Skyguard: Pirate Base
Skyguard: the prisoner’s accusation
At the Hoverbase, Invidia found a moment to tease Stratos after taking refuge in his arms. He reminded the recruit that a captain should put on a brave face. The mood changed when the Hero recognized a Chaorrupted Sky Pirate among their prisoners. Stratos reacted with alarm at Drakath’s involvement, while Invidia urged greater attention to the Skyguard’s personnel, defenses, and future.
Stratos demanded the captive’s name, rank, and purpose. Invidia threatened the prisoner, but his answer turned against the captain. He called Stratos a betrayer and claimed to have witnessed his bargain with the Champion of Chaos: the pirates were to be transformed so they could spread Chaos for their master. Stratos denied the accusation. The Hero asked for an explanation, and Invidia insisted they hear the prisoner out.
Skyguard: Stratos detained
The captive continued to address Stratos as Master, praising the supposed infiltration of Alteon’s guard and describing the agony of Chaorruption. The captain’s angry attempt to silence him only strengthened the suspicion around him. Invidia accused him of deceiving his friends, and Tropos confronted his brother in disbelief. The Hero ordered security to detain Stratos, who kept protesting his innocence and pleading to be believed.
With the base’s highest-ranking captain removed, Invidia brought a message to the Hero instead. The SkyPirate Base had been found. The Hero ordered forces gathered and word sent to High Command, then took the lead in carrying the fight to the enemy hideout. Invidia’s recruit persona now guided the next stage of an operation whose accusations the Hero had not yet untangled.
Skyguard: keys, alarms, and stolen papers
Invidia described a base that seemed quiet because most of its pirates were inside preparing a final attack. Guards and alarms still protected the approach. She also said her dreams and plans had been aimed at becoming strong enough that no one could control her life. Now Chaos appeared to be tearing them apart. To open the gates, she sent the Hero after a Gold Draconian who had deserted when he learned he was to be Chaorrupted. He carried the needed key. Invidia framed the killing as a favor, claiming that years of solitude and guilt had consumed him.
The next assignment required removing the Security Pirate, disabling the red alarms, and locating headquarters. Invidia then demanded important papers discarded among the pirates’ refuse and a code carried by one of them, permitting even killing to obtain it. Those papers and the recovered code would give the infiltrators what she said they needed to make their move.
Skyguard: the general behind the alarm
Despite the attempt at a quiet infiltration, an alarm sounded. About twenty pirates were converging on the Hero, and Invidia warned against capture under any circumstances. Getting through their attack would open the way forward. Her thanks praised the Hero’s strength, but the final challenge was still ahead.
The SkyPirate General stood between the Hero and the next stage of the operation. Invidia warned that defeat would mean the Skyguard’s annihilation. She also warned that weakening him almost to defeat would let Chaos empower him to attack with twice his former strength. Her promised thanks credited the Hero’s suffering and vigilance with keeping the Skyguard whole, even as its troubles extended far beyond this one opponent.
Skyguard: Nhia and Jarren
Inside the pirate stronghold, Nhia pleaded for herself and her brother Jarren. They needed protection from a cruel man and from their own grandmother, the Dreamweaver. Weeks earlier, they had fallen asleep at home and awakened in captivity. Nightmares now kept them from resting, and both were too weak to fight. Nhia thought she could endure a few more days, but feared Jarren could not. She had heard their captor quarrel with their grandmother, then claim that the Dreamweaver did not care about them. In their misery, it was difficult not to believe him.
For a Hero committed to Good, Nhia proposed seeking help from her uncle, Sir Ated, in Swordhaven Castle. Her grandmother hated him and threatened his dreams, making him an unlikely person for her to expect the children to contact. Nhia asked the Hero to recover her locket and take it to him. Told that his mother had given her grandchildren to the pirates as collateral against betrayal, Sir Ated reacted with outrage. He promised to retrieve them if the Hero did not, insisting that family mattered more than his mother believed and blaming her cruelty for driving him to the knights. Nhia’s hopeful response welcomed the news that someone in their family still loved them. The siblings would wait for rescue while the Hero finished the battle.
Skyguard: their cousin’s screams
Nhia’s other request sought a Hero with an Evil lack of conscience. Their cousin, the Nightmare Child, would not stop screaming into their dreams. The siblings said they loved her, but asked the Hero to use Nhia’s recovered locket to prove the family connection and convince the child, by any means necessary, that she had not been forgotten. The appeal to family had become a threat against someone Nhia herself called the most innocent being in Lore.
On that path, the Nightmare Child answered in distress. She asked that her cousins remember her when they were safely home, then said she would fall silent, let herself be forgotten, and die the final death without them hearing her last cry. Perhaps then they would remember. Nhia’s own response remained desperate: no one could help their cousin where she was, and continued screams might put the siblings beyond help as well.
Skyguard: the captain at the pirate base
A man with Captain Stratos’s appearance awaited the Hero inside. The Master demanded to know why they were there already, while the Hero could only ask how the imprisoned captain had reached a place leagues away. The Hero told Invidia to have a warning sent to High Command: the Hoverbase had been infiltrated. The man began to reject the title of captain, but the recruit would not let the exchange proceed on either man’s terms.
Invidia insulted the Master’s intelligence and told the Hero to learn how to destroy an enemy who might have been a friend. She declared that she was finished playing the timid recruit: she had been wronged and meant to make it right. The Master demanded to know what had become of his own goals, then cried out in pain. When the Hero asked what she was doing to Stratos, she offered a vision of the family’s past.
Skyguard: four brothers divided
The vision showed Stratos pinned beneath Exos, who had a dagger drawn. Lithos lunged to pull Exos away, but Exos’s slash caught him in the chest. Tropos cradled the wounded brother while Stratos knelt nearby, glaring at Exos. The scene set the four brothers’ lives on separate paths. The Hero was being shown a family broken by violence, adding another wound to the losses already haunting Stratos.
Invidia explained that Exos fled and was taken in by murderous ruffians. Stratos found a place in the Skyguard, where service also gave him freedom to continue his search and plan revenge. Exos knew his brother would not forgive him. He lived in a haze of paranoia, seeking anyone or any power that might protect him. The Master’s fear of Stratos now had a name and a family history.
Skyguard: the Dreamweaver’s chains
The Master was Exos, and Invidia’s deception also unraveled. The Hero recognized the old woman from the abandoned town who had sent Stratos into his past. She answered as the Dreamweaver, describing herself as an illusion-spinner caught in Fate’s web. Her life as a recruit had been more than an act, she said: Exos’s commands bound her to what she had done.
The Dreamweaver said that the minions around the Hoverbase were bound as well and had truly attacked it. She claimed that Exos’s commands chained her even more strongly, then asked the Hero to help break her ties and right his wrongs against Stratos and the Skyguard. Exos answered with a threat of ownership: she belonged to him, and death was the only way she could defect.
Skyguard: threads tied tightly
The escape left Nhia and Jarren behind. Nhia watched her grandmother take the Hero away and cried out to know why she had given them to the pirates. She begged the Hero to return. The children remained prisoners, still waiting for rescue.
Afterward, the Dreamweaver thanked the Hero for saving her life. The Hero answered that Exos would have killed her rather than allowed her freedom and that no one should have to remain a puppet. Then the Hero remembered the children. She insisted they were strong, would survive, and would not be harmed while she remained alive, but urged attention to the future. She saw their fates as threads now tied much more tightly together. The assurance was hers; the children remained at the base.