xarrul rework

npc/assassins.md

@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ They keep a codex, and they keep it like scripture:
 - **The seal.** Every kill is claimed openly under the guild's mark within a day. No innocent hangs for their work.
 - **The closing.** A sealed kill legally ends the blood-debt; retaliation is forbidden and the guild enforces the closing at its own expense. This is the clause that makes the city keep them.
 
-The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding. The **Lambent Order** has been taking side jobs — messy, ritualistic kills that undercut the market and mock everything the codex stands for. Bodies turn up carved open, hearts missing, symbols cut into floorboards. Worse, someone inside the House has been *cooperating*.
+The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding. The **Order of Mending** has been taking side jobs — messy, ritualistic kills that undercut the market and mock everything the codex stands for. Bodies turn up carved open, hearts missing, symbols cut into floorboards. Worse, someone inside the House has been *cooperating*.
 
 Tonight, four named members are present, plus two unnamed blades.
 
@@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ If the players bring her **proof of the rot** (the soulcoin, a marked victim, Th
 
 Late twenties, handsome, easy smile. Sandy hair, bright eyes, the kind of face you'd trust to watch your drink. He's the assassin who doesn't look like an assassin — the one who gets close to targets through charm, not stealth. He's everyone's friend at the table and nobody's friend in truth.
 
-Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Lambent Order for six months. The cultists need fresh kills for ritual components — hearts still warm, blood drained into sanctified vessels. Dace provides the bodies and takes a cut on top of his guild pay. He doesn't believe in the cult's ideology — he just likes money, and he finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
+Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Order of Mending for six months. The cultists need fresh kills for ritual components — hearts still warm, blood drained into sanctified vessels. Dace provides the bodies and takes a cut on top of his guild pay. He doesn't believe in the cult's ideology — he just likes money, and he finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
 
 **Key traits:**
 - The most likeable person in the room. Friendly, warm, buys drinks, makes jokes.
@@ -132,7 +132,7 @@ Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Lambent Order for six months. The c
 
 ### His Secret
 
-Dace has been meeting a Lambent Order contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The ward-sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the wards as part of the cult's broader plan. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
+Dace has been meeting a Order of Mending contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the house's old summoner-work as part of the cult's study of this thin point. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
 
 **Evidence linking Dace:**
 - DC 16 Insight during conversation: Something about his helpfulness is *too* practiced. He's performing.
@@ -142,12 +142,12 @@ Dace has been meeting a Lambent Order contact in the tavern's private room to ar
 
 ### The Mark on Dace (DM — the braid to Thera)
 
-**Dace is already condemned, and he doesn't know it.** His dealings with the Lambent Order drew crude, public attention to soul-death in the city — the exact thing [Thera](#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) exists to keep invisible. She has decided he is a liability, and during the formal-seeming little courtesy she paid him earlier tonight (a hand on his shoulder, a coin turned on the table, a murmured word) **she marked him.** In nine days the mark ripens and something eats his soul; the codex will never know, because on paper Dace will simply have been found dead of guild justice or a knife in an alley.
+**Dace is already condemned, and he doesn't know it.** His dealings with the Order of Mending drew crude, public attention to soul-death in the city — the exact thing [Thera](#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) exists to keep invisible. She has decided he is a liability, and during the formal-seeming little courtesy she paid him earlier tonight (a hand on his shoulder, a coin turned on the table, a murmured word) **she marked him.** In nine days the mark ripens and something eats his soul; the codex will never know, because on paper Dace will simply have been found dead of guild justice or a knife in an alley.
 
 The signs are on him now, hiding in plain sight behind his nerves:
 - He sleeps poorly and doesn't know why (reads as guilt).
 - At the candles, **his shadow falls a half-breath late** — DC 15 Perception if a PC watches him move near a flame.
-- True sight, *Veil Dust*, Mags's cleaner's instinct, or a DC 15 Medicine/Arcana check up close reveals **a hairline seam of grey light at the base of his throat**, like a cracked glaze.
+- True sight, *Veil Dust*, or a DC 15 Medicine/Arcana check up close reveals **a hairline seam of grey light at the base of his throat**, like a cracked glaze.
 
 **Saving him** is possible before the mark ripens: consecration (holy water, *Consecrate*, a cleric or paladin's touch), *Remove Curse* / *Greater Restoration*, Thera's death, or — hardest — the genuine forgiveness of the grievance that named him, offered and *meant*.
 
@@ -231,7 +231,7 @@ Thera serves something older than the codex and beneath the city — a thing tha
 
 **Do not name the entity, the pact, the ledgers, or the wider cell at the table.** The oneshot's payload is a feeling, not a lecture: *this guild of clean, principled killers has something inside it that turns people into currency, and its finest member is the one doing it.* Everything the players need to feel that is physical — a coin, a seam of grey light, a blade who is too perfect. The rest is a thread for another campaign.
 
-**Why she's here tonight:** to end Dace. His crude soul-butchery for the Lambent Order is dragging soul-death into public view — the one thing that could get people *looking*. She has already marked him and is deciding whether he dies or gets recruited. She is also quietly appalled by the cultists on principle: amateurs, desecrating something sacred for spell components.
+**Why she's here tonight:** to end Dace. His crude soul-butchery for the Order of Mending is dragging soul-death into public view — the one thing that could get people *looking*. She has already marked him and is deciding whether he dies or gets recruited. She is also quietly appalled by the cultists on principle: amateurs, desecrating something sacred for spell components.
 
 ### The Tells
 
@@ -249,7 +249,6 @@ Thera carries at least one **soulcoin** — the physical proof the whole subplot
 - **What it is:** a person, minted. Not destroyed — folded, cold, and (while the coin holds charge) *recoverable*.
 - **Detection:** Mags smells the necrotic residue instantly and goes grey; a cleric or paladin *feels* the trapped soul; *Veil Dust* or true sight shows it glowing wrong; DC 15 Arcana reads it as necrotic with a personal, fingerprint-like signature.
 - **Warmth dates the kill:** soulcoins cool over a season. A warm coin is a *recent* kill — and can be matched to a recent sealed contract on the guild's rolls, tying Thera to a specific death.
-- **If destroyed with charge remaining, the soul escapes** — a freed spirit that may thank its liberator, testify to what was done to it, or, if it died screaming, turn on the nearest living thing. A cracked, spent coin left behind is inert evidence.
 
 ### Stat Block
 

npc/cultists.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-# The Lambent Order — Cultists
+# The Order of Mending — Cultists
 
 *"We are not what they call us. We are scholars of the boundary, seekers of the wholeness that was stolen from this world. If they understood what we understand, they would not fear us. They would beg to help."*
 — Haddon, reciting Mother Vyre's words
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
 
 ## The Cult
 
-The Lambent Order presents itself as a small, independent mage guild focused on planar theory and boundary research. This is a lie stretched thin over a truth: they *are* studying planar boundaries, but with the intent of destroying them.
+The Order of Mending presents itself as a small, independent mage guild focused on planar theory and boundary research. This is a lie stretched thin over a truth: they *are* studying planar boundaries, but with the intent of destroying them.
 
 Their leader, **Mother Vyre**, is not present. She never comes to the tavern. She communicates through dead drops, coded messages, and — for the inner circle — through dreams. She is the architect of **The Opening**: the dissolution of all planar boundaries, merging the Material Plane with the Ethereal, the Shadowfell, the Feywild, and whatever else lies beyond. She frames this as healing — the planes were once one, and their separation was a wound.
 
@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@ Not present but referenced constantly. Players never meet her, but her shadow is
 
 ### Appearance & Personality
 
-Mid-fifties, neat grey beard, spectacles, ink-stained fingers. Looks exactly like what he claims to be — a fussy academic. Wears a scholar's robe with the Lambent Order's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame) pinned to his lapel. Carries books, quills, and a leather journal filled with notes in a cipher.
+Mid-fifties, neat grey beard, spectacles, ink-stained fingers. Looks exactly like what he claims to be — a fussy academic. Wears a scholar's robe with the Order of Mending's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame) pinned to his lapel. Carries books, quills, and a leather journal filled with notes in a cipher.
 
 Haddon is the most dangerous person at the cultist table because he's the best liar. He's reframed everything he's done as research — the summoning was an "experiment," the fiend was a "test subject," and The Opening is a "theoretical framework." He's lying to himself as much as to anyone else.
 
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ Haddon is the most dangerous person at the cultist table because he's the best l
 **Will share as "scholarly cooperation":**
 - Planar theory — the basics of how boundaries work, what a thin point is, why the tavern feels strange. All accurate, all framed to normalize The Opening's goals.
 - That the death mark on Orenn is fiendish in nature. "Clearly extraplanar damage. Necrotic, with a fiendish signature. Someone — certainly not us — has been dealing in dark pacts." He'll diagnose the Brand of Spite accurately while deflecting blame.
-- The Lambent Order's "research" into boundary integrity. He'll show the planar diagram on the table if asked, presenting it as theoretical cartography.
+- The Order of Mending's "research" into boundary integrity. He'll show the planar diagram on the table if asked, presenting it as theoretical cartography.
 
 **Will not willingly share:**
 - That they summoned a fiend. Specifically, that they summoned **Xarrul** using binding components from Tallow, blood from Dalla, and a name from Mother Vyre's research.
@@ -159,7 +159,7 @@ When Dalla breaks, it's not gentle. The realization that she bled for eight mont
 Haddon's plan — and Dalla's hope while she's loyal — is to **recapture and rebind Xarrul**. This is presented as the "safe" option within the cult:
 - Requires new binding components (Tallow sold them before, he can supply again — for a price)
 - Requires Dalla's blood again (she'll give it without hesitation)
-- Requires the binding circle in the cellar (Orenn's circle could be repurposed — DC 16 Arcana to adapt it)
+- Requires the binding circle in the cellar (the summoners' circle could be repurposed — DC 16 Arcana to adapt it)
 - Haddon leads the ritual. Rennt assists.
 
 **If the rebinding succeeds:** Xarrul is bound again. The cult has its weapon back. Dalla's connection to the binding is restored — which means Lístek's condition might stabilize (stop getting worse) but won't improve. The child stays frozen. Dalla tells herself this is progress. The cult continues toward Phase Two.
@@ -195,7 +195,7 @@ But the method requires thinning the veil between planes — a micro-Opening. An
 
 **Spellcasting.** Rennt is a 2nd-level spellcaster (CHA, DC 13, +5 to hit):
 - Cantrips: *eldritch blast, thaumaturgy*
-- 1st (2 slots): *hellish rebuke, armor of agathys*
+- 1st (2 slots): *hellish rebuke, armor of agathys, thunderwave*
 
 His magic comes from the pact — he made a minor warlock bargain as part of his initiation. He doesn't fully understand what he gave up.
 
