Beowolf, Jennish, and Kasskar are recruited by Gregor the Naturalist to seek out a giant squid in the caverns under Lofton Castle. There, they're apparently beguiled, and attacked by giant spiders in the confusion. Soon after, they're driven off by the pickpocketing tentacles of an unseen sea monster.
Beowolf goes one win, one loss at the illicit bare-knuckle boxing ring under The Whipsaw. Kasskar, Jennish, and Beowolf are recruited by Herndon the anatomist to steal a body with goiter from the Meade Hospital morgue. While searching in the morgue's Great Hall, they're accosted by walking dead and defeat them.
Beowolf, Jennish, Kasskar sail to Hilde on the Hedgepeth, with captains Burns and Krill. They meet Mikal, a young stowaway. Off Pitcairn on Hilde, the Hedgepeth takes the Blackwells ship Durst as a prize. Scoping out a Greencake facility they plan to plunder on Lake Annika, the characters are attacked by guard wolves and defeat them.
The party meets Aeris, an impressed sailor on the Hedgepeth, and Prosper, a haggard man lost on Hilde. They win a pitched battle with Greencake facility guards. They find the Greencake guarded by Muninn, the great patriarch of Hilde's wolves, and Kasskar overcomes him. Nearly killed by Muninn, Beowolf and Aeris have visions of Hollin.
The Hedgepeth finds the Dowager, which has been caught in the ice off Hilde for two years. The survivors' camp is a scene of horror, and the party is ambushed by some survivors, but brings the rest on board. Continuing towards Highpyre a few nights later, Burns emerges from the captains' cabin shaken, accusing Krill of witchcraft. The accusation divides the crew, and Krill and four others die fighting.
The party finds Beowolf's birth city, the burned ruin Highpyre, and a Witches' Chorus there judges their deeds so far. With the explorer Ammiral, they find the meteor Noreste in the surreal hell-town Bruegel, and Aeris drives off spirits protecting it. Heading home from Hilde, a second Krill appears on the Hedgepeth, not knowing how he got there. Not sure who or what the second Krill is, the party sets him adrift with the first Krill's corpse.
Kasskar tries to turn the Whipsaw's illicit boxing to profit by introducing prize purses and his own hardened fighters. But the Hobnail street gang attacks during the first match, protecting their turf from the party and the boxer Godwin, a member of the rival Coopers' Union gang. The party wins the grisly fight, but the Whipsaw crowd favorite Mulebeck is killed fighting on their side.
A mob attacks Werner's sanctuary for pregnant girls and untouchables, saying Werner harbors an abomination, and the party turns them back with cannon fire. Afterwards, the party meets the "abomination" Haas, a corpse-like man with no pulse and no breath. Hass tells them how he was murdered and unnaturally resurrected, and presses them to avenge him.
Aeris helps Haas take revenge on his killers, a gang of homeless living in an alley near the Mooncalf hostel. Afterwards, they go to Meade Hospital to find the experimenters who resurrected Haas. Searching there, they're attacked by Ignatius, another resurrected man controlled by cruel-looking probes in his exposed brain.
10, Part 1 - The Brothers Volker
Searching Meade Hospital further, the party finds the Volker brothers, the experimenters who resurrected Hass. Beowolf kills Alaric Volker, but with help from the demon Lebrecht, Gerholt and Harlan Volker escape with Prosper as their hostage. The party meets Ord Redding, a foreigner looking for Prosper.
The party takes Haas to Gramercy book store, a new safe house suggested by Werner's midwife Wren, and discover that Gramercy's cavern basement houses Hollin's secretive Oracle. Oracle adepts Aliester, Indvik, and Mari summon Deva, a spirit who tells Haas of the restful plane Hereward. The adepts open a portal to Hereward on Apogee, and Haas and Indvik enter.
The party discovers that Kasskar's neighbor at the Mooncalf hostel, Ishild, is a five-hundred-year-old lich and destroys him. Beowolf takes Ishild's ring, not realizing the ring is Ishild's phylactery, and has to destroy Ishild again when he reappears to reclaim it. Kasskar discovers that a Hobnails enforcer, Auld, started the Shambles fire that killed his family.
The party goes to Heath Prison hunting Auld. They find the ancient Dera'a Prison enclosed inside Heath, and find the divine prison Narshasa sealed under Dera'a's panopticon. They track Auld there and kill him, with Kasskar administering the coup de grace. They meet the Witches' Chorus a second time, who suggest that Beowolf may not be human.
Aeris enlists the lich Ishild in a tentative partnership. Told the Kirsi could help rescue Prosper, Ord leads the party west towards the Kirsi home Renhannes. Heading into the Tolland Wood, they fall in with Paine's mining company mercenaries, but the combined party is ambushed and routed by Eastmarch Clan trolls.
