Tranquil Sunset's Chapter

### Tranquil Sunset's backstory

Tranquil Sunset has been raised from birth in a cult dedicated to Jergal, the god of death, the Great Scribe impartially and implacably recording and observing the eventual end of everyone and everything in Te Ao. This cult calls itself the Brotherhood of the Lambent Scythe. They are not good people.

Tranquil Sunset's main task was to record the names of everyone in the cult who died, and help look after the cult's Holy Ledger. The idea is, if you live a devoted life as a servant of Jergal, your name gets put in the Ledger and at the end of your life / the end of eternity, you get a special place in the afterlife as thanks. Tranquil Sunset's supervisor was a grim little fellow called Chaptermaster Flur. The main cult leader, Mistress Eingang, was a deeply charismatic cleric with a lot more charm than her more Spartan followers. Tranquil Sunset genuinely looked up to her in a way.

Tranquil Sunset's faith was first shaken when she found that some names in the Holy Ledger had been crossed out, some time shortly before she was born into the cult. The handful of names were so violently stricken from the Ledger that they were illegible. All the Chaptermaster would tell Tranquil Sunset is that they were 'deserters' and heretics - and he punished Tranquil Sunset for being insubordinate and churlish. At this point, TS started writing her own private diary, as a way to commune with Lord Jergal free of censorship.

Chaptermaster Flur died shortly before TS's escape. As his junior, it was her duty to tidy his belongings and finish writing the story of his life. However, she found that the Chaptermaster kept records incriminating him - he was taking bribes from the Vestfalian Iconoclasts, and keeping the cult sheltered in return for tipping off the locations of other divine sects. One name came up a lot in Flur's records: Van de Klyster (a northern-sounding name - maybe someone from Tafel).

Not only that, but Flur and Mistress Eingang, along with several other prominent cult leaders, were planning a mass sacrifice of kin, some kind of dark but pointless ritual that TS was sure had more to do with keeping its followers in line than making Jergal happy.

Tranquil Sunset was disenchanted with the cult, but still believed strongly in the god of death. In fact, she felt closer to him th emore she saw and read about the death and chaos that surrounded Vestfal, as well as the increasing numbers of undead that had begun to roam the land. She felt that the god of death wouldn't just sit idly by and watch the carnage. He would get curious, he would want to get involved and perhaps even interfere with matters of life and death. Perhaps he wasn't the bleak and impartial entity she'd been told he was - perhaps death was, in fact, random, even chaotic.

In a fit of zeal, Tranquil Sunset stole a precious artifact out of the Chaptermaster's quarters - a gleaming silver pen, that can write on almost any surface and never runs out of ink, said to have once been held by the god HImself. When she writes an entry in her diary, Jergal sees and Jergal reads - and sometimes, in a silvery, spidery hand - he writes back..

#### Tranquil's revelations

- Among the names of the people struck off the Holy Ledger by the Brotherhood is none other than Coulisse, the man who helped repopulate Delemont and who started his own grubby little anti-religious cult there. Coulisse was called up to fight for the Vestfalians and helped massacre the original village in a raid 30 years before - he'd have been 17 at the time, in his late 30s when he founded Delemont and about 50 when he was kicked out by Roquette's Roadies.

- Jergal is seriously annoyed about the undead. It was his job to keep the undead under control - after the Spindle slipped, he had more and more issues with this and with divine power weakened in Vestfal, the country's having renewed problems with Fundamentally Evil monsters emerging from underground. Jergal is on the fence about whether to do his duty and re-inter all the undead, or whether to use them to bolster faith in him once more. He would also very much like to have a little chat with Pomeranius the human lich, who has somehow managed to cheat death via entirely arcane means.