The Chrononauts help the young heir to the throne of Karrnath, Kaius III, escape from the Dreadhold. Kaius III confronts the man sitting on the throne and reclaims his crown, bringing an end to the Last War and ushering in a new era of peace. But the new future is not quite what the heroes expected.

Player Characters: Calvin, Mist, Rolf, Teromil, Vaelen

The Dreadhold (993 YK, Nymm)

The dwarves of the Mror Holds built the slaughterstone eviscerator as a guardian for their keeps and dungeons. The insectlike construct, covered with adamantine armor and brimming with whirling blades, advanced upon the heroes. It moved with a surprising mobility for such a hulking, ponderous-looking machine. The four massive blades, each large enough to be wielded by an ogre, were spinning in a deadly whirlwind.

Kaius III and Thriller pulled steam pipes from the walls and used them as improvised weapons. They charged at the construct while the chrononauts assailed it with ranged attacks. Travis, revealing himself to be a bard, joined Calvin and Rolf in bolstering the heroes with songs of inspiration. But the front line soon crumbled as the Karrnathi prince and the warforged fell to the whirling blades.

Vaelen used his divine power to heal the fallen prince. It was then that he noticed something hidden among the pipes along the wall. It was a fiddle case with numbered dials much like the one that Aiden was holding. This was no ordinary container but a coordinate transformer field kit – a compact time machine. It came with a small note written in Elvish script which read, “Save the King.”

Mist looked at the dials and deduced that they were set to predetermined temporal spatial coordinates. The destination was the castle of the king of Karrnath in the city of Korth. He also noticed another case behind the first. This one was a boxy container with latches on one side. Inside, there was a book titled Grey’s Almanac: The History of the Last and Statistical Forecasts. It also came with a note, but this one was written in Dwarvish runes and read, “Beware the Eye.”

These items had clearly been left here for the chrononauts to discover. But who were their mysterious benefactors, and what were their motives for offering these boons and warnings? The heroes had no time to worry about that now. The construct was advancing toward them.

Rolf drew a mystical rune of warding to defending himself and stepped into the fray, hoping to hold off the machine while Mist and Teromil blasted it with their thunder cannon and radiant energy. They destroyed several of its blades and legs, hampering it’s attacks and mobility. But as the blades began to slow, the machine emitted strange noises and the red glow of its eyes grew brighter. The heroes realized that the construct was preparing to self detonate.

“Run for your lives!” Calvin shouted to the others as he ran back the way he came. But it was too late. As the construct exploded, everything seemed to move in slow motion. Before the fire and shrapnel engulfed him, Vaelen activated the coordinate transformer field kit. Mist, realizing that the field kit would transport only living creatures and their possessions, grabbed hold of the fallen Thriller’s body. Then, as the construct erupted into a hail of fire and fragments, the chrononauts vanished in the blink of an eye.

Korth, Karrnath (993 YK, Vult)

The heroes found themselves in the throne room of Crownhome, the fortress-palace in the Karrnathi capital city of Korth. The grand hall was lined statues of the kings of Karrnath all the way back to Karrn the Conqueror. At the far end of the hall where the statues ended, the grim throne of the king was raised on a platform above a stairway.

Most visitors entered the throne room through the stairs and emerged beneath the king’s feat with the king’s eyes upon their back. But the chrononauts could see the king seated upon the throne across the long chamber. He had the face of a handsome youth, but his shoulders were crooked and hunched over like a decrepit old man. A beautiful elven woman dressed in an exotic yet formal robe stood beside him. Vaelen recognised her as an Aereni elf, perhaps a diplomat. But he sensed that she was not as she seemed. A fiendish essence seemed to emanate from her. Other than these two, the entire throne room was strangely empty.

The Aereni whispered into the king’s ear, then turned to the heroes. She fixed her gaze upon Calvin and the glowing green pick around his neck. Then she flashed a wicked smile and vanished from sight. Before she disappeared, Teromil reached out with his mind and searched the thoughts of the Aereni. He realized that she was not an elf. Her inhuman soul was filled with pure evil, and her thoughts echoed with a sinister laughter.