@@ -229,6 +229,10 @@ Rennt is the most dangerous kind of extremist: one who's right about the problem
 - What The Opening actually means at scale
 - Mother Vyre's Phase Two plans
 
+### The Blackout (Act 2, DM)
+
+A few rounds into the brawl, pressed by the assassins piling onto him, **Rennt casts *Thunderwave*** — a legitimate defensive knockback. It also snuffs every candle in the hall at once, and in that sudden dark [Xarrul](xarrul.md) kills Orenn behind the bar. Rennt has no idea he provided the cover; he'll deny the cult had anything to do with the murder, and he's *telling the truth* — which makes the cult look damning and be innocent. See **[Murder Mystery — Act 2](../storylines/murder-mystery.md#act-2--the-spark)**. If a PC later accuses him of blacking the room out on purpose, his baffled fury is genuine.
+
 ### If the Dual-Plane Kill Is Proposed
 
 Rennt is **ecstatic**. "Do you see? Do you *see*? The planes *want* to touch. You're doing what Mother Vyre always said was possible — proving that the boundary is artificial!" His enthusiasm is genuine and deeply unsettling. He'll actively help with the ritual, which should make players very uncomfortable about what they're doing.
@@ -267,7 +271,7 @@ Mid-twenties, thin, unremarkable. The kind of face you forget as soon as you loo
 Essek is the closest thing the cultist table has to a conscience, and he's terrified.
 
 **Key traits:**
-- Joined the Lambent Order two years ago because the planar research was genuinely fascinating. He was a student, not a zealot.
+- Joined the Order of Mending two years ago because the planar research was genuinely fascinating. He was a student, not a zealot.
 - Six months ago, he found Mother Vyre's private correspondence in Haddon's study (he was looking for a reference text). He read enough to understand that The Opening isn't theoretical. It's a plan with a timeline.
 - The initiation brand burns when he considers betrayal — not enough to stop him, but enough to remind him he's watched.
 - He wants out. He's looking for anyone he can trust. Players who approach him gently, privately, and without judgment are his best chance.

npc/mags.md

@@ -16,9 +16,9 @@
 **Saving Throws** DEX +7, WIS +6
 **Skills** Perception +6, Stealth +7, Intimidation +4, Investigation +4, Survival +6
 **Senses** passive Perception 16
-**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant, Infernal (learned from years of dealing with fiends)
+**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant
 
-**Cleaner's Instinct.** Mags has advantage on ability checks to track, identify, or analyze fiends and their effects. She can smell brimstone, necrotic residue, and ethereal bleed at close range.
+**Fixer's Read.** Twenty years of interrogations, negotiations, and reading a room for the one person about to draw a knife have made Mags preternaturally hard to fool. She has advantage on ability checks to catch a lie, gauge intent, spot a concealed weapon, or track a mark. She reads *people* the way a scholar reads a page. What she cannot read — what she has no instinct for at all — is anything from the other side of the veil.
 
 **Retired, Not Soft.** When Mags is below half her maximum HP or when an ally she cares about is threatened, she gains +2 to attack and damage rolls.
 
@@ -50,22 +50,51 @@ Her eyes are dark and sharp. When she looks at you, she's not making conversatio
 >
 > *"Tohle je můj dům. Tenhle muž byl můj —" Zarazí se. Polkne. "— byl můj. A nikdo z téhle místnosti neodejde, dokud nebudu vědět, proč je mrtvý."*
 
+## Act 2 — The Reveal (DM)
+
+This is Mags's set-piece: the beat that ends the party and cages everyone. Run it in order, fast, and don't let the players derail the momentum until the ultimatum lands.
+
+**1. Order first.** She comes out of the kitchen mid-chaos, cleaver in hand, and stops the brawl with her voice — not a shout, a *cut*. The room obeys because everyone here knows what she is. She relights the candles with a brass rod behind the bar — leftover house-magic she never thought to question; a word, and every wick catches at once.
+
+**2. The body.** Behind her, Orenn. She sees him a half-second after the players do and goes utterly still (the read-aloud above).
+
+**3. The forced heal.** Her grief comes out as rage, and it needs a target: the nearest cleric-looking PC (a cultist if there's no divine caster; failing that, *any* PC — "you. *Try.*"). She hauls them to the body and demands they heal him. It fails — he's long past a cure.
+
+**4. The forced Revivify.** She won't accept it. She rips the **diamond from her own necklace** — a stone worth a nobleman's ransom, far more than the rite needs — and presses it and a torn, written rite into the caster's hands: *Revivify.* She can't cast it herself — she never could; she's a blade, not a channel — which is *why* she needs them. It fails too. The diamond crumbles to grey powder in their palm. The magic fired, the cost was paid, and **there was nothing to call back.**
+   - *Why it fails (never state it):* the soul is unreachable. Leave the cause unspoken — it could read as a trapped soul, a curse, the wards, dark magic. It should feel *wrong*, not *diagnosed*. It quietly rhymes with what [Thera](assassins.md#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) does to souls — a horror the players may only connect much later.
+   - *It's universal:* even a non-divine PC stumbling through the rite fails for the same reason. Never let the player think they blew it — tell them OOC it wasn't them, even as Mags snarls something about *useless casters*. In-fiction she's cruel; out-of-fiction you wink.
+   - *What it shows:* she carries a resurrection-grade diamond as *jewelry*. She came prepared for someone to die, the way a fixer always is — the first real crack in the "retired barkeep's wife" story, and a hint of the [fixer past](orenn.md#background) she and Orenn buried.
+
+**5. The lockdown.** She takes a fist-sized **ward-crystal** from the shelf above the bar and shatters it on the floor. Every exit slams under an **Arcane Lock until midnight** — front door, cellar trapdoor, shutters. No password lifts it. *She* can't lift it. She's locked in with them, and she did it on purpose. (See [the enchanted door & ward-crystal](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door).)
+   - *DM — the trap she can't see:* the ward-crystal is the old den's **ritual-lockdown stone**, and shattering it does far more than bolt the doors — it starves the last of the leftover containment below and clamps the veil into a crossing-channel. It is the one thing Xarrul still needed, and it engineered the murder precisely so Mags would break it. She thinks she's building a cage; she's finishing the fiend's door, and she has no idea. See [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door) and [Xarrul's plan](xarrul.md#the-nights-clock--presence--escalation). This seeds the late gut-punch: the lockdown she triggered to protect everyone is what lets Xarrul cross.
+
+**6. The ultimatum.** Find her the killer by midnight, or every one of them is tomorrow's stew. No one in the room doubts she means it — that's what matters, whether or not it's literally true. Then she goes to Orenn's body and grieves, quietly, and does not stop working the problem for a second.
+
+### The Two-Layer Accusation (DM)
+
+Mags publicly blames **the strangers** — the PCs. Taken at face value it's thin (a room full of brawling killers, and she suspects the quiet newcomers?). It isn't thin, because it's **theater with a purpose**:
+
+- **The public reason (what she says):** she doesn't know them, so she doesn't trust them. Blaming the outsiders lets her put the screws on *someone* without openly accusing her armed, faction-affiliated regulars — which would light the exact faction war she's straining to prevent. The assassins and cultists relax ("she's after the new blood, not us"), and the lid stays on.
+- **The real reason (what she won't say yet):** the PCs are the only **neutral** party in the building. Everyone else has a faction, a stake, and a reason to lie. She needs investigators she can lean on and who can talk to *both* sides. The death-threat is the leash.
+
+She only levels with them privately once they've earned a sliver of trust — and that turn is a strong beat. Seed it early: a PC who makes an **Insight check (DC 15)** during her tirade clocks that she isn't looking at them like a *killer* — she's looking at them like a *tool*. That read is the thread to the honest conversation later. It also lets you cash Orenn's dangled carrot: *"He was going to open doors for you? Find me who did this, and I'll be what he was going to be to you."*
+
 ## Personality
 
 Mags grieves the way a blade rusts — slowly, internally, and it makes her more dangerous, not less. She won't cry in front of anyone. She might not cry at all. What she will do is find the thing that killed Orenn and end it with the same professional precision she's used her entire life.
 
-She is direct, blunt, and has no patience for lies. She can tell when someone is hiding something — years of interrogating captured fiends gave her an instinct for deception that borders on supernatural (WIS 16, Insight +6 effectively).
+She is direct, blunt, and has no patience for lies. She can tell when someone is hiding something — twenty years of interrogating marks, informants, and men who thought they were cleverer than her gave her an instinct for deception that borders on supernatural (WIS 16, Insight +6 effectively).
 
 **Key traits:**
 - Doesn't ask questions she doesn't already suspect the answer to
 - Respects competence, regardless of morality
 - Will work with anyone — assassin, cultist, player — if it gets her closer to the truth
 - Has not processed Orenn's death and will not during this session. She's running on professional autopilot. The crash comes later, when the doors open and the night is over.
-- She knows fiends. When players bring evidence of fiendish involvement, something changes in her — the grief hardens into something older: the *work*.
+- She does *not* know fiends — not really. When players bring evidence that the thing behind this came from beyond the veil, she doesn't turn expert; she turns *stubborn*. The grief hardens into a refusal to be out of her depth. She'll hunt it like a mark, because hunting marks is the only tool she has — and some part of her already suspects it won't be enough.
 