The seventeen-year silvermote brood drives the party underground, into the stone age home of Mound Clan trolls, who they defeat. They continue to Shear Pass, where they find the admiralty warrior Reinhardt seeking oblivion and mingling with vampire-like necaratu. They learn that Shear Pass touches Murnan, the plane of necaratu and hapless dead.
The party continues west inside the Shear Pass fortress. Necaratu attack them at the fortress crypt and kill Reinhardt's man Stapleton. The party finds the Murnan portal under the fortress tower, and Ord kills the necaratu Damadara in single combat there. They escape the pass and enter the Kirsi valley Renhannes. They're welcomed by the Kirsi Court, revealed to be fairies.
The Kirsi tell Ord about Prosper's origin and the Kirsi exodus from Hollin. They ask Ord to install the changeling Bruhl as the rightful heir of Raven House and as Kirsi high priest. The party travels to the lost city Balibana, where Ord and Aeris put down the Raven House usurper Inkling and his fairy gang, River Jack, Bandy-Bandy, and Moonboots.
Knocked out trying to open Inkling's safe, Kasskar dreams of a globster in Hollin. Opening the safe on a second try, the party finds the assassin spell Word Without Warning. In Tulun, Beowolf pulls the harpoon Hosingen from the bull whale Huhner. The party goes to install Bruhl as Kirsi high priest at the temple of Boreas, where Raven House priests beguile them and turn them against each other.
The party puts down the west wind Zephyr, who has usurped the Kirsi god Boreas. They liberate the Kirsi Oracle, who tell them Prosper is in Hollin's City of the Dead. There, they find Prosper and a resurrected Alaric Volker controlled by Volker brain probes and have to kill them. They meet a second Prosper, who answers Ord's questions and heads for Renhannes with the dead Prosper.
The party finds Harlan Volker's lab in an abandoned cistern under the City of the Dead and defeats him. They meet an Inkeri camp in Gibb Park. There, young Inkeri challenge Beowolf's presumptive leadership, saying he is not human, and Beowolf kills Belwe in single combat. They find Beowolf's family business burned by Hobnails and cannot find his parents.
Chill Touch tells Beowolf that Hobnails abandoned his parents in the divine prison Narshasa. There, the party can't tell Beowolf's mother from Lahar, a personification of death mimicking her. The Hollin Oracle summons Lahar to the Grimoire, where Kasskar kills him using Word Without Warning. Returning to Narshasa, the party defeats the guardian Katamayan and frees Beowolf's parents.
The party returns to Hilde to push Beowolf's claim to Inkeri leadership. They find the Inkeri Knarr Clan encamped on the Aden Sea ice sheet, and Beowolf challenges their chief Faering for leadership. Beowolf defeats Faering with unseen help from the shaman Kajal, then orders Faering to continue leading the Knarr as his steward.
To counter Inkeri criticism that he's a religious outsider, Beowolf undertakes an animal spirit trial on Kerava Glacier. The party fights the dragon Vecassitrix there, and defeating him, receives animal spirits. The Witches' Chorus appears, answering Ord's questions about the Caliphate's Ninety-Nine Gods and suggesting that Kasskar has started unseen wheels in motion by killing Lahar.
The party turns to reclaiming Hilde's resources for the Inkeri. They go to the Voss Greencake mine, where they find a manifestation of the Blackwells emperor Krohn in the mine's salt palace. He tells them the story of Lahar, that he is also the Caliphate Malak, and that he's hunting the Caliphate's Ninety-Nine gods. Krohn attacks the party because Ord testified against him in al-Watan, but the party fights him to a draw.
Rallying, the party defeats Krohn and takes 150,000 gold worth of Greencake from the mine. Continuing to the guano cave near Albrecht, they meet the vampires of Phyla House, who have been decimated by a rabies epidemic. Leutwin turns the Dempster Sea Inkeri clans against Beowolf, and they trap the party in the cave.
The party defeats rabid vampires while escaping the guano cave, but Aeris contracts vampirism. They return to Hollin and find that Krill has returned to accuse Burns of witchcraft, causing a split in the admiralty and fighting throughout the city. Seizing on the chaos to start his revenge on Hollin, Aeris kidnaps the parents who abandoned him. He horrifies them with his magic implement - his brother's skull in a burlap bag.
Aeris resurrects his brother Jaris in the harpooner Eldred's body, then murders their parents and brings them back as undead. Aeris, Kasskar, and new allies Kane and Treasach free Pendragon from Dule Tree Prison. There, Aeris betrays Kasskar to the Hobnail kingpin Horst and his men. The Hobnails beat Kasskar into unconsciousness, but Kasskar's animal spirit, the dragon Marwolaeth, appears and destroys them.
