The Alazar
Five hundred years after the Heroes of Southaven, a village wizard tried to save the world. She took the roof off instead.
The Story So Far
It is the spring of 1767 SC. Brandyburrow is still famous for brandy, ale, and pickles, and the taproom of The Pickled Sparrow is still the warmest room in the village. Nothing about the evening suggests it is the last ordinary one.
Wick Sweetwater, a hedge-wizard with more theory than sense, has spent eleven years building something she will not explain to anyone. She started after the dreams began. Tonight she walks out of the taproom with a pack she can barely carry and goes down into the chalk tunnels under the eastern hill to finish it.
What comes up out of that cellar is a frightened halfling, some scorch marks, and eleven wasted years. Nothing else. Nothing at all.
Four days later, the stars are wrong.
Three weeks after that, a light crosses the sky that does not behave like a star, and The Alazar comes down in a barley field.
What the Party Will Learn
Every constellation is gone. The moon has a sibling now. The Church has no doctrine for either and is not handling it well.
There are other worlds out there, thousands of them, close enough to reach and full of people who have never heard of Elandria. They do not think a world appeared this spring. They think a blank spot on their charts, a fault three centuries old that ships routed around out of habit, finally resolved into something.
Which raises the question of what exactly was sitting in that blank spot, and for how long, and who put it there.
Magic still works here, and it works out there too. Out there it mostly comes in a housing, with a licence and a serial number, fitted by someone who did not design it. Worlds like this one are common enough that the galaxy has a word for them and a form to fill in at the port.
The Ship
The Alazar is a long-hauler with a bad registry and a worse reputation, and she is the first vessel to make landfall on a world nobody could see last month. Whatever else happens, the party leaves on her.
Set in the same universe as The Heroes of Southaven, five centuries later.