You step out of Tim’s General Goods, the door clicking shut behind you. The night air is cool, thick with the scent of rain that hasn’t yet fallen. You walk a few steps down the alley, winding past crates and coiled rope until you find what you’ve come here for.
Tucked between two buildings—barely wider than a cart—is a small shrine of many gods, half in shadow.
It isn’t grand. Just a weathered alcove with shelves of offerings and worn icons stacked together like market goods. A tarnished symbol of Waukeen gleams among coppers. A statuette of Avandra leans drunkenly against an upturned wine bottle. Charms, masks, and folded prayers are pressed into every corner—no one god owns this place.
But two stand out.
A figure carved in obsidian, stark and still.
And beside her, a twisting shape of silver wire, delicate, dancing.
The Raven Queen.
The Moonweaver.
You kneel before them. You don’t know what you expect. You barely know what you want.
You close your eyes.
The city falls away.
The cold arrives.
Not wind. Not rain. Something deeper. Older. The air around you holds its breath. And black feathers begin to drift down—not from rooftops, but from a sky you can’t see.
You are not in Waterdeep anymore.
You’re nowhere.
The Raven Queen’s presence settles around you like a cloak. She does not speak. She does not need to. Instead, golden threads of fate stretch across a void—shining, perfect, sharp. One wraps through your chest, pulling, humming with pressure.
She gestures.
You see your friends.
Lying broken beneath a sky aflame. Their bodies are just out of reach. You move to run—but your thread pulls tight. You can’t reach them. Their ends are written. Their deaths already woven.
Your thread glows next.
The thread begins to fray.
But the dark begins to pulse—not cold this time, but warm. Alive. Possible.
A silver thread winds into the gold, soft as breath, sinuous as moonlight. It winds through the weave not to bind, but to rewrite.
She steps out from the dark: veiled in starlight, silk, and shadow.
The Moonweaver.
She moves like a song you half remember. Her voice brushes your mind.
“They wrote the ending already,” she says, “but stories like yours don’t always behave.”
She lifts the silver thread. It wraps around your wrist, humming. It doesn’t pull—it calls.
And then you see it.
Visions not of prophecy, but possibility.
You in a moonlit dance.
You behind a mask you chose.
You holding someone’s hand, a name whispered between kisses.
You with a quill and no script to follow.
You—free.
And floating in the dark: a book.
Leatherbound. Shifting. Glowing faintly.
The Moonweaver offers no command. Only a smile.
“Take it,” she whispers. “Not to undo fate—but to challenge it. To write where others only read.”
You reach out.
You take the Tome.
Not for glory. Not for revenge.
She gestures again—toward your fallen friends, still out of reach.
You take it for them.
You return to your senses slowly.
The shrine is still. The alley is quiet. But the world has changed.
Overhead, the twin moons rise:
Catha, waxing crescent, calm and silver.
Rudius, waning red, distant and heavy.
Their light washes over you. It settles in your chest—not as peace, but as conviction.
From around the corner, laughter echoes. A pair of young lovers dart past the shrine, hand in hand, swallowed by the city. A tune—light and distant—fades behind them. Music, drifting like memory.
You lower your gaze.
The Tome rests in your lap, soft leather beneath your fingers.
You open it.
The first page is blank.
The second reads:
“To challenge fate, first you must understand it.”
You go to close the book.
A chill brushes your hand.
From the darkness above, a black feather flutters down, silent, deliberate.
It lands between the pages just as the cover shuts.
The Raven Queen is watching.
But so is the Moonweaver.
And you—are no longer just a thread.