Ishild suggests that Aeris build an indestructible phylactery using space-time theory and the meteor Noreste, and Aeris's party tracks Noreste to the admiralty's Morning Star Observatory. There, they defeat Aeris's old ally Ammiral and his marines, who recognize the dirty boxer Treasach. They find Gerholt Volker at Meade Hospital, who says he has created the soul of a new god in a jar.
Ishild performs the ceremony to turn Aeris into a lich, ritually killing him, at the Gradskan royal mummy cache. Aeris's spirit regathers there to reform his body at his phylactery, but finds the fairy Lacewing has stolen it. The Gradskan kings' spirits and their angel of death attack Aeris to stop him from finding the phylactery. The kings beat Aeris, but his animal spirit, Isaf the Black Worm, appears and destroys them.
The Gradskan kings' jester Arlin leads Aeris's spirit to the Raven House forge. There, Aeris finds the fairy Polaris has crafted decoy fauxlacteries identical to his own, but finds his own with Arlin's help. Reawakening in his now skeletal body, Aeris leads his party to retake the phylactery at the forge, where they kill Polaris and the fairy thief Lacewing.
Aeris's party attacks the Oracle, taking another 150,000 gold worth of Greencake and the spells Firestorm and Yawning Graves. Gerholt Volker's god in a jar feeds on the energy there, growing into a writhing, faceless mass. A spirit claims that the new god has just created the world, and that the party's memories of life before the god are an illusion.
Aeris casts Firestorm from Apogee, destroying Braddock with a consuming tornado of fire. He casts Yawning Graves, raising the victims as undead who attack the remaining survivors. The party, now Beowolf, Kasskar, Ord, and Aeris's resurrected brother Jaris, arrive soon after and defeat Aeris's party, with Jaris killing Aeris.
The party destroys Aeris's indestructible space-time phylactery in Kairos, the plane without time. Back in Hollin, the young Hobnail Karn asks Kasskar to get his brother back from an admiralty press gang, who kidnapped him despite the desperate ruin caused by Firestorm. Searching at the admiralty forge, they're attacked by a disturbed and inexplicably psychic press gang.
The party finds Karn's brother held prisoner at the Enfield Trading House. They discover that their old friend Mikal had psychic control of the Admiralty and Enfield House, but that mental trauma from Firestorm broke his control and his victims' minds. The lich Ishild reveals that he is the god of the Caliphate's Al-Batin noble house - Ord's lords. Ishild urges Ord to reclaim the Caliphate for the rightful noble houses.
The party buys the clipper Wayward from House Hanan, a Caliphate import-export house in Hollin. Recruiting Burns as captain, they sail to al-Watan to search for the rightful caliphs' heirs. They infiltrate the island refuge of Cold Comfort, Krohn's corp of assassins. Searching for records, they are attacked by a hunter-seeker, then attacked by assassins escaping.
Ord defeats the assassin Raihim under the dome of Cold Comfort's refuge. Cold Comfort's books reveal that The Maker's rightful heir is the slave Gafur, the crowd's favorite gladiator at al-Watan's coliseum. Learning that assassins have replaced Gafur's next opponents, the party rushes to interrupt the fight, killing the assassins and leaving the coliseum in chaos.
Escaping the coliseum, the party is attacked by Gafur's owner Alim and the Directorate, the inquisitors who exiled Ord. Ord meets his animal spirit, the djinn temptress Waifa, and she offers to make Ord the Caliphate's king if he will betray the party to her. At the Sun's Anvil, djinn tell the party that Krohn and the djinn high court have imprisoned Krohn's father and god, the Ninety-Nine's Malik.
Ignoring dire warnings from the Witches' Chorus, the party enters the Void Prison at the Well of Life. They find the Ninety-Nine's Malik there, and escape when Ord and Kasskar defeat the prison's Divine Lock. The Malik marshals the angelic Annur and the Sun's Anvil djinn. Returning to al-Watan, the party and the Malik defeat Krohn and his djinn allies in a final confrontation at Krohn's citadel.
38, Part 1 - The Blind Idiot God
Beowolf becomes immortal by drinking Krohn's Philosopher's Stone tincture. The party returns to Hilde, where they find a bizarro Hollin under the north pole. There, they defeat the Prodigy, the monster that violates the natural order, and see the sleeping Blind Idiot God, whose fitful dream is reality. They find Lethe's Star, and reinstalling it in Highpyre's tower, cement Beowolf as the Inkeri king.
The fairy Ivy leads Kasskar to the Raven Forge. There, he finds Polaris's fauxlacteries and Aeris's Orb of Contravention, suggesting the party might have destroyed a fauxlactery instead of Aeris's true phylactery. Ruling the Inkeri decades after finding Lethe's Star, the unaging, left-handed Beowolf is mortified to meet an elderly, right-handed Beowolf.