Suddenly, a portal to another realm opened in front of the heroes. A tiny sprite reached out from the portal and handed a tiny glowing needle to Kaius III. As he did so, both the needle and the sprite grew in size until the needle became a sword and the sprite became a handsome youth. Calvin recognized him. It was Phann, the Warlock of the archfey and a former chrononaut of Dr. Morris.

“I bestow this gift of the Summer Queen to the true king,” said Phann. Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the portal closed and Phann had vanished.

At last the king noticed the intruders. Realizing that he was alone, he looked surprised and alarmed. He cried out in a shrill voice,
“Who are these interlopers? Where are my guards? Is no one here?”

As Kaius III held the sword, radiant light shined from the blade. It’s light was as brilliant as the noonday sun. The king upon the throne cried out in pain as the light of the sword filled the room and burned his flesh. His cry was cut short when Kaius III dashed up to the throne and stabbed the king trough the chest with his radiant blade.

As the king’s body turned to ash, he looked up at his assailant and said,

“Why… my son…”

“Goodbye, father,” Kaius III replied.

Kaius III had reclaimed the throne from his father, Kaius II. The latter had made a pact with the Blood of Vol and had been turned into a vampire. He had expanded the powers of the Blood of the Vol and their paramilitary arm, the Emerald Claw, and suppressed an attempted coup by warlords led by forces loyal to his own father, Kaius I, who had not returned from his self imposed exile.

For their help in rescuing him from the Dreadhold, Kaius III bestow the heroes with three mighty gifts. He gave them the Sword of Summer used to kill his father. He gave them the components needed to repair Ultron and recharge its temporal displacement capabilities. And he gave them the resources needed to repair and restore life to the fallen warforged Thriller.

The chrononauts thanked the new king for his generosity, but they sensed that something was amiss. Returning Kaius III to the throne had been too easy. They wondered what kind of new future had been wrought.

The chrononauts looked inside Grey’s War Almanac. It contained an accurate history of all the events during the Last War and following century. They discovered that Kaius III would indeed bring an end to the Last War, but he would also push an agenda of eugenics and forced sterilization upon the people of Khorvaire other than his chosen people – humans, half elves, and elves. Dwarves had a special place in this new social order as bards and minstrels. Worst of all, he would ensure that the warforged were never freed. How could they be given the same rights as sentient beings, let alone his chosen people?

There was a minor footnote in the year 1093 YK, the same year that it was published. A warforged emissary named Builder from the Warforged Sanctuary would go to Karrnath to speak to the king. He wanted help petitioning the nations to allow the warforged to establish their own autonomous nation in the Mournland. However, he was killed by unknown assailants during his visit. Builder was a spiritual and political leader among the warforged, and his assassination set off a chain of events that led to great unrest among the warforged.

Neither Ultron nor Grey’s Almanac could make predictions beyond a century into the future. Mankind’s history seemed to come to an abrupt end near the turn of the century, in the year 1094 YK.

The chrononauts used the newly repaired Ultron to travel 197 years into the future to find out what happened afterwards. Their spatial anchor was the location of the warforged Thriller. They followed Thriller’s lifeline to their new coordinates in time and space.

Karrnath (1190 YK, Aryth)

The heroes arrived in a future torn apart by war once again. It was a dark rainy day in a clearing within a deep forest. They were in a refugee camp for human survivors of a deadly virus. They saw the warforged Thriller being held captive as a prisoner by human soldiers. Their leader was a tall bald man wielding a Richmond and Roland thunder cannon.

“You damn dirty warforged! This is all your fault. We should never have brought your kind into existences,” the humans exclaimed. Thriller refused to speak and pressed his forehead to the barrel of the thunder cannon, daring the fleshborn soldier to pull the trigger.

The humans were about to execute the warforged when the heroes intervened. Suddenly, the earth rumbled with footsteps all around them. The shadows of the woods were filled with the red lights of warforged eyes. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, and they had the camp completely surrounded. Each pair of red eyes glowed menacingly with a monster’s gaze as they advanced upon the camp of human survivors.

To be continued…