Wizard War - The Attack on Starfall

Fey leads the interrogation in Grant Taver's office. Clarissa's account: she was approached by Dawncrest after the Starfall Festival, at a moment when she was already angry and looking for somewhere to aim it — anger rooted in something personal involving Lloyd. Small things first, just listening, just reporting, and then each compromise enabling the next until there was no version of stopping that did not require burning down everything she had already done.

She gave Dawncrest YukYuk's blueprints, copies of Mac's engineering notes, the clerical network's pastoral routes, and Alric's Waylet. She gives back, unprompted: the Architect's cipher key (a substitution pattern on elvish astronomical notation, confirmed accurate against the recovered documents), his physical description, the name Solstice Protocol, and the fact that an entity calling itself the emissary attended a Dawncrest briefing. Tac identifies it on description as the Voice of the Nameless.

That night two columns of zombies come down the thoroughfare from Adair Square behind two Flesh Golems. It is a screen. Four Dawncrest Retrieval operatives enter the building invisibly, hunting Clarissa. Griva is in the cell disguised as her and holds the deception. Mac freezes three constructs in sequence. Fey destroys three operatives in one combined action; Nim takes the fourth, who says 'The Architect sends regards.'

One wererat guard and one rookie guard die. The orc guard captain performs well enough that Grant promotes him on the spot.

Clarissa comes out from under the bed, declines the loyalty ring — 'a ball and chain' — then retrieves a gold ring she swallowed before her capture, triggers a keyed Dimension Door, and is gone. She had prepared it before she surrendered. Her warning about the attack was real; so was the cipher key; so was her exit.