Chapter 1: Return from Neverdeath Graveyard

Neverwinter has weathered its share of calamities — none greater than the eruption of Mount Hotenow, which nearly leveled the city forty years past, though the scars have long since been rebuilt over. These days the city stands under the rule of Lord Protector Dagult Neverember, a man who claims descent from one of Neverwinter's great heroes and who has, whatever the truth of that claim, kept the city stable and prosperous.

It was in Neverember's modest villa that our story began, summoned before the Lord Protector himself alongside several guards and a trio of priests of Oghma from the House of Knowledge. Neverember broke off from a political discussion to greet us warmly and lay out the trouble at hand: four prominent citizens had vanished from the city in recent nights — Eldon Keyward, a scholar of the Outer Planes; Indrina Lamsensettle, an actor of high society; Sarcelle Malinosh, a wild-magic sorcerer; and Umberto Noblin, a gnome historian. None of the four knew each other, and no connection between them was obvious.

Divinations paid for by Neverember traced the victims' trail to Hallix Mausoleum in Neverdeath Graveyard — and stopped cold there, as though something were deliberately blinding the priests' sight. Neverember asked us to investigate and promised each of us a fine house in the city if we could bring the missing townsfolk home and see justice done.

Into Neverdeath

Neverdeath Graveyard sprawls in two halves — the Main Graveyard of the wealthy, thick with mausoleums, and the humbler Pauper's Graveyard beyond a dividing wall. Hallix Mausoleum itself proved an unassuming granite block, its chain broken and padlock hanging loose. Inside, six coffins belonging to the Hallix family — dead since the eruption of Hotenow — sat empty but for scraps of cloth and gnawed bone. A staircase at the rear led down into darkness, and down we went.

What we found below was no simple crypt but a sprawling catacomb complex, parts of it clearly claimed by a secretive cult devoted to Vecna, the lich-god of secrets — their symbol, a staring eye gripped in a withered hand, was scrawled across the walls in more than one chamber. Deeper still, we discovered vestiges of an older tenant: the long-vanished Waterclock Guild, whose rusting pipes, cogs, and bound elemental servants still threaded through several chambers, dripping water into the silence.

The Prisoners

One by one we found the cult's captives, each held in a converted burial cell.

Sarcelle Malinosh we found wrapped in blankets inside an old coffin, her sorcery temporarily stripped from her by some ordeal on a distant plane. She was desperate only to be free of the graveyard and see herself home — but she was shaken by something she'd seen in a recent vision: a withered figure hovering aloft, gathering dreadful energy that built and built until it screamed and burst outward, and something terrible followed. She could not say what it meant, only that it frightened her badly.

Umberto Noblin, a gnome historian, we discovered sulking on a sodden mattress, more preoccupied with the terrible cell rations than with fear. Once freed and fed something decent — he has a particular fondness for magically conjured food — his tongue loosened considerably. It turned out Umberto was secretly one of Neverwinter's foremost scholars of Vecna's dark history, quietly researching the ancient, poisonous rivalry between Vecna and his onetime lieutenant, the vampire Kas. He'd kept the work to himself for fear of being scooped by rival scholars — and, we suspected, for fear of being mistaken for a cultist himself.

Indrina Lamsensettle, the actor, we found proud even in her tattered finery, dreaming aloud of baths and perfume the moment she'd escape. She believed — wrongly, we came to think — that Lord Neverember himself was behind her abduction. In time she confided why: she had gathered proof from genealogists that Neverember's claimed lineage back to the hero Nasher Alagondar was fraudulent, and she assumed he wanted her silenced for it. Whatever the truth of her accusation, it was hers alone to carry, and the cult clearly cared nothing for Neverember's politics — only for the secret itself.

Eldon Keyward, the planar scholar, we did not find in his cell — only his empty blankets and a notebook crammed with cramped notes on planar intersections and gateways. He had already been taken to the ritual chamber.

Along the way we crossed paths with other residents of the old crypts: a sulking, bullied water elemental and its companions who'd once served the Waterclock Guild and now merely wanted to be left to their eternal rain; a marid named Shanzezim, bound to the ruins by old guild magic, patiently reassembling a disassembled clock that would take years to finish and gifting us a lucky flywheel for our trouble; and the restless dead of a family whose ashes the cultists had disturbed and who wanted nothing more than to see every "Vecnan" in the place torn apart.

We also turned up grim evidence of the cult's methods: a cultist named Raina Kairls, reduced to a mindless, shambling husk after being made an example of for daring to think of betraying her fellows to the city guard, and a captured cultist's stray notes describing a plot against Indrina specifically because "her secrets will make a worthy sacrifice."

The Sacrifice Gallery

Fighting deeper into the catacombs, we came upon the cult's leader — a gaunt, secretly wicked Neverwinter aristocrat named Jerot Galgin, who had built a hidden life of necromancy and devotion to Vecna behind his family's back for years, all while they believed him away in Waterdeep. His notes made clear the cult's purpose: draining victims of their most meaningful secrets and knowledge as offerings to Vecna, part of some vast design the lich-god was assembling from stolen secrets the world over.

