every child from the ward for something called Reformation. The retired Dragoon knew neither where they had gone nor what the process meant. The raiders had moved quickly and gone directly for their targets.
Lae recognized a practiced strategy. Holding so many prisoners would require a base, and he hoped Reformation would take long enough to let him trace their movements. He would stay and help: whether he and the Hero had started the trouble or merely found it, they would be the ones to finish it. Later, Lae obtained directions to the Vindicators’ fortress. Their growing movement needed recruits, and its pride made its secrets easier to follow.
The fortress: keeping to the shadows
Lae’s directions led to the Vindicators’ entire base of operations. His claimed mastery of espionage had received help from an old Hollowborn acquaintance familiar with the area. Gramiel was supposed to be away, giving them a chance to search. Lae supplied concealment rather than invisibility: the Hero had to remain in shadow. Its peculiar smell became a joke between them, but also a practical danger when the fortress’s hounds picked it up.
The Hero extinguished lights, fought through recruits, and dealt with the hounds before investigating unfamiliar creatures in the dungeon. Lae could not identify them despite his experience of Lore. What first looked like an obstacle to their search was part of the prisoners’ fate. Trygve’s civilians were locked among those creatures, and the pair needed keys before they could lead anyone out.
The fortress: the meaning of Reformation
With the keys recovered, the Hero freed the prisoners. The other creatures were not simply monsters confined beside the villagers: they were villagers transformed through a ritual. Lae directed the Hero against the General responsible. When challenged, that officer claimed the victims had existed to serve Gramiel and that their new, supposedly divine shapes gave hopeless lives a purpose.
The Hero rejected that justification. Following the Light had not prevented the General’s order from becoming cruel and corrupt. Defeating the officer interrupted this part of the operation, but did not by itself restore the transformed victims. Lae still hoped to reverse their condition. They fought through the fortress’s defenders, obtained a key from the General, and searched Gramiel’s chambers for the purpose behind it all.
Gramiel’s journal: love and a world without shadows
The account in Gramiel’s chambers began with a guardian assigned to a quiet village. He described meeting Veronika, falling in love, and abandoning his duties and former life to remain with her. Happiness ended, he wrote, when Horcs attacked while he was away hunting. The village was destroyed and Veronika disappeared. That was Gramiel’s account of his loss; the investigation had not yet established who had actually attacked.
Gramiel and the survivors had answered by seeking a world so bright that beasts would have no shadows in which to hide. As his cause spread, his followers’ faith strengthened him. He wanted not only revenge or a memorial to Veronika, but the restoration of his former strength and true form: a Celestial. Lae understood the recruits’ importance in those terms. Their faith was feeding the very being who had organized them.
The tower: a story too convenient
A guard interrupted the search, and Lae disposed of him quietly before trying another disguise. The Hero could still see Lae despite a spell intended to make him look like an ordinary Vindicator. More troubling was the journal’s neat sequence: falling in love, an attack while Gramiel was away, no recovered body, and a new determination strong enough to reshape the world. None was impossible on its own, but the Hero suspected that something had arranged the pattern.
Lae encouraged that suspicion while keeping the immediate rescue in view. He believed the transformed people could still be saved if Gramiel reversed what he had done. The Celestial’s throne room lay at the top of the highest tower. Lae also admitted that some Hollowborn were curious about a Celestial undergoing their own trial, an opportunity they had never had before. What sounded like background speculation would soon acquire a more sinister meaning.
The tower: exemptions from the human utopia
The Hero began the climb by taking patrol information from soldiers. Lae found their schedule almost impossible: they were allowed only minutes to eat and sleep, as though devotion could feed humans as it fed a Celestial. The transformed villagers remained another danger. With no way to contain them yet, Lae left their handling to the Hero; removing the wings they had acquired was a desperate measure, not an established cure.
The tower also contained genuine Draconians, not more humans reshaped into beasts. Lae questioned why Gramiel’s human-centered order admitted them while condemning Horcs and Hollowborn. His suggestion that Veronika might have liked Dragons was a guess, not an explanation they had proved. Beyond a locked door waited more defenders, and beside it an angry Horc was demanding the Beast Tamer responsible for his people’s persecution.
The tower: the Horcs who were framed
Zlar’s hostility came from a campaign of false accusation. His kin had never attacked Gramiel’s village or harmed Veronika, he said. Vindicators had destroyed their home, then spread a story that drove humans to hunt even the refugees hiding in caves. The Beast Tamer used face-changing magic like Lae’s to disguise beasts as Horcs and send them against villages. Zlar wanted that deception ended.
The Hero obtained the key, defeated the Assassin guarding another locked door, and reached the Beast Tamer and his hounds. After the Tamer’s defeat, Zlar apologized for judging the pair badly. The Hero now understood that illusory Horcs had framed the real ones and supplied the grievance behind Gramiel’s crusade. Lae pointed out that the journal contained only one other notable name. The Hero was increasingly wary of the companion who kept offering clues while withholding answers.