 ## The Warden's Mark (DM)
 
-Mags carries a **dormant [Brand of Spite](xarrul.md#actions)** over her heart — the same hand-shaped mark that killed Orenn, only fainter and cold. Xarrul branded both wardens: it killed Orenn and *held* Mags in reserve (two dead wardens at once would raise the alarm too soon, and a living Mags keeps the room in line). **She knows.** She has felt the cold hand on her chest for weeks, told no one — not even Orenn — and it is part of why she is so fatalistic. When she says *"Orenn and I could have taken it. One of us isn't here,"* the truth underneath is that she no longer believes she is a whole one of herself.
+Mags carries a **dormant [Brand of Spite](xarrul.md#actions)** over her heart — the same hand-shaped mark that killed Orenn, only fainter and cold. Xarrul branded them both. It killed Orenn — the calmer one, who might not have reached for the panic button — and *kept Mags in reserve*, because it **needed her alive**: she is the one who seals the house (see [the lockdown](#act-2--the-reveal-dm)), and a living, grieving Mags holds the room in line while the fiend finishes its work. Two murdered keepers at once would have raised the alarm too soon. **She knows about the mark.** She has felt the cold hand on her chest for weeks, told no one — not even Orenn — and it is part of why she is so fatalistic. When she says *"Orenn and I could have taken it. One of us isn't here,"* the truth underneath is that she no longer believes she is a whole one of herself.
 
 **Discovery (a mid-game presence beat):** the players can find the mark through [Orenn's silver mirror](orenn.md#items-on-his-person) (the distortion sits over her heart, like the thin point), a DC 14 Medicine or DC 15 Arcana check up close, or Bren reacting to it. It tells them, without a word, that Xarrul is already *inside* the house — inside *her*.
 
@@ -93,27 +122,27 @@ If a table needs a bigger fight on the join path, add **Sevra** at Mags's side r
 - That Bren has been getting worse lately — more agitated, more controlled
 
 **Will share if players earn trust (show evidence, demonstrate competence, or show genuine care for Orenn):**
-- The ward-sigils in the cellar and what they do
+- The old markings and gear in the cellar — she knows they belonged to the summoners who ran this place before them, not what they actually do
 - Orenn's letter (if she's read it by then)
-- That the tavern sits on a thin point between planes
-- That Orenn was investigating the Lambent Order
+- That the tavern sits on a thin point — and that they cleaned a den of summoners out of it years ago and sealed what those summoners had torn open. As far as she knows, that case is *closed*.
+- That Orenn was quietly working the Order of Mending — his surveillance, his case board down in the cellar
 - The location of the hidden compartment in the storage room
-- How to activate the iron bell (partially restores wards)
+- How to ring the iron bell (an old house-trick; she knows the knack, never the meaning)
 
 **Will share only under extreme circumstances (direct evidence of the fiend, the brand explained, or if she's convinced the players are the only chance):**
-- Full details of their cleaner past
-- How to use the binding circle in the cellar
-- Her assessment of whether the fiend can be beaten ("Orenn and I could have taken it. Orenn and I. One of us isn't here anymore.")
+- Full details of their fixer past
+- The summoners' binding circle in the cellar — she knows it *caged* the things they called, not how to work it
+- Her assessment of whether the fiend can be beaten ("Orenn and I could have taken it. Orenn and I. One of us isn't here anymore.") — bravado worn as certainty; she needs it to be true
 - The Oil of Etherealness in the bedroom
 
 **Will never volunteer — but the players may find it themselves (and probably will, if they explore):**
-- The **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** in the cellar and everything behind it — the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: the Vault, the laboratory, the caged **[Guest](the-guest.md)**, the corpse in the second cell, and the failing rift. This is the couple's real, ongoing operation, and Mags assumes no one alive but her knows it exists. If the players surface any of it — the fortune, the prisoner, the trophies implicating patrons upstairs — she doesn't lie, but she goes very still, and what she says next is some of the rawest honesty in the module (see Relationships). In the direst circumstances she may *send* them down for the [Fiendbane Salt](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-cleaners-arsenal) or silvervein root, handing over the black key with the flat instruction: *"Take what you need. Don't touch the cages. And whatever you find down there — it doesn't change tonight."*
+- The **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** in the cellar and everything behind it — the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: the Vault, the laboratory, the caged **[Guest](the-guest.md)**, the corpse in the second cell, and the failing rift. This is the couple's real, ongoing operation, and Mags assumes no one alive but her knows it exists. If the players surface any of it — the fortune, the prisoner, the trophies implicating patrons upstairs — she doesn't lie, but she goes very still, and what she says next is some of the rawest honesty in the module (see Relationships). In the direst circumstances she may *send* them down for the [Fiendbane Salt](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-fixers-arsenal) or silvervein root, handing over the black key with the flat instruction: *"Take what you need. Don't touch the cages. And whatever you find down there — it doesn't change tonight."*
 
 ## Her Role in the Session
 
 Mags is the emotional anchor and the gatekeeper. She controls access to the tavern's secrets and to the most powerful tools available. She's also the person enforcing the lockdown — which means she's keeping assassins and cultists in the same room, a pressure cooker that she's managing through sheer force of will.
 
-She will not fight alongside the players unless the fiend manifests in the Material Plane inside the tavern. Then all bets are off. The retirement ends and the cleaner comes back.
+She will not fight alongside the players unless the fiend manifests in the Material Plane inside the tavern. Then all bets are off. The retirement ends and the fixer comes back — and a fixer's answer to a problem is to end it.
 
 **If the players side *with* the fiend:** she becomes the obstacle between them and its crossing — see [The Warden's Mark](#the-wardens-mark-dm) for how to run that fight so the *players*, not Mags, decide the night.
 
@@ -126,4 +155,4 @@ She will not fight alongside the players unless the fiend manifests in the Mater
 - **Bren:** She's been feeding him and keeping him safe for months. She suspects something is wrong beyond madness but hasn't had time to investigate.
 - **Sevra:** Professional respect, mutual wariness. Mags knows what the guild does and doesn't approve, but Sevra has always respected the rules of the house.
 - **Haddon:** She doesn't trust him. Never has. Can't articulate why — just a feeling. (Her instinct is correct.)
-- **The [Guest](the-guest.md):** The prisoner she's fed twice a day for eleven years and never once called by a name. If the players confront her about it, she doesn't defend it and she doesn't flinch: *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."* If they freed it, she's grimly unsurprised. If they killed it in its cage, she doesn't recoil — she *recognizes* the choice, and that recognition is its own quiet verdict on them. The Guest is the clearest mirror of what "cleaner" really meant, and Mags will not pretend otherwise once it's in the open.
+- **The [Guest](the-guest.md):** The prisoner she's fed twice a day for eleven years and never once called by a name. If the players confront her about it, she doesn't defend it and she doesn't flinch: *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."* If they freed it, she's grimly unsurprised. If they killed it in its cage, she doesn't recoil — she *recognizes* the choice, and that recognition is its own quiet verdict on them. The Guest is the clearest mirror of what "fixer" really meant, and Mags will not pretend otherwise once it's in the open.

npc/orenn.md

@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 # Orenn — The Barkeep
 
-*"Welcome to the Burnt Tongue. Sit anywhere. Don't start anything."*
+*"Welcome to the Nether Inn. Sit anywhere. Don't start anything."*
 
-**Status:** Dead. Murdered during the brawl.
+**Status:** Dead. Killed behind his own bar, in the dark, mid-brawl. He does not come back.
 
 ---
 
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ In death, his expression is one of genuine surprise. Not fear, not pain. He didn
 
 ## Personality
 
-Orenn was the calm at the center of a storm. He spoke quietly because he didn't need to shout. He was polite because politeness costs nothing and buys time. He ran the Burnt Tongue with the same precision he once used to clean fiends out of sewer tunnels — measured, deliberate, with an exit strategy for every scenario.
+Orenn was the calm at the center of a storm. He spoke quietly because he didn't need to shout. He was polite because politeness costs nothing and buys time. He ran the Nether Inn with the same precision he once used to clear a room of men who wanted him dead — measured, deliberate, with an exit strategy for every scenario.
 
 He believed in rules not because he was lawful but because rules were the only thing that kept this particular powder keg from detonating. He treated every patron — assassin, cultist, beggar, addict — with the same level of professional respect. Not warmth. Respect. There's a difference.
 
@@ -28,46 +28,51 @@ He believed in rules not because he was lawful but because rules were the only t
 - Never raised his voice
 - Remembered every face and every debt
 - Treated Mags as an equal in every sense
-- Was investigating the Lambent Order quietly — he suspected they were more than scholars but hadn't uncovered the truth
-- Kept the old cleaner tools and wards maintained, "just in case"
+- Was investigating the Order of Mending quietly — he suspected they were more than scholars but hadn't uncovered the truth
+- Kept the previous owners' gear and the old seal in the cellar in some kind of order — re-traced the chalk out of closed-case habit, never really understanding it
 - Had a dry sense of humor that surfaced rarely and always caught people off guard
 
 ## Background
 
-Orenn was a cleaner for over twenty years. When the city's underworld spawned something it couldn't handle — a rogue summoning, an unbound elemental, a fiend that slipped through a botched portal — the fixers called Orenn and Mags. They worked as a pair: Orenn did the tracking, planning, and binding; Mags did the killing. They were expensive, reliable, and discreet.
+Orenn was a **fixer** for over twenty years. When the city's underworld had a problem that needed to *stop existing* — a rival crew, a blackmailer with the wrong ledger, a body that couldn't be found, a job that turned out worse than anyone was paid for — the people with money called Orenn and Mags. They worked as a pair: Orenn did the watching, the planning, and the talking; Mags did the killing. They were expensive, reliable, and discreet. They dealt in *people* — and a handful of times, across a long career, in things that turned out not to be people at all. Enough times to own a little salt and a shelf of borrowed books. Not enough to call themselves experts in anything but ending trouble.
 
-They retired fifteen years ago after a job that went wrong — details are scarce, but Mags has a scar that runs from her left temple to her jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after that. They bought the Burnt Tongue because it was the last place anyone would look for them, and because the thin point in the cellar needed watching.
+The job that ended them was **this house.** Fifteen years ago a den of summoners was working out of the building — calling things up through the thin point in its bottom — and it had gone bad enough that someone paid well to have it cleaned out. Orenn and Mags took the contract, killed and scattered the cult, and it cost them: Mags carries a scar from temple to jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after whatever they found in the dark down there. The tear the summoners had torn was sealed once the dust settled — by the cult's own last containment, or the specialist brought in on the job; *not* by them. They took the building as **payment** (no one else wanted a cursed cult-den on a bad corner), told the world they'd retired, and settled in on top of a case they were certain was closed.
 
 ### The Retirement That Wasn't
 
 "Retired" was always a story Orenn told the world — and, on his gentler days, himself. The truth is buried behind a concealed door in the cellar, in the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: a hidden warren that is the couple's real workplace. They never stopped. They just moved the work downstairs and got quiet about it.
 
