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BEING A SUMMARY OF OUR TALE THUS FAR
or, An Anemic Sketch of Chapters 1-12

Loud-mouthed Sette Frummagem is the thieving and insistent daughter of crimelord Nary A'Care Frummagem. Da sent Sette away to collect tribute from a Frummagem cousin sent abroad to make his way in the world. At Sette's side Da placed Duane Adelier, a spell-wielding undead gentleman from the little understood country of Alderode. Da threatened to reveal Duane's zombie nature to the townfolk if he didn't accompany and assist his ambitious daughter.

Duane and Sette travel on foot through the wilds of the continent of Kasslyne, seemingly lost after Sette angrily destroys their map. After a few misadventures they come across the den of a gang of slavers. Duane is too late to save one of their child victims and instead discovers these "slavers" are stealing people and cutting out their insides. Rattled, Duane viciously attacks a group of Crescian lawmen also on the villains' trail, then flees, putting himself and Sette squarely under State suspicion.

After reaching safety, Duane loses his temper with Sette, convinced she is leading him farther westward on the continent than he cares to go. Duane explains that Cresce - the country on Kasslyne's farthest west coast - is the sworn enemy of the people of Alderode, his homeland. He also admits that his undead nature gives him a terrible craving for warm flesh, and he finds this harder to control when confronted with blood and violence. Sette assures him they'll stay well away from hated Cresce, and charms him into another week's worth of travel, putting them nearly at her cousin's front door.

Leaving Duane behind to rest an injured leg, Sette ventures ahead to scout her cousin's lair. She soon crosses the Crescian lawmen from earlier and blows up half the town to escape them. One of the slavers follows her as she high tails it back to Duane. A spellcaster's duel ensues between her undead bodyguard and Quigley, the slavers' commissioned spell-wielder who also hails from Duane's homeland and who seems to have a particular distaste for his kinsmen.

Duane is victorious but before he can strongarm Quigley's story out of him, we see that the zombie loses his wits at night, reverting to a dumb and slavering revenent. Sette wisely pulls him from the battle, then takes advantage of his oblivousness to sneak him into town, stowing the flesh-hungry monster in a Love Hotel, as one does.

Meanwhile, one of the slavers' victims, a plucky kid named Jivi, busts free and escapes the warehouse where his villainous captors are hiding. Keen and brave, he helps save Quigley and Quigley's blind son Matty when the slavers double-cross him and bring in a new pair of toughs to put him out of his misery.

Jivi and the Quigleys are led to safety by a mysterious blue ghost impressed by Jivi's heroics. Having also born witness to the spectacle, Sette unfortunately is spotted by one of the slavers. Poisoned with a sedative, she barely manages to make it back to the Love Hotel - the slaver hot on her heels - before she passes out.

The next morning, Sette discovers that zombie Duane has bloodily slaughtered her pursuer. He also seems unable to revert to his sane form. Dodging his ire, Sette's world turns upside-down when, in a sudden turn, she trips and falls into her zombie's shadow, landing in the spectral innards of a place called the Khert.

The Khert is the organising framework beneath her world, powering spellcraft, making sure all natural laws run, and also safe-keeping the memories of the dead. Sette wanders this weird place, baffled as to how she's arrived, and soon runs afoul of some of its monstrous inhabitants. A spectral form of Duane rescues her in the nick of time but they take a tumble, and Sette finds herself immersed in Duane's very soul.

Now we see Duane Adelier as Duane Adelier was in life: A husband, a father, and a priest and soldier in an Aldish religious Army and Temple. Duane had a precocious daughter named Mikaila as gifted in spellcraft as her father who accompanied him to the Temple one day as a birthday treat. After a meeting went sour and Duane assaulted one of the country's top politicians, Duane and Mikaila made their way home through the snowy night streets. But poisoned crossbow bolts flew! Murderers appeared! The pair was cruelly cut down by Crescian assassins.

Sette awakens from the memories and, pursued by a chatty monster also intent on escaping, uses her keen sense of smell to help befuddled Duane find his way out of the khert.

Regaining lucidity, Duane is enraged to find himself in Cresce, and aghast that Sette left him in a position to eat someone (even if that "someone" was a fiend). Sette apologises, struck by all she saw of Duane's past. Tearfully she confesses how much Duane's company has come to mean to her. Charmed again by this little girl who reminds him so much of his lost daughter, Duane miserably agrees to press on to her cousin's. They set out.

Sette's cousin is Stockyard Frummagem, a rogue running a brothel who's duped the local townsfolk by promising to salvage their doomed economy. For in the country of Cresce the government can shutter any town it deems insolvent, scattering its citizens to new assignments and residences. Stockyard's raking it in but nearly ready to move on. When Sette shows up and threatens him if he doesn't pay Da his tribute, Stockyard seems to acquiesce - until he privately reveals to Sette that the entire point of her travelling with Duane was to deliver the zombie to Stockyard so he could be smuggled back to Alderode.

Sette is devastated. Da lied to her! And Duane... is her friend.

