Nott’s porcelain mask slips in the street one day. She was too distracted by the man who had walked past her, his coat practically covered in shiny objects. She reaches to the ground, hastily picks it up, furtively looks around.
A hand rests on her shoulder, and she jumps. Oddly, though, the hand is from about her own height. She looks over and sees a gnome in full plate armor, blonde hair pulled back into a bun. The gnome smiles. “Your family doesn’t have to define you, not if you don’t want it to.”
Caleb puts his hands into a loaf of bread, just as he had shown Jester and Beau weeks ago. It’s cold, and he’s hungry, and it’s a hard habit to break even when they have more than enough coin to throw around now. He looks at the bookshop he was planning to enter, seeing a white-haired man in a fine coat standing there. Caleb pauses, decides to wait for the man to leave.
When the white-haired man comes out, he seems to notice Caleb there. He pauses, and says, “Your pain is part of you. Make it work for you.”
Jester bounces through the street festival, depositing pamphlets to the Traveler wherever she can. Amidst the bright colors and the hubbub, she’s almost invisible. Like she used to be.
She stumbles, and is caught by an older woman with – antlers? Jester does her best to memorize this sight; she’s sure that it will make an excellent addition to her collection of drawings. The woman smiles, her face seeming ageless somehow. “You’ve got friends now. As long as you have their back, they’ll have yours.”
Beau looks at the letter in her hands that somehow found its way to her, and balls up her fists in anger. She wishes she hadn’t read it. She wishes she could cut herself off entirely, and fears that isn’t possible.
A dark-haired woman – half-elf, she guesses – steps out in front of her. Beau’s first instinct is an angry retort, but she thinks about what Fjord might say, and bites her lip. The momentary delay gives the older woman time to speak. “You can be more than what your father wanted of you.”
Yasha sits in a bar with a tankard of ale before her, just kind of staring at it. She thinks about Xhorhas and everyone that she left behind there. She thinks about her new friends, some of whom seem more accepting than others, and tries not to wonder when they’re going to ask her a question she isn’t ready to answer.
Someone sits down next to her. Her eyes are already narrowed as she turns to look at the goliath. She’s never seen anyone like him. She didn’t know goliaths could grow beards. The goliath downs his own tankard of ale. “It’s who you choose to associate with that really matters,” he tells her.
Molly stops to admire a street performance. A pair of gnomes seem to be engaging in some kind of friendly duet, each of them telling a more exaggerated story than the last. Molly can definitely appreciate a good story.
He pulls a coin from his pouch and tosses it into the hat the gnomes left out. The male gnome removes his hat with an elaborate flourish and bows to Molly. “Others might put labels on you, but you’re the only one that gets to decide who you are.”
Fjord listens to their stories, one by one. The stranger who stopped them and told them something that seemed unusually piercing, unusually meaningful. It would be easy to laugh that all off as some kind of coincidence, but he’s starting to think that sometimes coincidence isn’t.
That night, in his dreams, it’s not the giant face of his patron that he sees. It’s a half-elf, clad all in black with raven’s wings outspread from his back. “Your patron might have gifted you that power, but you’re the one that gets to do something with it.”
He wakes up to a raven on his chest, beady eyes staring, before it lets out a caw and flies away.
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