The Story So Far

Part 1 - Guildmaster Edith Elwyn

   Under the firm weight of winter, the first of many new Peacekeepers arrives at the Ringward early in the year 398. A disaster has claimed the lives of nearly every living noble Peacekeeper and a call for volunteers has gone out to the Three Kingdoms in order to replenish the Guild's manpower. However, it does not take long for these new Peacekeepers to suspect that the cold, distant Guildmaster Edith Elwyn is hiding something. She refuses to explain anything about the 'shipwreck' which has somehow taken the lives of so many noble men and women while leaving all of the Guild's Fallen miraculously unharmed.
   Two months after the first arrivals, the Guild's airship, the Silky Sidra, crashes unexpectedly just short of its home port, so close as to be within sight of the Guild. Nikola Kovac Levicar, his cousin Ignascij Kovac Miran, and the Fallen Renatus are tasked with recovering a Fallen from the crashed airship.
   But travelling into the mountains is no easy task, and the Peacekeepers are forced to contend with an avalanche even before encountering a crew of paranoid men willing to shoot first and ask questions later. The survivors of the crash view Miran and Levicar with nothing but suspicion. They learn that the Fallen Diem was forced to murder her own master and lover, the Kuld Peacekeeper Castus, by some secret decree of Edith's. Now the survivors, all loyal men of Castus and Clan Stone, refuse to hand her over back into Edith's clutches. Rather than give up Diem and Renatus to the vengeful survivors, the two Travians kill the resisters. In the end, the two Travians emerge bloody and exhausted from their ordeal, returning to the Guild with a new knowledge that their Guildmaster is a mass murderer.
   Worse still, such is Edith's paranoia that she refuses to suffer any outsiders with knowledge of the crash and ensuing massacre to live. Miran and Levicar are forced to hunt down and kill the only two human survivors of the crash left, men of middling influence named Jac and Thorbald. They meet their ends in a muddy street outside the village of Wolfwater.
   For two more months the Guild remains a tense and dangerous place, its denizens wound up like bowstrings and ready to snap. Nobles scheme to overthrow Edith before she can repeat her past slaughters, but none ever dare challenge the power of the Crown openly. The Fallen are freely used to surveil the Guild's own members, and few dare speak freely anywhere in the Guild for fear of being overheard and killed.
   The Guildmaster's reign ends abruptly when Castus' brother, Caspian fra Callistus, arrives under the alias of Leif efter Olav. Unbeknownst to most of the Peacekeepers, Edith's daughter has been missing for months. In fact, Caspian has murdered the slave trader and Fallen hunter, Sirra efter Sigurbjorn, and preserved the woman's body within a cask of wine, which he tricks the assembled Peacekeepers into drinking from in a grisly, mocking toast.
   Caspian uses the moment of shock, outrage, and disgust, to try and kill Edith, but he instead succeeds only in knocking the Crown from her head. When the Crown rolls to its new owner, it is not a nobleman or noblewoman but a Fallen who suddenly takes on its responsibilities.

Part 2 - Guildmaster Renatus

   Renatus' taking of the Crown throws the Guild into crisis. The noble Peacekeepers resent her authority at best and fear a regime of violent revenge and score-settling at worst. A large portion of the garrison deserts, and the remaining Peacekeepers are forced to project a facade of normality to the outside world lest the rulers of the Kingdoms realize that their Guild has been usurped by the very prisoners it was designed to control. Levicar performs public duties and signs the orders as the apparent Guildmaster, but all live in fear of Renatus' true authority being discovered and uneasily cooperate in the conspiracy.
   Meanwhile, after a period in the Ringward's dungeons, Edith is not only executed but slain in a terrifying, death-denying ritual. Renatus gives the privilege of carrying out the sentence to Diem, who avenges her murdered lover by forcing the reluctant Fallen Animus to trap Edith's soul within a sword. The Travian priest, Miran, is the only human witness to the execution.
   While judgment against the deposed Guildmaster Edith Elwyn is delivered swiftly and mercilessly, Renatus shows greater leniency towards the man who brought Edith down. After allowing Caspian to languish in the dungeons for a time while she deliberates upon his fate, Renatus decrees that he is to return to Mod Kulden to stand trial for the murder of Sirra efter Sigurbjorn rather than face justice at the Ringward. This decision so outrages much of the Guild's nobility, who also fear the knowledge that Caspian possesses, that Miran and Levicar set out to keep the man from returning home at any cost.
   Not for the first time, the pair deliver death on the road outside Wolfwater, this time recruiting highwaymen to ambush Caspian and his escort, Diem, killing the Kuld while the Fallen escapes back to the Ringward. With remarkable ruthlessness, Miran then even silences the wounded mercenaries who were hired to silence Caspian.
   After Diem reports the murder, the increasingly paranoid Renatus unleashes Mutat Historiam, a Fallen with the unique ability to invade and manipulate a person's memories, in order to discover who disobeyed and betrayed her orders. Brasha fra Brynjar of Clan Ironbreaker and Miran come under the greatest scrutiny and both suffer Mutat's direct interrogations.
   As the crisis at the Ringward nears its breaking point, the exiled Caloran noblewoman Bixenta and Peragita depart for the southern Highland city of Snehvid Krog to put down a slave uprising there. A settlement of valleys, mines, and quarries, the local slaves band together and take over the Jarl's own keep, holding his daughter hostage inside and demanding their freedom and an airship to make an escape with their families to new lands. While Peragita takes the form of a bird, enters the tower, and rescues the Jarl's daughter, Bixenta joins with a prospective new Peacekeeper, one Remy fra Reinvald of Clan Berry, and seek a negotiated settlement to the slave uprising.
   The pair meet a pair of so-called 'Free Fallen,' dangerous creatures uncontrolled by any of the mechanisms of the Guild. Claiming to work for a mysterious rebel they call the 'Liberator,' they assist the slaves in their uprising but only to a point, withdrawing from the battle as soon as they are given the opportunity to capture a Peacekeeper. Taking Bixenta and disappearing, Remy is left to oversee the destruction of the slave rebellion, which reaches a fiery conclusion when the retreating slaves and their families are shot from the sky by cannon fire.
   Peragita returns with Remy on the very day of Brasha's long-planned sixteenth birthday celebration. Fearing that Renatus mean to have her killed, however, Brasha flees the Ringward using the surprise party as a pretense for her disappearance. At the same time, Renatus secretly has determined to abdicate and the Fallen Guildmaster flees on the same day, in the same chaos.
   Before leaving, Renatus leaves instructions for Mutat to hold an election for a new Guildmaster, but Levicar attacks him and the Crown is once again sent bouncing to its next recipient: the second son of Clan Jade, Rolf fra Rasmus, an airship pilot and engineer who immediately seeks to reduce the bitter strife between human and Fallen at the Ringward. He takes the name 'Gareth Ryce' as a declaration of intent.