But there is even darker business afoot. The slavers have also arrived at Stockyard's, and it seems they have been using their slaves to smuggle a powerful but unstable substance called First Silver. Fueled by pain, it's begun to slither through its human hosts and attract all manner of angry ghosts escaped from the khert. Stockyard plans to ship this horrible red hell-putty and Duane together on a boat downriver to a western Crescian port. However, tying a protesting Sette to a chair, Stockyard's distracted by the revelation that his two most trusted friends and employees are having an affair. Paranoid that they will steal his business while he's taking Duane and the Silver to their destination, he murders one of them, capping off the miasma of misery and pain that has all of this time been making the First Silver swell and sharpen. It explodes! And, despite the panicked effort of his murdered friend's lover - an amateur spellcaster named Anadyne - Stockyard is killed.

What a monster the First Silver becomes! A behemoth of silver thorns, cancerous human tissue, and Pain controlled by the last surviving slaver - a spellwielding lizardman calling itself Delicieu.

Duane overcomes his shackles and escapes Stockyard's ship. Then Quigley and the Crescian Lawmen assist the zombie in battling the nightmare back, even as it wreaks havoc throughout the brothel, killing indiscriminately. Sette has the idea to fill all the underground river's locks and then throw open the lock-gates, washing the Silver monster downriver and out of town. It takes a pair of hostages with it however - Anadyne and her loyal friend Knock - leaving our heroes to flee to sanctuary.

Sanctuary is the cosy home of the Ripa couple. Rahm Ripa is a disgruntled member of the Black Tongue Brotherhood, an apolitical coven of spellcasters who defy the laws of the land in order to write their own spells, conduct illegal research, and study whatever they please free of social and religious taboos. Rahm is visited by another of the Order's members, a charismatic man called Bastion Winalils who reveals to his friend quite casually that he is responsible for the creation of undead Duane Adelier!

Bastion also hired Sette's father to dupe the zombie into this entire journey and still is intent on Duane reaching that Crescian port. In exchange for a favour, Rahm agrees to help him.

The Crescian Army arrives! But their presence is no comfort to our heroes. The Crescian lawmen who had been tracking the First Silver and weaving in and out of Sette's journey - brave Captain Toma and his punchy Lieutenant Elka - discover that these particular soldiers are traitors under the command of the insurgent General Bell. Bell had wanted to use the First Silver as a genocidal weapon against Alderode but had been rejected and - he felt - humiliated by Cresce's elderly Queen. Going behind her back, it was Bell who had facilitated the slavers and their Silver and Bell who was now keen on covering up all the devastation it had caused. He ordered his faithful agents to raze the town. Unsuccessful in stopping these horrors, Toma and Elka are chased over a precipice, presumably to their doom.

Amidst the destruction, Rahm attempts to capture Quigley and remove his unpredictable presence from Bastion's schemes, but conscience stays his hand. Rahm's wonderful wife takes pity on our heroes and tells them of her sister who has what Quigley needs to repair the injured construct he relies on to do his mercenary work. With the town burning in their wake, Duane, Sette, Jivi, and the Quigley's escape downriver.

Duane, meanwhile, has learned to retake control of his nights. Though he's still a slavering imbecile zombie in the real world once the sun goes down, he's been taught by a strange avian benefactor that this state is caused by his soul leaving his body. His soul is inextricably tethered to that body, violently jerked back into it once the sun rises, but at night it's left free to roam the khert. The birdwoman - a creature as old as Time named Lady Ilganyag - teaches Duane how to remain lucid while in this state. She counsels him, befriends him, but also gives him knowledge gleaned from the khert of the First Silver's future: the terrible monster is bound towards his homeland and, one day, it will decimate Alderode.

Duane swears to find it first and stop this. He clings to this new purpose, finding a renewed joy in his otherwise grey existence.

Meanwhile, courting the country's nobility for support, General Bell plots to take the Crescian throne.

Bastion Winalils, fulfilling his promise to Rahm, pays a visit to their Black Tongue Brotherhood and finds it in its own disorder. Claiming to be acting under orders from the Crescian Queen, a terrifying snakeman called Ruckmearkha has infiltrated the Organisation. He has acquired a nobleman from Alderode and is using his own mind-altering venom and the skills of the Black Tongue spellcasters to extract damaging information from the hapless human. This is distressing enough to Bastion, but then Ruck for some reason demands to know where both the mad lizardman Delicieu and Duane Adelier are. Possessive of his zombie, abhorring these sudden politics in his apolitical Order, and finding Ruck intolerably dangerous, Bastion escapes the snake's advances, but now is the enemy of his Black Tongue brothers.

A week of travel on the river sees Duane, Sette, Jivi, and the Quigleys nearly to their destination. Sette is floundering, clashing with her travelling mates and, more importantly, uncertain how to proceed. Does she try to please Da by sneaking Duane to that Crescian port? Or does she treat Duane like a friend and come clean? What do all these people even want with him? Ugh, remembering what happened at Stockyard's place with that monster gives her a belly ache. The only certainty is she does not at all mind if Duane puts that moanin' world-melter down. Hopefully she doesn't have to help.

There's little time left to agonize over it when the sky over the river blackens with a sudden and supernatural hurricane! Unprovoked, weird fishwomen attack from the water while their counterparts - lightning- and cyclone-wielding male air elementals - smash their construct from all sides. One of the creatures' friendlier representives - ostensibly acting against her sisters' wishes - swims to our heroes' aid and guides them into an underwater access bay leading up to an island shrine. Zapped and paralysed in defense of his charges, Duane remains behind, fate unknown...