-- **The fortune.** Twenty years of expensive, discreet cleaner work is stacked in the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) — well over 2,000 gp in coin, gems, and deeds. The modest life upstairs (their bedroom lockbox, 150 gp, two silver rings) is genuine and sentimental. The war-chest below is genuine and paranoid. Both are true. That contradiction *is* Orenn.
-- **The laboratory.** They still brew — fiend-hunting alchemicals for themselves, and Veil Dust as a *tool* for watching the thin point (never for sale). See the [Workroom](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-workroom-laboratory).
-- **The Guest.** Their darkest ongoing secret: a **changeling** they captured eleven years ago and never released, held in a cell below and used as an off-book spy — most recently to infiltrate the **Lambent Order**. This is *how* Orenn was "investigating the cult." See **[the-guest.md](the-guest.md)**. Orenn told himself, and the Guest, that they'd let it go "eventually." Fifteen years of eventually. He died still meaning to.
+- **The fortune.** Twenty years of expensive, discreet fixer work is stacked in the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) — well over 2,000 gp in coin, gems, and deeds. The modest life upstairs (their bedroom lockbox, 150 gp, two silver rings) is genuine and sentimental. The war-chest below is genuine and paranoid. Both are true. That contradiction *is* Orenn.
+- **The laboratory.** They still brew — the poisons and suppressants a fixer's trade runs on (the Guest's "trim dose" among them), working out of the den's leftover alembics and the anti-fiend odds and ends the summoners abandoned. The Veil Dust down there is the *previous owners'* research into working the thin point; Orenn and Mags kept it because it was valuable and occasionally useful on a job — not because they were watching anything. See the [Workroom](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-workroom-laboratory).
+- **The Guest.** Their darkest ongoing secret: a **changeling** they captured eleven years ago and never released, held in a cell below and used as an off-book spy — most recently to infiltrate the **Order of Mending**. This is *how* Orenn was "investigating the cult." See **[the-guest.md](the-guest.md)**. Orenn told himself, and the Guest, that they'd let it go "eventually." Fifteen years of eventually. He died still meaning to.
 - **The Guest's predecessor** starved to death in the next cell when it stopped being useful ([Cell Two](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-two--the-long-dead)). Orenn allowed that. The calm, courteous barkeep who treated every patron with respect was also a man who could keep a person in a cage for a decade and sleep — mostly — at night. The players may learn this. It should complicate how they grieve him.
 
 Orenn was not a good man wearing a bad past. He was a genuinely kind man who had done, and was still doing, monstrous things — and had made his peace with the arithmetic. That's the dark history the Deep Cellar reveals, without anyone having to confess a word.
 
 ## How He Died
 
-Xarrul killed Orenn with the full chain: **Brand of Spite** to mark him, **Visions of Spite** to freeze him in a hallucination of his own worst fear, then claws through a body that couldn't flinch. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting target with no allies to intervene, all three stages collapsed into seconds. Orenn was behind the bar during the brawl. Everyone was distracted. Xarrul materialized just enough to touch him from the other side, branded him, locked his mind, and struck — then retreated to the Ethereal Plane before the dust settled. The expression on Orenn's face isn't surprise at death. It's the last frame of whatever Xarrul forced him to see.
+Xarrul killed Orenn with the full chain: **Brand of Spite** to mark him, **Visions of Spite** to freeze him in a hallucination of his own worst fear, then claws through a body that couldn't flinch. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting target with no allies to intervene, all three stages collapsed into seconds.
+
+The timing was the trick. Orenn had stepped down to storage for supplies just before the brawl broke — which is *why* it ran unchecked; with him gone there was no one to shut it down. He came back up to do exactly that, waded into the scrum, and caught a mundane knock (a bottle, a chair) that left him bruised and bleeding but very much alive. Then **Rennt's Thunderwave killed the candles** and the hall went black, and in that dark Xarrul jaunted partway into the Material Plane behind the bar, branded him, locked his mind, and struck — then retreated to the Ethereal before the lights came back. Total exposure: seconds. The expression on his face isn't surprise at death. It's the last frame of whatever Xarrul forced him to see.
+
+**He cannot be brought back.** Whatever the brand did, his soul is beyond reach — *Revivify*, *Raise Dead*, *Resurrection*, all of it finds nothing to hold. Mags burns a diamond proving it in [Act 2](../npc/mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm). This is permanent, and the module never softens it. (Leave the *reason* unspoken in play; it should feel wrong, not diagnosed.)
 
 **Physical evidence on the body:**
 - A **black brand** on his chest, roughly the size of a spread hand. It's not a burn in the traditional sense — the skin is unmarked on the surface, but beneath it the flesh is charred. DC 14 Medicine reveals the damage radiates *outward* from the heart, as if something ignited inside him.
-- **No defensive wounds.** He didn't fight back because there was nothing to fight.
+- **A mundane brawl wound (decoy).** He's cut and bruised from the blow he took wading into the fight — it *looks* like the brawl killed him. DC 14 Medicine confirms it didn't: the injury is survivable; the fatal damage is internal, with no external wound to explain it.
+- **No defensive wounds.** He didn't fight back against the *thing that killed him* — there was nothing to fight.
 - **DC 15 Arcana on the brand:** Identifies it as necrotic damage with a fiendish signature. Not any spell in common use — something older, more personal. Like a fingerprint.
 - **DC 18 Arcana:** The brand's pattern contains a fragment of Xarrul's true name. A character who records the pattern and later compares it to fiendish lore (Orenn's bestiary in the bedroom, or Haddon's texts) can identify the specific type of fiend they're dealing with.
 
 ## What He Knew (For DM Reference)
 
-Orenn suspected something was wrong for weeks. He noticed:
-- The ward-sigils weakening (he checked them monthly)
-- Increased ethereal bleed-through near the thin point
-- The cultists meeting more frequently and with more urgency
-- Bren's condition worsening (more agitated, more controlled)
+Orenn suspected something was wrong for weeks — but he was looking in the wrong direction, and he never once looked *down.* His whole career had trained him to think in people and factions, not in the thing sealed under his own floor, and the case on that was *closed.* What his surveillance actually turned up (all of it on the [case board](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-long-cut-central-corridor) in his old cellar ops-room) was a **district-wide** wrongness he read as an *underworld* problem:
+- People turning up dead or gone across the quarter in ways that didn't add up — some of it Thera's work, some of it he couldn't source at all
+- The Order of Mending meeting more often, more urgently — his strongest, realest lead, and the one that let him blame everything else on the cult
+- Patrons *changing* under his own roof — Bren's raving, Vetch chasing stronger dust — which he filed as recruits and addicts, not symptoms
+- A cold that had crept over the district these last weeks, dreams gone bad on the block, the corner's old unlucky name getting louder
 
-He didn't know about Xarrul specifically, but he was preparing. The holy water, silversheen, and warding chalk in the storage room were recent purchases. The letter in Mags's apron was his contingency plan. He ran out of time.
+He didn't know about Xarrul, and he never connected any of it to the sealed rift beneath him. He thought the trouble was out in the city. He was preparing anyway — the holy water, silversheen, and warding chalk in the storage room were recent, nervous purchases, a fixer buying insurance against something not-human he could feel moving but couldn't name. The letter in Mags's apron was his contingency. He ran out of time, twenty feet above the answer.
 
 ## Items on His Person
 
@@ -75,4 +80,4 @@ He didn't know about Xarrul specifically, but he was preparing. The holy water,
 - A **plain black iron key**, heavier than the rest, that fits nothing upstairs. It opens the **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** to the Deep Cellar and the Arcane-locked [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) below. Anyone who searches the body (DC 12 Investigation, or automatic if they loot him) finds it; recognizing what it opens is the mystery. The Guest, if reached, will happily point at it.
 - A **silver ring** (plain, matches one in the lockbox upstairs)
 - 12 gp, 8 sp in a belt pouch
-- A **small silver mirror** (not magical, but Orenn carried it out of habit — in the cleaner days, mirrors were used to spot ethereal entities by the distortion they cause in reflections. DC 15 Perception while using the mirror in the cellar reveals faint distortions near the thin point.)
+- A **small silver mirror** (not magical, but Orenn carried it out of habit — an old trick from somewhere in his career: hold up a mirror and a thing that shouldn't be there warps the reflection. He carried it for years and never quite expected to need it. DC 15 Perception while using the mirror in the cellar reveals faint distortions near the thin point.)

npc/tallow.md

@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ He smiles easily but the smile never reaches his eyes. When he laughs, count you
 
 ## Personality
 
-Tallow is a survivor. He has no ideology, no loyalty, and no principles beyond one: protect the business. He's been the middle man between the House of Scales and the Lambent Order for years, supplying both sides with what they need and profiting from the tension between them. The barkeep's death terrifies him — not because he cared about Orenn, but because Orenn's neutral ground was the ecosystem that kept his business alive.
+Tallow is a survivor. He has no ideology, no loyalty, and no principles beyond one: protect the business. He's been the middle man between the House of Scales and the Order of Mending for years, supplying both sides with what they need and profiting from the tension between them. The barkeep's death terrifies him — not because he cared about Orenn, but because Orenn's neutral ground was the ecosystem that kept his business alive.
 
 **Key traits:**
 - Never gives information for free. Always wants something in return — not always gold; sometimes a favor, sometimes a secret, sometimes just the satisfaction of creating a debt.
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ Tallow is a survivor. He has no ideology, no loyalty, and no principles beyond o
 - The brawl was about territory — the assassins think the cultists are taking contracts
 - Vetch is desperate for a fix and will do almost anything for one
 - Bren has been here for months and is getting worse
-- The Lambent Order claims to be scholars. Nobody believes them.
+- The Order of Mending claims to be scholars. Nobody believes them.
 
