Events · The Highwilds

A massive skywyrm rides the warm updraft off a stone spire, its scaled coils glinting in the sun. It spots the glow of your keel-drive and banks toward you, looking for a meal.

A young stormray has tangled itself in your upper rigging, thrashing its wings like wet canvas. Down below the cloud deck, a much larger adult stormray is calling out for its young.

A clan warbird swoops across your bow and blocks the airway, her rails lined with armed beastborn boarders. "These are clan skies, low-flier!" her captain barks. "By what right do you cross them?"

A powerful thermal updraft rushes up the face of a cliff spire, marked with clan feather-flags. Glider couriers ride the rising air column to save a day's flight, though it is dangerously narrow for a full ship.

A half-frozen avian courier drops onto your deck rail, a sealed message tube strapped to her leg. "Urgent peace terms from Kestrel Spire to Greyrun," she gasps. "My wings are spent—I can't make the final leg."

On a storm-swept cliff ledge, a clutch of cask-sized skywyrm eggs steams in the freezing rain. The mother wyrm is away hunting, and wealthy collectors on the Peak pay a fortune for live eggs.

Two rival clan warbirds circle each other above a deep gorge, their rails bristling with armed boarders. One ship flies a white truce-feather from her masthead, but the other refuses to answer the signal.

A clan warbird pulls alongside your ship, and her captain points a spear directly at crewmate. "That one was banished from Thornhold! Hand the exile over to face clan justice!"

On a craggy rock spire too small for an aerie, a Deep ursine hermit is smoking trout over a driftwood fire. He waves your ship down, holding up a whole smoked fish.

A clan aerie on a distant spire has gone completely dark. Its warbirds hang motionless at their moorings with their crews lying cold and unconscious on deck—and an unlit Hollow ship is moored right among them.

A crew of pirates has landed on a high mountain meadow and is herding a clan's prized cloud-goats up a ramp into their cargo hold. A lone clan herder shouts curses at them from the rocks.

A pack of young avian riders on glider-kites swoops alongside your rail, laughing and issuing a challenge: first to round the Needle Spire wins a forty-silver purse!

Atop an isolated rock spire stands a wooden burial platform where a fallen clan warrior lies laid out for the sky-birds, her spear and silver offerings resting beside her. Three mourners watch quietly from a nearby warbird.

A clan trading raft suspended from four giant lift-kites hovers in the lane, stacked with smoked meat, cured wyrm-scale, and carved horn. The clan trader waves away your coin purse. "Keep your lowland silver! What real goods do you have to trade?"

The high-altitude air is so bitterly cold that thick rime ice is forming across your sails and rigging. The extra weight is dragging the ship down, and the steering lines are freezing solid in their blocks.

A young Blooded lupine boy is dangling from a torn glider-kite snagged on your bowsprit. He is no more than nine years old, shivering, and furious at the indignity of being rescued by a lowland ship.

the port's moot-ring is a flat stone ledge encircled by planted spears. A lowland crew can earn the clan's respect through the ancient Trial of Talons: one of your crew against their champion, bare-handed, until one fighter is pinned to the rock.

Between the port's twin rock spires runs a razor-narrow gorge whipped by violent crosswinds. Young clan flyers thread the gap on kites to earn their adult names, and the elders invite your ship to attempt the run while the whole aerie watches.

An elder of the port sits beside the moot-fire holding a bowl of glowing embers in her lap. She teaches traditional kin-magic by spoken rhythm and memory. "Your lowland Academy traps magic on dead paper," she says. "Here, we carry it in the blood."

the port's council of elders sits in a circle around the moot-fire, debating whether to open their market to your lowland ship. A hotheaded young warrior is loudly arguing to turn you away.

A bank of dead Hush-fog drifted across the port two nights ago. Half the clan has fallen ill from the mana drain—shivering with grey lips and cold hands while their kin-casters' hearth-fires die out. Their healers are at the end of their strength.

the port welcomes your crew into the feast hall under ancient guest-right, serving roast goat, dark bread, and fiery mountain mead. Halfway through the meal, a drunken warrior loudly insults crewmate as a "thin-blooded lowlander" in front of the entire hall.

A towering wall of black storm clouds stretches from the lower cloud deck all the way to the glacial peaks between two spires. Clan flyers say every storm wall has a calm passage hidden inside it, if you know how to read the wind.

Inside the thunderhead, dark winged shapes glide through the driving rain in pairs—stormrays on the hunt. One of the massive predators spots your keel-glow and banks toward your ship.

A clan warbird has lost her keel-drive in the middle of a hailstorm. The gale is driving her helplessly toward a jagged rock spire while her crew clings to the rigging—she is less than a minute from being dashed to pieces.

A Crown specimen-collector's ship lies wrecked on a mountain ledge, bound for the royal Exhibition. Her cargo hold is packed with iron cages holding a stormray pup, two skywyrm hatchlings—and a Deep vulpine woman locked in a cage labeled SPECIMEN.

A clan warbird lies broken across a high mountain saddle, her crew frozen at their battle stations. Her deck guns are still intact, and no patrol is in sight.

A floating rock outcrop glitters with a rich seam of mana crystal, but a clan's rust-red claw-mark is painted across the stone face—marking it as claimed clan territory.

The underside of a towering spire is honeycombed with wind-carved caverns where the gale moans through the stone. The clan aerie above entombs its ancient kin-casters inside—and while they don't sell permits, they expect outsiders to ask permission before entering.

Inside the wind-tunnel cavern, the stone floor has collapsed into an open chasm over the sky. On a narrow ledge across the drop, a clan lupine scout with a broken leg waves a torch and shouts for help.

At the heart of the cavern, mummified clan kin-casters sit in stone alcoves wrapped in feathered cloaks. One clutches a clay tablet inscribed with an ancient casting chant. Beyond them, a fissure glitters with mana crystal beside an old warbird gun battery.

A massive old skywyrm lairs in a frost-rimmed cave near the peak of a spire. Fresh claw-tracks in the snow show the beast has just flown out to hunt—leaving decades of shiny plunder unguarded inside.

The cavern reeks of acrid smoke. The floor is heaped with bleached bones mixed with silver coins, brass buckles, and a ship's bell. Deeper inside, valuable salvage glints behind a thick wall of solid ice.

Sealed behind the ice lies the heart of the wyrm's hoard: a ticking gnome-built device, an ornate ship fitting pried from a noble yacht, and a chest of silver coin. Outside the cave mouth, dusk is falling fast.