The ritual itself was underway in a cavernous gallery when we arrived — Eldon suspended in a cage above a ring of chanting cultists, their leader, a proud mage named Kendri Nex, drawing his secrets out of him before our eyes. We broke the ritual and freed Eldon, but the backlash of that severed rite tore open something far worse than we expected: a riot of silvery-purple energy consumed the room, the floor fell away beneath us, and every one of us — Eldon included — was hurled through the tear and into darkness.

Evernight

We woke in open coffins, jumbled together at the bottom of a muddy grave pit, ghouls already circling above with hungry cries. Eldon, too, had been shoved through with us, nailed into a coffin of his own, and we fought our way clear of the pit together once the ghouls were dealt with.

Eldon explained what had happened as best he could. Neverwinter, he said, is scarred with rare tears between worlds called Crevices of Dusk, gaps that sometimes open onto the Shadowfell. We had fallen through one and landed in Evernight — a black mirror of Neverwinter where no sun ever rises, where an ashen fog chokes the sky above rivers of lava instead of water, and where the undead — vampires and ghouls chief among them — walk the streets as freely as the living do at home. Since we'd been underground in Neverwinter's graveyard, we'd landed underground in Evernight's own graveyard in turn. Eldon reasoned that a market like the one bordering Neverdeath Graveyard back home might have a twin in Evernight too, and that discreet questions there were our best hope of finding a way back.

He was right. East of the graveyard sprawled the Corpse Market, a lively bazaar of the dead trading in pickled remains, jarred blood, funeral finery, and stranger things, lit by torches and feeble moonlight at all hours. There we drew the attention of Sangora, a centuries-old vampire merchant who dealt in information as readily as blood. In exchange for gold, or simply for satisfying her curiosity about where we'd come from, Sangora told us what she knew: that Crevices of Dusk are rare, that Neverwinter has changed since she last saw it, and — most usefully — that she knew of one stable, permanent crevice, hidden in the tomb of a family called the Dolindars, exiled long ago to the Shadowfell for reasons never explained. The Dolindars had studied wizardry and planar gates obsessively despite a family curse that barred them from ever using one themselves, and they had lived and died in Evernight lonely and miserable. It should be noted that Wakershim took a shine to Sangora, putting in work to "redeem" her.

The Dolindar Tomb

Sangora's directions led us to the Dolindar tomb, though her helpfulness came with a price we hadn't bargained for: four vampire spawn, sent by Sangora's own household to make a meal of us, caught up to us at the tomb's entrance and had to be put down before we could go inside. Turns out Sangora was unaware of this plan, and dealt with the underlings harshly - the ones that survived the encounter.

Within, the tomb radiated the same isolation that must have haunted the family in life — nothing so crude as a haunting, just a pervasive, bone-deep loneliness that seemed to sap the will to help one another. We met Newmy, a small, shy ghost of a moon elf who had been hired to keep the tomb clean centuries ago - but alas during the vampire spawn battle she was caught up in the Death Priest Letum's "Destroy Undead" and was unable to assist the party.

Deeper in, two Dolindar siblings had been transformed by their endless isolation into raging, many-armed horrors and had to be fought off before we could press on. Past them lay a vault of family treasures — coin, a jeweled helm, a snow globe of Neverwinter, and stranger relics — each pedestal carved with the same bitter inscription: "What good are treasures when home is denied?"

Beyond that, a sealed stone door bore the words "DOLINDAR" and "NO WORLD TO RETURN," its letters set into movable tiles. With some trial, and Eldon's occasional hints, we worked out the door's answer, and it ground open into the tomb's final chamber.

There we found what remained of Kevetta Dolindar, the family matriarch, herself warped by centuries of isolation into a lonely, harpoon-armed horror guarding her own coffin amid a floor bristling with blades. We fought her down, and found that her coffin held no body at all — only a roiling well of silvery-purple energy. Eldon confirmed what we already suspected: this was our way home, a stable Crevice of Dusk leading straight back to Neverwinter.

One by one, we stepped into Kevetta's coffin and out again into a dusty, forgotten tomb in the Pauper's Graveyard back home, its faded threshold reading "Home Again, To Rest Forever."

Aftermath

By the time we made it back to the Neverdeath catacombs, the cult of Vecna was gone — Jerot Galgin, his lieutenants, and every cultist we hadn't already stopped had fled Neverwinter the moment they understood that people of consequence now knew of their existence. Any prisoners we hadn't managed to free before the ritual's end did not survive the cult's flight; the cultists left nothing behind that could name them.

Lord Neverember made good on his promise, granting each of us a fine house in Neverwinter, workers and renovators paid for out of his own coffers to see them fit for living. The rescued Umberto, Indrina, and Sarcelle and their families added a further fortune in gratitude for their freedom.

None of us walked away from Evernight unchanged. Whatever passed through us in that ritual's collapse left each of us with a strange, lingering thread of connection to Vecna himself — a private sense for secrets, sharper instincts, an occasional shiver at the sound of his name. It manifests differently for each of us, and none of us can quite explain how we know it's there. But we know it is, and we suspect it is far from the last we'll hear of the lich-god of secrets — or of the ancient grudge Umberto told us of, between Vecna and his betrayer, Kas.