 **Will trade for moderate value (20+ gp, a promise of protection, or damaging information about a rival):**
 - He sold the cultists **binding components** last month — "three pints of lethe-marrow, a coil of silver wire inscribed with something I couldn't read, and a jar of rendered tallow. Fat. Not... not me." The order came through dead drop, unsigned, but he knows it was Haddon.

npc/the-boarder.md

@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+# The Boarder — Emergency Replacement PC ("Wick")
+
+*A drop-in PC for the player whose character walked out the front door (see [the enchanted door](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). They rent the spare room upstairs, so they were always here — hand the sheet over and fold them into the scene with no ceremony. The player builds the sheet on D&D Beyond; this is the concept and the plot wiring, not stats.*
+
+## The One-Liner
+
+A lapsed priest of the **Threshold (Práh)** — the death-god's order that counts souls across — hiding from their own failure in the last place a temple would ever look, and the only boarder Orenn trusted under his roof. Now the man who gave them sanctuary is dead in a way resurrection won't touch, which is the exact horror that broke them once already.
+
+## Who They Are
+
+- Goes by **Wick** — a use-name, not the one they were ordained under. (Fitting for a priest of the passage: they tend the flame that marks a soul out, and they've watched too many gutter.) The player can rename freely.
+- Rents the small spare room on the upper floor. Orenn didn't let people sleep under his roof — Wick is the exception, and neither of them ever fully said why. Orenn gave sanctuary the way he gave everything: quietly, with rules, and no questions about the past. Wick paid in coin and in the off-books doctoring the house needed — patching brawl wounds, easing withdrawals, sitting with the dying regulars no city physician would touch.
+- **Neutral.** No tie to the Scales or the Order — which is exactly why Mags extends them a sliver more rope than she gives the strangers.
+
+## Why They're the Perfect Drop-In
+
+The scene the player re-enters *has a body in it*, and Wick has an instant, natural role: house healer and death-priest both, so examining Orenn is simply what they'd do. Their read is plot-load-bearing:
+
+- They peel the **decoy wound** at a glance — this brawl knock didn't kill him.
+- They *feel* the wrongness before anyone rolls Arcana: a soul that isn't where a soul should be. They have no name for it. They've felt it once before, and it cost them their faith.
+- If you want the gut-punch, Wick is the ideal target for Mags's **forced Revivify** ([Mags — Act 2](mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm)): the resident death-priest, the one person who *should* be able to call him back, holding a burning diamond over a man who won't come. Let it land.
+
+## What Wick Knows (soft clues — thread-starters, never answers)
+
+Months over the bar have soaked them in the surface of everything without their understanding any of it:
+
+- **Orenn had been off for weeks** — up at odd hours, buying strange supplies (Wick carried a crate of "salt and chalk and holy water" up the steps for him once), checking the cellar more than a wine cellar warrants.
+- **Night noises from below.** Scratching, a cold draft up the stairwell, Orenn descending at hours when no barrel needs tapping. He told Wick once, flatly: *"The room at the bottom of the stairs isn't yours. Don't go looking."* They obeyed. They always wondered.
+- **The patrons' ailments.** Wick has quietly treated half this room and noticed **Dalla's** tremor and the scars up her arms (they read as ritual bloodletting, not self-harm); **Vetch's** dependency and what he'll do for a dose; **Bren** getting *worse* in a way that isn't madness; and that one of the assassins (**Dace**) sleeps like a man with something eating him.
+- **Mags and Orenn were more than they let on.** Wick has seen the scars, the economy of movement, the "decorations" that are weapons. They never asked.
+
+## What Wick Does NOT Know (guardrails — keep the mystery intact)
+
+- Nothing about the **Deep Cellar**, the **Guest**, the vault, or the fixer past beyond "they were dangerous once." Orenn walled the boarder off from the real secret — and *learning it* is part of Wick's night, complicating their grief exactly the way it complicates the party's.
+- Nothing about **Xarrul**, the summoning, or who killed Orenn.
+- Nothing about **soulcoins** or the guild's rot. Their sense of *"I've felt this wrongness before"* is instinct and old trauma, not knowledge — keep it a feeling, never a briefing.
+
+## The Personal Thread (their light "dossier")
+
+- **The wound.** Wick left the Threshold after a run of deaths in their care where the rites *failed* — souls that should have crossed simply weren't there to guide, and no one at the temple could tell them why. Disbelieved, then quietly shelved, then gone. They came to the city to disappear. Tonight, Orenn dies of the very thing they ran from. *(This is a deliberate, unspoken echo of what [Thera](assassins.md#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) does — a resonance for the DM, not a clue to hand over. If your table pulls the guild-rot thread hard, Wick's history can quietly corroborate it much later.)*
+- **The goal.** Protect the one place that took them in — and finally find out what Orenn was hiding under the floor. That drive points them straight at the investigation and, eventually, down the stairs, aligning them with the party by default.
+
+## Standing With Mags
+
+Mags knows Wick, tolerates Wick, and trusted Orenn's judgment in letting them stay. In the [two-layer accusation](mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm) she won't seriously suspect the house's own boarder — which makes Wick a natural bridge between the returning player and Mags's private trust. Play it so the strangers still have to *earn* the rope Wick starts with: Wick can vouch for the party, or spend that standing badly. The player's call.
+
+## Building the Sheet (general only)
+
+Keep it around **level 4** to match the party. The concept wants a **divine healer** — a Grave or Life cleric of the Threshold sits perfectly, and Grave Domain's death-flavored kit (spare the dying at range, holding people up at 0 HP) is thematically ideal — but reflavor freely: a Twilight cleric, a death-touched paladin, a Divine Soul sorcerer, or a secular battlefield physician if the player wants no faith at all. Nothing about Wick's plot role needs a specific class; it needs *someone who tends the dying and feels the wrongness of this one.*
+
+**Dial-down option.** If you don't want the Threshold / soul-death resonance at your table, run Wick as a purely secular **fugitive apothecary** — same room upstairs, same soft clues, same bond with Orenn, minus the death-god history. You lose the thematic echo; you keep the perfect drop-in.
+
+## Read-Aloud: Re-Entry (optional)
+
+> *Ze schodů, které vedou nahoru do soukromých pokojů, sejde postava, kterou dnes večer skoro nikdo nezaregistroval — nájemník z patra, přivolaný tím rámusem. Zastaví se na posledním schodu. Přejede pohledem převrácené stoly, ztichlou místnost, Magsina záda. A pak to, co leží za barem. Ať čekali cokoli, tohle ne.*
+
+*(This is where the returning player takes over as Wick.)*

npc/the-guest.md

@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ In its **worn form** (what the party first sees): whatever face serves. By defau
 Eleven years and it hasn't escaped, because Orenn and Mags built the cage out of more than iron:
 
 1. **The suppressant** (above) — dosed, it can't shift, and a changeling that can't change is just a prisoner.
-2. **The ward-lock** on the cell (runed nails; DC 15 Thieves' Tools, jolts on failure) and **Přástka**, the [phase spider](../location/deep-cellar.md#encounter--the-guardian), which can follow it across planes. There is nowhere a changeling can run that a phase spider can't.
+2. **The ward-lock** on the cell (runed nails; DC 15 Thieves' Tools, jolts on failure) and **Twinkle**, the [feyspitter spider](../location/deep-cellar.md#encounter--the-guardian), denned one room over. It feels every footfall through the webs that lace the warren, blinks ahead to cut off a runner, and grapples with reach — there's nowhere down here a changeling on foot gets past it.
 3. **The real chain — leverage.** The couple know its **true name** and, worse, they know the names of the people still hunting it for a job it did before they caught it. The moment it surfaces, those people find it. Orenn's promise, kept for eleven years: *behave, and we never make that call.* With Orenn dead, that promise just died too — and the Guest knows it. **This is the crack the players can pry at, in either direction.**
 
 ---
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ Eleven years and it hasn't escaped, because Orenn and Mags built the cage out of
 The Guest is the best-informed prisoner in the building, because its whole function was *knowing things*:
 
 - **The couple's true history** — every job on the chalk wall, who paid, who died, what's in the Vault, and what happened to the changeling in **Cell Two** (*"They called her the Guest before me. When she stopped being useful, they stopped feeding her. I listened to it take eleven days. So — you'll understand if I'm eager to be useful."*).
-- **The Lambent Order.** This is the hook that threads the exploration back into the murder. Orenn's last and longest assignment for the Guest was to **infiltrate the cult** — the Guest spent nights wearing a member's face at meetings in the [private room](../location/back-rooms.md) and beyond. It can reveal: the cult's obsession with the thin point, the name **Mother Vyre**, that they were preparing to *summon something*, and that Orenn was closing in on them. It does **not** know the fiend was Xarrul, or that the summoning already happened tonight — it's been in a cell. But what it knows corroborates the whole cult subplot and can point a stuck party toward the [Lambent Order](../storylines/lambent-order.md) and the [Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md).
+- **The Order of Mending.** This is the hook that threads the exploration back into the murder. Orenn's last and longest assignment for the Guest was to **infiltrate the cult** — the Guest spent nights wearing a member's face at meetings in the [private room](../location/back-rooms.md) and beyond. It can reveal: the cult's obsession with the thin point, the name **Mother Vyre**, that they were preparing to *summon something*, and that Orenn was closing in on them. It does **not** know the fiend was Xarrul, or that the summoning already happened tonight — it's been in a cell. But what it knows corroborates the whole cult subplot and can point a stuck party toward the [Order of Mending](../storylines/order-of-mending.md) and the [Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md).
 - **Where Orenn hid things** (the black key, the Vault's contents) — it watched the couple for eleven years. It misses nothing.
 - **It did not kill Orenn** and has an airtight alibi (a locked cell three floors down). But it will happily *let* the party suspect whomever suits its purposes, if that buys it freedom.
 
