It began, as these things often do, with a stranger in a hood buying drinks at The Mended Wing. He had work for anyone willing to take it: a collector needed something retrieved from a vault in the marsh town of Bogside, and the crew who'd taken the job three days prior hadn't been heard from since. He left an address for a dusk meeting and slipped out before anyone could ask the obvious questions. While the party weighed the offer, Chimmy tested her fingers on a dozing fisherman's purse, coming away with a handful of coppers, a couple of silvers, and a bonus lift from the fisherman's tip jar, earning a rare nod of professional respect from Jet.
The dusk meeting took them to a quiet room called The Closed Eye in Haven's east quarter, where they met the collector himself: a man named Crowfoot who did not smile and kept, of all things, a feather that hovered in the air beside him. The job was laid out plainly. Recover a reliquary from Vesna Koss's vault in Bogside, and the fee would be 2,500 gold, half paid up front. The party agreed. Then the feather did something it apparently hadn't done in seventeen years, pulsing gold at Jet's touch, and even Crowfoot's flat expression seemed to flicker at that.
With coin in hand, the party made for The Northern Star, Haven's outfitter, and spent close to two hundred gold outfitting themselves for the road: studded leather for Rask and Franco, custom leather for Chimmy, thieves' tools, a disguise kit, a healer's kit, rope and a grappling hook, rations, and a pair of healing potions. Before they left Haven, Crowfoot gave them what little he knew of the crew who'd vanished before them: a lockbreaker, a sellsword, a hedge mage, and a scout, who had cased Vesna Koss's estate for two days before striking at midnight. The vault, he said, had made a sound like hollowing itself out. Then it had gone quiet, and so had they.
The party spent one more night at The Mended Wing before setting out southeast along the river road toward Bogside. Rask's ease in the forest shaved real time off the journey, his eyes catching trail signs the others would have walked straight past. When night fell, they made camp in the woods, and Jet and Chimmy took the first watch together, an alliance sealed with nothing more than a single copper piece and a wary, mutual understanding.
Morning came gray and quiet. Franco worked through an inspiring tune on his lute to shake the stiffness of the road out of everyone's shoulders, while Dr. Destructo ran through a series of careful stretches before murmuring the words that wrapped him in a shimmer of protective magic. With the camp struck and the last of the solid ground behind them, the party stepped off the river road and into the Mire, leaving Haven, its coin, and its questions behind them for whatever waited in the marsh ahead.