The tower: rescuers and fuel
Zlar offered his kin’s help to gather the transformed prisoners and take them somewhere safe. The Hero accepted, giving those victims protection while the climb continued. The Hero hoped the rescued villagers could also help clear the Horcs’ name. Restoration still depended on finding a way to undo Gramiel’s work; gathering the beasts was not itself that cure.
More soldiers defended the upper floors, where an Elite Priest was preparing a ritual. The Hero disarmed soldiers and beasts as Lae examined what was happening to their bodies. They were dissolving, and there was no time to evacuate everyone before they disappeared. Stopping the priest became urgent. His ritual chamber also contained crystals that Lae warned the Hero to watch.
The tower: a sacrifice and an unseen creditor
The defeated Priest accused the Hero of belonging to Lae’s kind, then resolved to give everything to Gramiel. The Hero tried to expose the contradiction in an order proclaiming human supremacy under a Celestial master. Lae saw followers bent into believing their leader’s delusions and recognized a method he associated with someone else. As the Priest turned himself into energy for Gramiel, Lae urged the Hero away and took the rear.
Afterward, Lae said he had smothered the Priest’s spell and knew that intervention would attract notice. Someone had staged the Horc attack and turned Gramiel’s grief into a crusade, and that person would not welcome the disruption. Elsewhere, an unseen speaker complained that Lae owed a favor and was betraying the arrangement by dropping hints. She intended to visit her dearest Gramiel and see the person who had changed Lae’s loyalties.
Dawn Sanctum: who deserves another life?
Beyond the tower, Lae pointed to more Vindicators giving their Grace to Gramiel as pure energy. The Hero suspected an attempt to regain his original Celestial form. Lae’s question was different: why had their intense dedication brought them to this end rather than a second chance as Hollowborn? He returned to the Hero’s argument at Trygve. What made one frightened, dying soul more deserving than another?
The Hero argued that pressure changed people and that fear or weakness at death’s door should not define a whole life. Lae wanted to take that question to the other Hollowborn. A dying soldier interrupted, revealing that other Hollowborn spies were already hidden in the ranks. Before the pair could learn much more, he faded away. Lae avoided explaining the spies and instead led the Hero onward to see them.
Dawn Sanctum: the hidden Hollowborn
The Hero fought through the last Vindicator defenses and discovered Hollowborn among them. Many had joined the order after already becoming Hollowborn. Lae wondered whether their work was also meant to create more candidates with a strong will to fight and live. They were now cutting down Gramiel’s followers to return their Grace faster and accelerate his transformation. The army that imagined itself the guardian of a future utopia had become fuel.
Genevieve urged the faithful to offer their lives for the loved ones who would inherit that promised world. She did not at first understand why the infiltrators wanted the same sacrifice. The Beast Tamer’s hounds guarded the route as well, and Lae revealed that they were Hollowborn too. At Veronika’s statue, a letter was waiting. Reading it would turn the Hero’s suspicions into a confrontation with Lae.
Gramiel’s letter: the love behind the deception
Gramiel’s letter addressed Veronika as the woman whose body and spirit he had been unable to find. He had forced Necromancers to search for her and left letters at an empty grave. His memories were less innocent than the idealized lost love suggested: he had noticed her jealousy when others spoke to him and had followed her into a meadow where she tore butterflies’ wings away while chanting about his love. He had found even that cruelty enchanting and wished she had trusted him enough to show it openly.
The Hero recognized Veronika’s statue from Trygve’s hall of Glorybringers. She had been Hollowborn throughout the affair. Lae finally admitted the purpose: an Oracle had predicted something important about a Hollowborn Celestial, and Veronika had cultivated Gramiel’s obsessive will so that he could survive the Shadow Fiend’s trial. Someone still had to defeat him and bring him to death’s threshold. That was the role for which Lae had drawn the Hero to Trygve with rumors.
Dawn Sanctum: Lae goes off-script
Lae had joined the plot to repay Veronika a favor, intending to set the stage and leave the final judgment to the Shadow Fiend. Now he was revealing the scheme against the wishes of the other conspirators. He said the Hero’s conversation had changed how he felt about it. His apology did not undo the manipulation, but he wanted the Hero, rather than the conspiracy, to decide Gramiel’s fate and show the Hollowborn what that decision meant.
The remaining route brought both Vindicator and Hollowborn Draconians against the Hero. Some eventually cooperated despite their opposing loyalties, then withdrew wounded. Lae saw that Veronika and the others had done more than he knew. His remarks about Dragons and divine fate made the Hero uneasy, but did not establish any further revelation. At the end waited Gramiel, close to completing his return to Celestial power.