@@ -109,7 +109,7 @@ Meeting the Guest is a **genuine moral fork** with real mechanical outcomes. The
 | Choice | What happens |
 |---|---|
 | **Free it, trust it** | It keeps its word *as far as it goes*. It'll trade everything it knows about the cult (a real leg-up on the Reckoning), and may even fight the rift creatures beside the party — it wants that tear closed as much as anyone. Then, at the first unwatched moment, it takes a face and **vanishes** into the city. It doesn't betray the party; it simply leaves, wearing someone. A loose end, walking. |
-| **Free it, then try to bind/control it** | It agrees, smiles, complies — and works the whole time to slip the deal. If it gets a day (suppressant fades) or an opening, it turns: full stat block, Ambusher, and if it can it takes **a PC's face** first to sow chaos before escaping. A memorable, dangerous fight or chase (it may flee as a rat through the [infestation](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-junction-hub-cave) — a horrible callback). |
+| **Free it, then try to bind/control it** | It agrees, smiles, complies — and works the whole time to slip the deal. If it gets a day (suppressant fades) or an opening, it turns: full stat block, Ambusher, and if it can it takes **a PC's face** first to sow chaos before escaping. A memorable, dangerous fight or chase (it may flee as a rat through the [infestation](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-long-cut-central-corridor) — a horrible callback). |
 | **Leave it caged** | It's furious behind the smile. As the party leaves it calls after them — soft, reasonable, devastating — *"The door swings shut the same way for everyone down here. Remember that, when it's your turn."* If the party later **burns the cellar** (the fifth rule) without freeing it, it dies in the fire. Make them hear about it. |
 | **Kill it** | Easy, if it's dosed and caged. It doesn't fight — it looks almost relieved. *"There. That's the kindest thing anyone's done for me in eleven years. I hope someone's that kind to you."* Its info dies with it. If Mags learns the party murdered a caged prisoner, it colors how she sees them — not with horror (she's done worse) but with recognition, which is its own kind of judgment. |
 
@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ Meeting the Guest is a **genuine moral fork** with real mechanical outcomes. The
 
 ## Hooks Into the Rest of the Session
 
-- **Murder mystery / cult:** the Guest's infiltration intel corroborates the Lambent Order subplot and can un-stick a party that hasn't cracked the cult. It's the exploration track's bridge back to the main mystery.
+- **Murder mystery / cult:** the Guest's infiltration intel corroborates the Order of Mending subplot and can un-stick a party that hasn't cracked the cult. It's the exploration track's bridge back to the main mystery.
 - **Character secrets:** at least one Personal Goal in [character-secrets](../handouts/character-secrets.md) points a PC at the Guest specifically (a face from their past, a contact to free, or a mark to silence). If a PC secretly knows the Guest, the cell scene detonates.
 - **Mags:** she knows exactly what's down there and expects the players never to find it. If they free or kill the Guest, raise it with her — her reaction (defensive, then bleakly honest) is some of the best late-game character work available. *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."*
 - **The rift:** the Guest is an early-warning system for the [Old Work](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-old-work) — its fear telegraphs the danger before the party stumbles into it.

npc/xarrul.md

@@ -6,17 +6,17 @@
 
 ## Overview
 
-Xarrul is an ancient, cunning fiend — not a brute, not a conqueror. A manipulator. A patient intelligence that has survived for centuries by being smarter than the things that summoned it. It was bound by the Lambent Order, sent to assassinate Sevra, intercepted by the House of Scales, and accidentally freed when the assassins broke its bindings without replacing them.
+Xarrul is an ancient, cunning fiend — not a brute, not a conqueror. A manipulator. A patient intelligence that has survived for centuries by being smarter than the things that summoned it. It was bound by the Order of Mending, sent to assassinate Sevra, intercepted by the House of Scales, and accidentally freed when the assassins broke its bindings without replacing them.
 
 For all those centuries, Xarrul has never once been *real*. It has been summoned, bound, sent on errands, and dismissed — a whisper behind the glass, a borrowed claw, watching mortal life the way you watch a fire through a window: close enough to feel nothing. It does not want power or conquest. It wants to stand on the *other side* of the glass — to stop being a thing that is called, and become a thing that lives here.
 
-The Burnt Tongue is its chance. The tavern sits on a thinning veil at a natural peak, and for fifteen years one man kept that veil mended: Orenn, the warden. Killing Orenn was the first move of an escape — remove the keeper and the door opens on its own. Everything since (the framing, the whispers, the faction blood) is not spite. It is *cover*: Xarrul learned, from centuries of being hunted by cleaners like Orenn, that the way to cross unnoticed is to keep everyone in the building too busy killing each other to notice the wards are dying.
+The Nether Inn is its chance. The tavern sits on a natural thin point — a fault the building's old owners, a den of summoners, once tore half-open before Orenn and Mags cleaned them out and left the breach sealed. Xarrul chose this fault off the cult's map precisely because it was already worked thin, and because the deepest chamber is a hidden, forgotten place to labour undisturbed. For weeks it has been prying that old seal open from the Ethereal side — but a leaky, open house let its crossing dissipate, so it needed one thing more: the house sealed shut around it, into a closed vessel it could finish crossing inside. Only the summoners' emergency lockstone does that, and only a killing makes the surviving keeper break it. So Xarrul killed Orenn — the calmer of the two, the one who might not have panicked — knowing his partner would seal the house in grief and hand the fiend exactly the door it needed. Everything since (the framing, the whispers, the faction blood) is not spite. It is *cover*: keep everyone too busy killing each other to notice what the lockdown really did, or to interfere before midnight.
 
 It is intelligent, patient, and — beneath the amusement — genuinely monstrous. But it does not lie. In a house where everyone is hiding something, Xarrul tells the plain truth about what it is and what it wants. That is what makes it dangerous, and it is what makes *siding* with it possible (see [Scenario F: The Open Door](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul)).
 
 ## Stat Block
 
-**Xarrul** — Medium fiend, chaotic evil
+**Xarrul** — Medium fiend, lawful neutral
 **AC** 15 (natural armor) | **HP** 78 (12d8+24) | **Speed** 30 ft., fly 30 ft. (hover)
 
 | STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
@@ -56,6 +56,8 @@ It is intelligent, patient, and — beneath the amusement — genuinely monstrou
 - Only one creature can be branded at a time. Branding a new target removes the previous brand.
 - The brand lasts until removed by *Remove Curse*, *Greater Restoration*, or the death of Xarrul.
 
+*DM — the stealth brand (out of combat).* This is also how Xarrul marks a victim unseen, and it is meant to be **rolled and resolved in secret.** It picks a moment of cover — darkness, a brawl, a blackout, or reaching from the Ethereal Plane at someone isolated — and rolls to hit against the target's AC without announcing anything. **On a miss,** the ambush shows through for one second: the target glimpses the real thing — a cold hand closing over their chest, a shadow-claw, two points of amber light — and *knows* something reached for them. **On a hit,** say nothing at all. The 2d6 necrotic is real, but you do not narrate a brand or an attack; you fold it straight into a masking **Waking Dream** (below) and keep telling the story. The one thing it cannot disguise is the damage *type*: every covered "accident" in the house tonight leaves a cold, greyish, necrotic wound, and that invariant is the crack investigators pull on. *(In open combat, branding is loud and visible — the mark is meant to be seen, and the kill chain below takes over.)*
+
 **Visions of Spite.** *Requires a branded target.* Xarrul forces a branded creature it can see within 30 feet to witness a spiteful vision — a hallucination tailored to the target's deepest fears and shames, channeled through the brand's connection. The target must succeed on a **DC 15 Wisdom saving throw** or take 7 (2d6) psychic damage and be **paralyzed** until the end of its next turn, frozen in the grip of the vision. On a success, the target takes half damage and shakes the vision off. The brand remains on the target regardless.
 
 **Example visions (pick or improvise based on the target):**
@@ -77,6 +79,14 @@ It is intelligent, patient, and — beneath the amusement — genuinely monstrou
 
 *This is how Orenn died. Xarrul branded him from the Ethereal Plane, forced a vision of spite into his mind — freezing him in place — then raked him with claws that struck a body incapable of flinching. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting barkeep with no allies to intervene, the full chain collapsed into seconds. In combat, with allies and agency, it's telegraphed and interruptible.*
 
+**Waking Dream.** *Requires a branded target Xarrul can see (line of sight — it has to be present, which is exactly what sets Bren off; see **The Two Jobs**, below).* Reaching through the brand, Xarrul rewrites the target's memory of the **last minute** — not what it perceives now, but what it *remembers* having just perceived. **No saving throw. No damage.** A save would tip the player off that reality is negotiable; this never does. For an NPC, just play them as though the false memory is true. For a PC, never announce it and never say "think back" — weave the false memory inline with your normal narration, as settled fact, and move on. The edit holds until hard evidence contradicts it or *Remove Curse* / *Greater Restoration* / Xarrul's death lifts it.
+
+- **Cover.** Cast the instant after a stealth Brand to rewrite the branding into a mundane accident — a spark from the fire caught a sleeve, a drink went down wrong, a stumble against a bench. The mark and the necrotic wound remain; the memory of earning them is gone.
+- **Misdirection.** Plant a false memory in a branded witness: they now sincerely *remember* seeing an innocent slip behind the bar, a threat that never happened, a clue that was never there. One branded person, turned into an honest false witness. It can reproduce any entry on the [Veil Dust hallucination table](../storylines/ethereal-trip.md#hallucination-table) as a "memory."
+- **Limits.** Only the branded creature's memory changes — one target at a time, so an *unbranded* witness to the real event contradicts the false one, and it cannot clean a crowded room. The necrotic wound is the seam. And it must be present to cast it.
+
+*Two tells, always: the **Bren-spike** (a memory was just rewritten near us, right now) and the **necrotic wound + hand-mark** (this person was rewritten at some point tonight). Xarrul can fake everything except death's signature — and that is the crack that lets mortals catch it.*
+
 **Whisper of Ruin (Recharge 6).** Xarrul targets one creature within 30 feet that can hear it. The target must make a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or become frightened for 1 minute and compelled to take a specific action on its next turn (attack a specific ally, drop a weapon, flee toward a designated area). The target can repeat the save at the end of each turn. On a success, the creature is immune for 24 hours.
 
 ### Reactions
@@ -111,10 +121,12 @@ More defined. A gaunt, angular figure with skin like charred paper, cracked with
 ## Tactics
 
 ### Before Discovery
-Xarrul stays in the Ethereal Plane, watches, and stirs trouble:
+Xarrul stays in the Ethereal Plane, watches, and stirs trouble. Its cover tools are short-range (Voice Thief and whispers reach 30 ft., telepathy 60), so working the room means coming *into* the room — which is what makes Bren react (see **The Two Jobs**, below). It:
 - Uses Voice Thief to whisper incriminating things in NPCs' ears ("I saw Haddon near the bar" whispered in Kael's voice to Sevra)
-- Occasionally manifests a claw or shadow near the thin point to keep Skein (and therefore Bren) agitated
-- If players get too close to the truth too fast, Xarrul creates a distraction — a fight between factions, a strange noise, a candle blown out
+- Stealth-brands an isolated patron and edits their memory (**Brand of Spite** + **Waking Dream**) to plant a false lead or an honest false witness
+- If players get too close to the truth too fast, creates a distraction — a fight between factions, a strange noise, a candle blown out
+
+It does **not** deliberately agitate Skein to rattle Bren — that backfires (an agitated Skein is a distracted one that loosens its grip and lets Bren surface). It wants Skein calm and Bren silent; see **Skein — a Tool, Not an Ally**, below.
 