Part 3 - Guildmaster Gareth Ryce

   Unfortunately for the new Guildmaster, he inherits a Guild struggling with disorganization and disunity, not to mention a lack of experience, a treasury in a sad state, and the fact that the Guild's only airship has been destroyed.
   Within weeks of his ascension, he is called to the court of Den Høje Fæstning, the Mod Kulden capital, to answer a diplomatic summons from Queen Einfrid herself. To the public eye and to the eye of the wary Queen, the Guild has gone through three Guildmasters in the span of three months, with Levicar willingly abdicating after scarcely any time at all holding the position. The two supposed Guildmasters do their best to maintain the Guild's public facade, and while evading the suspicions of the Queen and her wily Chancellor Tahvo, Gareth and Levicar investigate a lead into the Liberator that they hope will lead them to Bixenta if she yet lives.
   The Guild next travels to the Highland city of Korsvejen but is unable to unravel the rebels' schemes before the local Jarl and his brother are assassinated during a performance of a famous play upon an enormous theater-airship floating above the city. The Fallen Salvat and Peragita use their powers to enter the fray ahead of the Guildmaster and Levicar, but they arrive only in time to inadvertently assist Bixenta in her revenge against her half-brother, Argider. To the shock of all, not only is Bixenta not dead, but to all outward appearances she appears to be working alongside rebel assassins. This does not look good for the Guild of Peacekeepers.
   While publicly condemning Bixenta, Gareth clandestinely meets with her before she returns home to El Dit Salada to stake her claim to rule there. She reveals what she has learned from her period of captivity with the rebels, including the fact that there is likely a spy at the Ringward. Satisfied that Bixenta is not in fact a rebel agent, Gareth commits to a plan which seeks to keep the monarchs of the Kingdoms appeased while avoiding handing Bixenta over to any of them for 'justice.' At the same time he begins a patient game against the suspected spy, waiting for the so-called 'Remy fra Reinvald' to reveal his true allegiance.
   The new year brings plenty of new grief for the embattled Guildmaster. A diplomatic mission to the newly installed Lady of El Dit Salada reveals the strife in the city as an attempt is made on Bixenta's life, and perhaps the Guildmaster's as well. Peragita is struck blind by an assassin's poison and Gareth's position is made more difficult as criticism of his handling of the crisis mounts at home and abroad.
   And less than a month later, Bixenta would be an exile from her city for a second time after a falling out with her mother, sending the city of El Dit Salada into a full blown crisis of succession as the remaining noble families in the city vie for position in barely concealed internecine warfare. Summoned to the Caloran capital by the Prince Regent Duilio, uncle of the underage heir, the Guildmaster is ordered to exile his wayward Caloran Peacekeeper, Bixenta, and resolve the crisis in El Dit Salada.
   Gareth and his most trusted lieutenant, a middle-aged Travian woman named Lana Struna the Elder, depart for El Dit Salada at a time of great change at the Ringward. Gareth leaves behind a pregnant Bixenta, just about to give birth to a child that may or may not be his own. The Travian priest, Miran, and his Fallen of reflections, Luceat, begin a long journey south which begins with the extirpation of a cult upon a jungle island and ends with their arrival in Cape Ending to hunt down the renegade Fallen and ex-Guildmaster, Renatus. The Peacekeeper impostor known sometimes as 'Remy fra Reinvald' and sometimes as 'Donalind' goes rogue as well after a mission in Brezluk, taking the Fallen Pax with her, not to mention one of the Guild's two airships, beginning an unsanctioned eastward hunt for the Liberator. The scholar Levicar continues to meddle in the Travian election, seeking to prevent a war and the proliferation of a mysterious, deadly chemical known as 'Travian Fire.'
   But things prove no simpler in the west. When the Peacekeepers arrive in El Dit Salada they find a whole raft of rival factions at each other's throats. Choosing to assist Bixenta's uncle in his bid for power over his own sister, the rival lord Balendin, a longtime enemy of Gareth's, invites the assistance of the northern wildlings to take the city. The resulting clash nearly reduces the city to ashes but for the intervention of the Guild and its airship in intercepting a red dragon in the skies over the city.
   The wildlings retreat and the Guild limps home, victorious but wounded and unsatisfied. They do return, however, with an unexpected windfall: a new connection to potential allies among their erstwhile enemies. In secret, Gareth and Lana conspire to turn the Guild of Peacekeepers towards a more revolutionary goal...