Session : The Wagon Report
General Summary
Tolliver was driving the wagon. Somehow, impossibly, Tolliver was driving the wagon.
No horse. No reins. No visible means of control, only the ring that tethered the thing to will and chance.
At first, it moved with strange obedience. Then, it began to accelerate.
The road blurred. The shouts of the street rose in alarm. Ahead, Pan ni Tata, the beloved bread stall, thronged with morning customers.
Tolliver, full of confidence and panic both, pulled the ring to make the wagon turn.
It did not turn.
It lurched.
Wood split and iron shrieked as the wagon tilted onto its side, sliding hard against the cobblestones before skidding toward the river.
In an instant, everything fractured, noise, bodies, and instinct.
Tolliver leapt free, rolling across the road.
Brikk sprinted along the tilted side before jumping clear.
Padget threw herself outward. Nerissa and Valden stayed within, fighting to shield the drugged and trembling children inside.
The wagon slammed through the embankment and half-hung over the water, the current roaring below.
Tolliver, breathless, anchored a rope to a stone loop on the bridge and threw it down.
Padget caught it, securing one of the children as the wagon’s wreckage began to sink.
Brikk and Nerissa were swept downstream, struggling to keep above the churning surface.
A young man, a dockworker by the look of him, ran onto the bridge to help.
He threw another rope.
Before it reached their hands, a crossbow bolt snapped through the air and buried itself in his chest.
He died before his knees hit the wood.
Tolliver searched for the shooter, but the rooftops were empty and the crowd screamed below.
With the help of the onlookers, the party was dragged from the water one by one. The bridge became a scene of ruin—broken timber, blood, and the scent of the river’s rot. Among the helpers was Gurka Vell, the Threadbare Smith, who arrived pushing a wheelbarrow and wordlessly helped carry the survivors to safety.
When at last they gathered on solid ground, cold and dripping, their next step was clear.
The children still stared without focus, hollow, wrong.
The wagon was gone.
And Mother Pela might be the only one in Frae who could tell them what had been taken from these children, and how it might be restored.
Brikk
Nerissa
Valden Guanga
Tolliver Goldfinch
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