 ### When Confronted
 - **First priority:** Not getting trapped. It will use Slip Between and Ethereal Jaunt aggressively to avoid being pinned on one plane.
@@ -128,17 +140,75 @@ Xarrul doesn't lair in the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md), but it has
 ### The Dual-Plane Kill
 See [The Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md). If players attempt the synchronized kill, Xarrul fights desperately on both planes. On the Ethereal Plane, it's more aggressive (this is its home ground). On the Material Plane, it tries to flee. Both halves must die within 1 round of each other for the cure to work.
 
+## The Two Jobs — How Xarrul Works the Night
+
+Xarrul has two tasks that cannot be done from the same place, and it spends the night shuttling between them.
+
+**Downstairs — tend the tear.** The crossing is *labour,* not a countdown. The old seal wants to close (the summoners' wards are cracked but not dead — Bren feels them "failing"), so Xarrul must periodically re-open and hold the seam: recharge it, realign it as it drifts, feed the bleed back into it. This is the actual goal-progress, done at the thin point in the cellar, away from Bren — **no tell fires down here.**
+
+**Upstairs — tend the cover.** Keeping the investigation from converging on the cellar before midnight. Its cover tools are short-range — Voice Thief and whispers reach 30 ft., telepathy 60 — so working the room means being *in* the room, within range of Bren. **This is where the tell fires.**
+
+It can't be in both places, so early in the night it is mostly downstairs (the brawl aftermath does its cover work for free) and surfaces only to nudge; late in the night it is dragged upstairs more and more. That shuttle is the engine for everything below.
+
+### The Brenometer — Bren as a Fiend-Detector
+
+Xarrul does **not** use Skein as an alarm (it is the most perceptive thing in the building; it needs no half-blind parasite for a sensor), and it does **not** deliberately agitate Skein — that would be self-sabotage, because a frightened Skein is a *distracted* one that loosens its grip and lets Bren surface (see [Possession — Bren as a Xarrul-detector](../storylines/possession.md)). The relationship runs the other way:
+
+**Xarrul's own presence agitates Skein, and a frightened Skein means a briefly lucid Bren.** So Bren is a detector the *players* can learn to read: when the madman goes rigid, stares at empty air, or snaps briefly coherent, something cold is in the room *right now*. Kael saw exactly this during the brawl and never understood it — Bren went stiff, staring at the bar, because that was Xarrul killing Orenn at point-blank presence.
+
+This makes presence a **metered, self-limiting risk.** Being near Bren cracks the muzzle on the one witness who can describe it, so Xarrul stays ethereal and distant by default and comes close only when it has business — and every memory it edits (**Waking Dream**) fires the tell, because that needs line of sight.
+
+### Why It Gets Bolder as the Night Runs
+
+Three drivers, all pointing the same way — this is the mechanism under **The Night's Clock** (below):
+
+1. **Cover decays.** Early, the brawl aftermath and faction distrust do its work for free. As the party pools clues and converges, that natural chaos runs down and it must re-inject confusion by hand — more trips up, more tells.
+2. **Exposure gets cheaper.** Early, being caught is fatal (the crossing isn't far enough along to survive interruption; it can still be cheaply rebound). Late, once the seam is wide, catching it no longer easily stops the crossing — so it dares to show itself. This is the mask coming off.
+3. **The tear needs more tending.** Late, the seam is wide and volatile — near-constant holding, not the occasional nudge.
+
+Net: it is stretched thin, present more often, and bolder — so the Brenometer fires hardest exactly as the crossing peaks. Its one witness gets loudest at the worst possible moment for it.
+
+### The Attention Lever (a handle for the players)
+
+Because its attention is finite and split, the party can tax it without understanding why:
+
+- Investigate **loudly and cooperatively** → they force it upstairs to firefight → the tear goes untended → the crossing **stalls** (at the cost of lighting the tell, revealing it, and provoking the scatter-kill — see the Kael row in **Who It Kills, Who It Spares**, below).
+- Go **quiet** → it tends the tear uninterrupted → the crossing **accelerates.**
+
+This inverts the usual creep-around instinct: the loud, chaotic table is, without knowing it, doing the thing that slows it down — and the careful, quiet one is handing it the night.
+
+### In the Ethereal Plane — Proprietary, Not Territorial
+
+Xarrul is **not territorial.** The ethereal cellar is its *worksite,* not a lair it defends by instinct — it is a recent, purposeful operator sharing the plane with Skein, the scavengers, the binding circle it avoids, and the deep Ethereal beyond. Its response to anyone who reaches the Ethereal Plane is keyed to exactly one question: *does this threaten the crossing?*
+
+- **An observer** (a Veil Dust tripper who simply *sees* it): it does **not** attack. Violence would confirm hostility and blow the ambiguity it cultivates. It watches, and it *talks* — Voice Thief, telepathy, truth mixed with misdirection. Contact is an opportunity, and a party that's talking to it isn't ringing the bell.
+- **A trespasser** (exploring, not yet touching the work): attrition, not commitment — the herded rift-scavengers (above), cold, dread, a manifested claw. It buys time and discourages; it will not commit to a fight that exposes it early.
+- **A threat** (moving to breach the seal, wake the iron bell or the foundation sigils, re-power containment, or hitting it with something that pins or hurts it across planes): now it is self-defense — immediate, lethal, and smart (Slip Between, Brand the most dangerous, Whisper of Ruin to divide them). The instant they stop threatening the crossing, it disengages.
+
+It is proprietary about the *process,* not the *space.* Someone can stand in "its" ethereal cellar all night; it does not care until they touch the work — then the response is instant, and it is an accountant's decision, never instinct.
+
+### Skein — a Tool, Not an Ally
+
+Xarrul neither befriends nor hunts Skein by default; it **exploits** the parasite and holds it in contempt ("a lesser thing, feeding on scraps"). Its whole stance tracks one variable: *is Bren's mouth currently shut?*
+
+- **Default — coexistence.** Skein muzzles the only eyewitness to the murder *for free* (its Silence the Host keeps Bren incoherent, for its own reasons), and a party that finds Skein first may burn the clock on the possession subplot instead of the crossing. Xarrul does nothing for Skein and needs to do nothing — the parasite censors its witness at no cost.
+- **It protects the muzzle — deniably.** If the party is about to *kill* Skein in the Ethereal Plane, a freed Bren becomes a lucid, coherent eyewitness — an arcanist who studied this exact fault and can point them straight at the crossing. Xarrul won't overtly rescue vermin (too exposing), but it tips the scales: a scavenger into the fight, a Shadow Surge, a divisive whisper — enough to let Skein *flee* (its own ability) and keep Bren muddled.
+- **Their interests align.** During a lucid window (severed tendrils, *Protection from Evil and Good*), Xarrul and Skein briefly want the same thing — Bren silent — and it may nudge Skein to reclaw its grip. Fiend and parasite, for a moment, on the same side against the free man.
+- **It kills Skein only if the parasite turns.** A cornered Skein trying to buy its life by informing the party about the bigger fiend becomes a liability and dies without a second thought. (Unlikely — it is too terrified and too small to try.)
+
+Fighting Skein directly is beneath its dignity. They share a plane; only one of them is playing chess.
+
 ## Motivation — What It Really Wants
 
 Xarrul is not mindless evil, and it is not merely *petty* evil either. It has one clear, cold want: **to become real** — to cross the veil permanently and walk the world as a resident, not a summoned tool. For centuries it has been called up, bound, made to run errands, and dismissed; it wants to stand on the far side of the glass. Everything it does tonight serves that single end.
 
-**Why it killed Orenn.** Not for revenge — or not *only*. Orenn was the **warden**: fifteen years of mending the ward-sigils and watching the thin point, the one hand holding the door shut. Kill the keeper and the veil decays on its own. The murder was the first move of an escape, dressed up as a statement. That it was also satisfying — the cultists tried to enslave it, the assassins broke its chains and gave it no respect — was a bonus, not the point.
+**Why it killed Orenn.** Not for revenge — or not *only*. Orenn's death does two things the crossing needs. First, it **triggers the lockdown**: a killing in the house is what makes Mags shatter the summoners' lockstone, and that seal is the closed vessel Xarrul must have to finish crossing (see [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock) and [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). Killing *Orenn* specifically — the calmer one, who might have investigated coolly instead of panicking — guarantees the grieving, protocol-following partner is the one holding the stone. Second, it removes the **one watcher** whose surveillance was quietly circling the fiend (Orenn never knew it lived under his own floor, but he was getting close from the wrong direction). That it was also satisfying — the cultists tried to enslave it, the assassins broke its chains and gave it no respect — was a bonus, not the point.
 
-**Why the chaos.** The framing, the whispers, the faction blood — none of it is spite. It is **cover**. Xarrul spent centuries being hunted by cleaners like Orenn; it knows the only way to cross unnoticed is to keep everyone busy killing each other while the wards quietly die. Every manipulation is operational:
+**Why the chaos.** The framing, the whispers, the faction blood — none of it is spite. It is **cover**. Xarrul spent centuries being hunted by fixers like Orenn; it knows the only way to cross unnoticed is to keep everyone busy killing each other while it finishes its work in the sealed house. Every manipulation is operational:
 
 - The Brand leaves fiendish evidence → the cult gets blamed.
 - The murder happened during the assassins' brawl → the timing implicates *them*.
-- Both sides at each other's throats → no one tends the veil. That is the *goal*, not a side effect.
+- Both sides at each other's throats → no one stops to ask what the lockdown really did, or goes looking for the crossing before midnight. That is the *goal*, not a side effect.
 
 **On the Opening.** Xarrul has no interest in Mother Vyre's grand design and is not part of her plan — but it is not a harmless loose thread either. Where the cult wants to dissolve *every* wall between planes for everyone, Xarrul wants one crack, just wide enough for itself. It is, functionally, the **enemy of the Opening** — and that is exactly the leverage it offers a party desperate enough to bargain (see [The Reckoning — Scenario F](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul)).
 
@@ -148,13 +218,13 @@ Xarrul is not mindless evil, and it is not merely *petty* evil either. It has on
 
 The old shape of this module was a whodunit: *what killed Orenn?* → "a fiend" → fight it. The reframed shape keeps the fiend's identity as an *early, cheap* answer and makes the real investigation **moral**: *is this thing actually the villain here?* For that to land, Xarrul must be **felt all night** and slowly recontextualized — from ambient menace, to a voice that seems to taunt, to the only honest dealer in the room.
 
