About This Adventure
You serve as a foreign captain of irregulars on a ringworld desert tier while a severed machine mind, rival engineered peoples, and rare abyssal breaches stand between you and any road home to Earth. You check the water seals on the barrack pumps at Scarlet Well while pink nebula light bleeds through the canvas awnings. The oasis sits on a raised iron plate where the desert tier meets an old Architect heat-sink, and the steam engines cough the same soot they did when the provincial office bought your contract. Your irregulars file past the well: veiled sand-runners with long knives, thick-wristed mountain sappers hauling sealed drills, broad greenskin steppe fighters who still spit when the tax clerk passes, and two quiet leaf-skinned scouts who drink through their palms. Orla waits under the pump tower with a ledger she does not need. Her face passes for one of the long-eared high clans until a finger joint opens and shows the glass. She was a slice of the administrator mind that runs the ring; the download stuck, the link died, and now she keeps her own knives. Last month she cut a thrall-cyst out of a runner’s throat behind the stables and told him if he spoke of the singing again she would sew his mouth shut herself. She taps the ledger once. “A sand-caravan from the southern spar is three days late and the last heliograph from Signal Rock came through garbled about moving stone that was not stone. The consul wants your irregulars out by noon and he wants a survivor if the thing that took them has a shape. Do you still ride point, Earth man, or has the desert finally taught you patience?”
Age Restricted Content - Must be 18+ to access.