Dawn Sanctum: the cost of ascension
The first confrontation could not stop Gramiel’s ascension. Too many Vindicators had been cut down, and their returned Grace carried him past the threshold. The Hero had to face him at his strongest. Gramiel accepted another willing soldier’s sacrifice and promised prosperity in Veronika’s name, dismissing the Hero’s attempt to warn him about the Hollowborn. Veronika herself urged him onward while maintaining the fiction that he was avenging her death.
Her encouragement became a command to die for her. Gramiel strained beyond his limits; the Hero warned that he would explode, and Lae promised protection when reasoning was no longer possible. In the confrontation’s aftermath, Veronika pressed the dying Gramiel to reach into the shadows and keep fighting for revenge. The moment for the Shadow Fiend’s trial had been prepared.
Dawn Sanctum: the truth Gramiel could not survive
The Hero interrupted before Gramiel could accept that final fiction. Veronika had survived, framed the Horcs, and manipulated him into creating the Vindicators so that his desire for vengeance would carry him into a Hollowborn life. Gramiel confronted what his violence had served. When Veronika insisted that he loved her, he asked whether she had ever loved him. Gramiel died without becoming Hollowborn. Afterward, she blamed him as weak-willed for wasting years of work.
Lae rejected her judgment. Gramiel’s determination had been real even when its object was false. No one should be defined by the worst moment of a life, and the Hollowborn should not decide who deserved rebirth by assigning a value to a human or Celestial soul. Veronika turned toward a replacement candidate: Gramiel’s killer. She would make the Hero hate her strongly enough to dedicate a new Hollowborn existence to destroying her.
Lae’s answer: a trial of his own
Lae refused to surrender the Hero to that plan. The Hero still had reason to doubt him: was this another performance, and were they merely his next target? Lae admitted that words could not prove his change. He called on the Shadow Fiend, acknowledged the lost opportunity to test a Celestial, and offered himself instead. He wanted to prove why he deserved to remain Hollowborn when others had not received that chance.
The Hero next found themself back at Trygve with Veronika. She remembered hating that home so much that she had died to leave it. She still defended the perfect fantasy she had made for Gramiel, but the Hero insisted that even his terrible actions had not made such manipulation acceptable. His letter offered an answer to her performance: he had seen more of her than she had meant to reveal, and the love could have been real. The Hero left her to consider it and went to look for Lae.
Trygve: Alvi returns to the light
The Hero encountered Alvi, now introducing herself as a Glorybringer, or Hollowborn as Lae had called her. She remembered failing the trial and falling for what felt like forever. Then Lae had taken her hand and brought her back into the light. He had left a message for his friend, and the Hero recognized themself as its intended recipient.
According to Alvi, Lae had given part of his Hollowborn self to the Shadow Fiend as the price of her rebirth and the first step in a new trial of his own. He was no longer invincible, and accepted that cost as proof that he meant what he had said. He had named no destination, but hoped to meet the Hero again and learn more about being Hollowborn, including why he had become one. Asked whether they wanted that reunion, the Hero said yes. The closing scene showed Lae alone beside Trygve’s graves.
Gramiel’s aftermath: what remained of the dream
Back in the sanctum, Veronika stayed where Gramiel had lived. She admitted that the Oracle’s vision had led her to charm a Celestial, forge his will, and arrange his death, but the man had cared about the truth. Her dismissal of love as a transaction faltered into a thought about what might have been real. She also reported that the transformed villagers had been healed and were human again, crediting herself with cleaning up that unfinished part of the disaster.
The consequences reached beyond the fortress. Veronika said that Lae’s unprecedented sacrifice for Alvi had divided the Hollowborn, winning supporters and enemies. Genevieve, meanwhile, refused to accept the end of her master’s cause. She called for the Vindicators to retrieve Gramiel’s body, rebuild their ranks, and restore his light. Her words promised another attempt; they did not show him resurrected or the cult’s ambitions fulfilled.
Gramiel’s campaign: work beyond the main pursuit
The campaign also left separate, repeatable commissions. At Trygve, Lae offered to help prepare strengthening tinctures for people bracing for further danger, quietly modifying the recipe. At the fortress, he requested Grace from Gramiel’s followers to study its properties. In the tower, he proposed examining the Assassin, Priest, and Beast Tamer again; the first two had sought relief from hardship, while the Tamer might share acquaintances with him. These were follow-up errands, not more steps required between the major confrontations.
After Gramiel’s death, Veronika offered payment for investigating his mortal and Celestial lives and the Draconians. She recalled his fear of death and his willingness to face it if they could spend their lives together. Each of these four commissions had a free version and a Legend version with the same narrative request. Repeating them for rewards did not create additional episodes in the pursuit or reverse the ending already witnessed.