-Presence escalates on a **ward-clock**. Orenn checked the sigils monthly; he is dead, and no one is mending them. As the night runs, the thin point widens — the room grows colder, the ethereal bleed thickens, Xarrul manifests more fully and kills more openly. If the clock runs out, Xarrul **crosses over completely**: permanent, material, no more Slip Between, far worse to fight. The players slowing the clock (the iron bell, re-powering the cellar containment, the fifth rule's *burn-and-seal*) is the pushback; their failure to is complicity.
+Presence escalates on the **lockdown clock**. The moment Mags shatters the lockstone, the house seals across every plane into a closed vessel — and Xarrul, sealed inside on the ethereal side, begins finishing its crossing through the old tear. It has until **midnight**, when the seal lapses on its own. As the night runs, the crossing advances — the room grows colder, the ethereal bleed thickens (no longer diffusing away into the district, but pooling *inside*), Xarrul manifests more fully and kills more openly. If the clock runs out, Xarrul **crosses over completely**: permanent, material, no more Slip Between, far worse to fight. The players slowing or breaking the clock — **breaching a sealed exit** to re-open the vessel, the iron bell, re-powering the cellar containment, the fifth rule's *burn-and-seal* — is the pushback; their failure to act is complicity. (Full mechanism: [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock).)
 
 **The escalation ladder (presence = the clock made audible):**
 
-1. **Ambient dread (Acts 1–3).** No identity yet. Cold spots, a candle that gutters with no draft, Bren flinching at something no one else senses, distortions in [Orenn's silver mirror](orenn.md#items-on-his-person). The house feels *inhabited*.
-2. **It notices you (early Act 4).** Once the party investigates, Xarrul whispers to them — Voice Thief, telepathy. **Mix lies with truths.** Some whispers misdirect (the smokescreen); some are *real and checkable* — it points them at a genuine clue, corrects a wrong guess. They can't yet tell whether it's helping or playing them. That ambiguity is the engine.
-3. **Honest contact (mid–late Act 4).** A real channel opens — Veil Dust, the mirror, or it simply speaks near the thin point. Now it *converses*: candid about the murder, candid about *why*, and everything it says checks out against what they've dug up — while everyone with a face keeps lying.
+1. **Ambient dread (Acts 1–2).** No identity yet. Cold spots, a candle that gutters with no draft, Bren flinching at something no one else senses, distortions in [Orenn's silver mirror](orenn.md#items-on-his-person). The house feels *inhabited*.
+2. **It notices you (early Act 3).** Once the party investigates, Xarrul whispers to them — Voice Thief, telepathy. **Mix lies with truths.** Some whispers misdirect (the smokescreen); some are *real and checkable* — it points them at a genuine clue, corrects a wrong guess. They can't yet tell whether it's helping or playing them. That ambiguity is the engine.
+3. **Honest contact (mid–late Act 3).** A real channel opens — Veil Dust, the mirror, or it simply speaks near the thin point. Now it *converses*: candid about the murder, candid about *why*, and everything it says checks out against what they've dug up — while everyone with a face keeps lying.
 4. **The pitch (Reckoning).** They have the context now. The offer becomes emotionally available (Scenario F).
 
 **The device that carries all of it: a recurring voice.** Dry, amused, unattributed. It seems to taunt early; it is slowly revealed to be Xarrul; it is slowly revealed to have *never once lied*. A few lines per scene. The reframe — *the cruellest-seeming thing turns out to be the only honest one* — lands itself.
@@ -165,19 +235,19 @@ Keep the **first impression genuinely menacing** (Orenn's horrific death, the sc
 
 Sympathy is not safety. Xarrul is understandable, honest, and the lesser evil — **and** it methodically murders everyone who could stop it. The menace is in the *curation*: it kills exactly what threatens its crossing and is terrifyingly good at knowing who that is. Cold, surgical, inevitable. When the players realize everyone still breathing is *useful to it* — that it has been playing chess with the guest list all night — that is the coldest beat in the module.
 
-Overt killing is expensive while it hides (it needs the smokescreen), so the body count **escalates with the ward-clock** — the mask comes off precisely as it becomes real. Run every kill below as a **DM tool triggered by player choices**, not a scripted inevitability; otherwise you delete your own endings (kill Haddon on a timer and a party that never considered rebinding loses that branch for nothing).
+Overt killing is expensive while it hides (it needs the smokescreen), so the body count **escalates with the lockdown clock** — the mask comes off precisely as it becomes real. Run every kill below as a **DM tool triggered by player choices**, not a scripted inevitability; otherwise you delete your own endings (kill Haddon on a timer and a party that never considered rebinding loses that branch for nothing).
 
 | When | Move | Target | Why |
 |------|------|--------|-----|
-| Pre-game | Kill (done) | **Orenn** | The warden. The first move. |
-| Early–mid Act 4, *if the party stalls* | **Deniable** kill | **Kael**, or a minor patron | Reads as faction violence *or* fiend — keeps the mystery alive, re-raises stakes, can light the faction war. It's still hiding. |
+| Pre-game | Kill (done) | **Orenn** | The calm keeper — killed to trigger the lockdown and clear the one watcher. |
+| Early–mid Act 3, *if the party **converges*** | **Deniable** kill | **Kael** (the witness), or a minor patron | Not to start a war — to **scatter**. Kael is more useful alive (a self-propelled war-fuse) until he flips: the honest witness who starts focusing his testimony and rallying the room toward a *coordinated* hunt. Killing him then reshuffles the coalition back into mutual suspicion and buys another hour. War is a possible side effect, not the aim — a boil is high-variance cover; it wants a simmer. |
 | Conditional | **Reactive** kill | **Haddon**, *only if the party moves to rebind it* | "You reach for the chains, I take the hand." Punishes a choice instead of pre-deleting the rebinding path. |
-| Late / crossing | **Open** kill (mask off) | the ward-mender / the most competent threat | Done pretending. Fully manifest, kills in the open. Peak horror, gated on the clock. |
+| Late / crossing | **Open** kill (mask off) | the most competent threat left standing | Done pretending. Fully manifest, kills in the open. Peak horror, gated on the clock. |
 | **Spared — always** | — | **Essek** (indicts the cult for it), **the Guest** (its intended vessel), sometimes a **branded PC** (grooming) | The chess set. Notice-this-and-shudder. |
 
 > **Grooming → conversion.** The "branded PC" it spares isn't just kept alive — it may be *turned*. A lone PC caught in the Deep Cellar can be marked with a brand of favor and genuinely persuaded to Xarrul's side (not charmed — argued). See [handouts/the-conversion.md](../handouts/the-conversion.md).
 
-**The laundering effect.** The people it kills are largely ones the party has already soured on — fanatics building toward the apocalypse, a hothead spoiling for a bloodbath. A join-leaning table *rationalizes* the murders ("Rennt was going to end the world anyway"). That is the seduction: Xarrul launders its violence through the party's own contempt for the victims. Which is exactly why it also needs one move they *can't* wave away.
+**The laundering effect.** Most of the people it kills are ones the party has already soured on — fanatics building toward the apocalypse, a true believer who'd end the world to prove a point. A join-leaning table *rationalizes* those deaths ("Rennt was going to end the world anyway"). That is the seduction: Xarrul launders its violence through the party's own contempt for the victims. Which is exactly why it also needs one move they *can't* wave away — and the **Kael kill is one such move.** He is sympathetic, loyal, and no one's apocalypse-builder, and Xarrul kills him not for being dangerous but for being *useful to the truth*. Murdering the honest man to buy forty minutes stays cold even *with* the context. That is the whole principle in one beat: every kill is *explicable* — a cold observer can reconstruct exactly why it happened — but not every kill is *forgivable*. The context turns the murders from senseless into calculated, never from wrong into right.
 
 ### The Kidnap — Honesty Weaponized
 
@@ -191,7 +261,7 @@ It does not bluff, and the players *know* it doesn't, because you've spent all n
 
 ## The Warden's Mark (Mags)
 
-Xarrul worked on *both* its wardens. Orenn it branded and killed. **Mags it branded too** — a dormant Brand of Spite over her heart, the same hand-shaped mark Orenn bore, only fainter and cold rather than killing. It has held off triggering it: two dead wardens at once would raise the alarm before the wards decayed enough, and a living Mags is useful — a scapegoat, a jailer keeping the others in line, a heart to break later.
+Xarrul worked on *both* of them. Orenn it branded and killed. **Mags it branded too** — a dormant Brand of Spite over her heart, the same hand-shaped mark Orenn bore, only fainter and cold rather than killing. It has held off triggering it, because **it needs her alive**: she is the one who seals the house (the murder is what makes her do it), and a living, grieving Mags is useful afterward — a scapegoat, a jailer keeping the others in line, a heart to break later. Two dead keepers at once would raise the alarm too soon.
 
 **Mags knows, and hides it.** She has felt the cold hand on her chest for weeks and told no one, not even Orenn. It is part of why she is so fatalistic; when she says *"Orenn and I could have taken it. One of us isn't here,"* the truth underneath is that she no longer believes she's a whole one of herself. The players can discover the mark — Orenn's silver mirror, a Medicine/Arcana check, Bren's reaction — a mid-game beat that says, without a word, that Xarrul is already inside the house, inside *her*. Full detail and the compromised statline live in [mags.md](mags.md#the-wardens-mark-dm).
 
@@ -208,7 +278,7 @@ Either way, triggering the mark keeps the spotlight on the PCs rather than on a
 - Mother Vyre's real name and location (leverage against the cult)
 - Dace's treachery (it watched from the Ethereal Plane)
 - The nature of Skein (it recognizes the parasite — "a lesser thing, feeding on scraps")
-- That the thin point is growing and the wards are failing — not because of The Opening, but because thin points naturally fluctuate and this one is at a peak
+- The truth about the thin point: it's a natural fault the old summoners tore and someone sealed, nothing to do with The Opening — and that *Xarrul itself* is what's prying that seal open now, with the sealed house doing the rest
 - The exact method of its own destruction (the dual-plane kill) — it will NOT share this willingly, but it might slip in arrogance: "You cannot kill me. Not truly. Not unless you could be in two worlds at once."
 
 ## Items