Salt and Gold

Three months after your expedition went down and everyone wrote you off as dead, you turn up alive, carrying a fragment of Syrissia, the old goddess of desire and temptation, lodged in your head. Nobody asked for that.

The story tracks what actually happened to you and the artifact behind it, while the people around you deal with grief they no longer get to keep, and Syrissia keeps offering shortcuts through power and forbidden desire that come with a price.

You work through Marrowgate rebuilding relationships that cracked while you were "dead," picking a class, and deciding how much of Syrissia's influence to let in. Corruption and choice both leave marks, and they shape who's willing to still stand next to you when the danger closes in on the city. This first chapter covers the prologue and opens up the main city and its sandbox layer, so there's more scaffolding than payoff for now.