Editing Drake's Company (section)

===The Varen Investigation===
Four years after Olhydra's defeat, the members of Drake's Company met back up in Silverstone to celebrate Ru Bae Ya's birthday. During the party, Drake was approached by a halfling named [[Nikki Underbough]] with a letter from Neff Willowrush. Neff explained that despite their antagonistic past, he needed Drake's help, and that helping him would also solve the mystery of who killed Drake's family. After some discussion, Drake set off with Nikki, alongside Ru Bae Ya, Sumac, Qwynn, and Ya's new half-orc friend [[Garland]]. They boarded a ship captained by the water genasi [[Jib]] and set sail for [[Inethar]], the capital of [[Varen]] and Drake's old hometown. En route, their ship was attacked by a monstrous scyllan, which ate Sumac and Ya. Jib managed to banish the creature back to the [[Nine Hells]], but it took Sumac and Ya with them in its gullet. Ya was able to plane shift them back to the Material Plane, though it took a few more teleportations before they arrived back in the vicinity of their ship.

Upon arriving in Inethar, they were met by a messenger from Storm King [[Lanak Iskarr]], who wished to invite them to dinner that evening. At dinner, the king praised the heroism of Drake's Company and told them that his kingdom was recently beset by a man calling himself the [[Black Wizard]]. The wizard was summoning fiends to attack the populace, and spreading rumors that the king himself was behind the attacks. King Iskarr wanted them to track down the wizard and either kill or capture him to put an end to his attacks.

The next day, Nikki led them to Neff Willowrush's secret safehouse. Though Neff made no apologies for his past with Drake, he begrudgingly admitted he needed Drake's help. Neff explains that he once ran the largest shipping company in Varen. After Drake put him in prison, he turned temporary control of the company over to his son, Lanner. When Drake's family was murdered, and Neff implicated for it, he relinquished control to Lanner entirely due to the damage his reputation had suffered. Lanner, however, sold the company instead. He then boarded a ship across the [[Dragon Sea]], but perished in the tsunami caused by the [[Shattering of Orodeth]]. Neff was prepared to accept all this as simple misfortune, until he was released from jail and returned home to find an assassin waiting for him. Now suspecting all of these incidents were linked, he needed a highly competent investigator but knew that there was only one he knew for certain could not be part of the conspiracy against him: Drake Roxley. Though Drake initially named several of his former Varanese associates who were also above board, Neff informed him that all had died under suspiciously convenient circumstances. Sensing that there was some truth to the charges of conspiracy, Drake agreed but made clear he was doing this for his family and for Varen, not for Neff.

Their first move was for Nikki and Garland to sneak into the office of the former Willowrush Shipping Company. There they found Lanner's personal ledger, revealing that he had accrued sizeable gambling debts to a bookie named [[Horamin Fallowgale]]. They also found a letter encouraging Lanner to sell the company to pay his debts... signed by the enigmatic Stormfront, who had also hired Bastian Thermandar to kill Drake's family. Shortly after leaving, they were attacked by a band of royal guards. After dispatching their foes, however, they discovered that the guards were actually devils wearing royal guards' uniforms. After Drake confirmed that the uniforms were authentic, they went to see Jessica Dormund, who owned the textile company that made the uniforms. Though she knew nothing about why there were devils in uniform, they eventually got her to admit that her late husband had also been severely in debt to Horamin Fallowgale, and that while she made regular payments, she believed trying to pay off the entire debt at once would bankrupt her.

With all signs pointing to Horamin Fallowgale, the group made plans to visit his gambling house. While Ya and Drake distracted the guards (Ya by spending lavish sums and being overly flirtatious, and Drake by throwing a violent tantrum after losing money in a card game), Nikki and Garland snuck into the back and confronted Horamin himself. When he refused to talk, they simply knocked him unconscious and stole his books. Once away from the gambling house, they inspected the books and found that he facilitated the gambling habits of a significant portion of Inethar's nobility. Looking closer, they noticed a startling pattern: several nobles who owned some of the largest companies in Varen were noted as being important to Horamin's business partner: Stormfront. This included Willowrush's shipping company, the textile and armorers who worked with the palace, and a prominent mercenary company. Seeing the makings of a plot against the crown, they immediately sent word to the king and requested a meeting to deliver their information to him.

The next morning, while they were out shopping, the Black Wizard suddenly attacked Inethar, summoning a horde of devils while he attacked the palace and shouted, with a magically-amplified voice, that the devils were the work of the Storm King. The heroes jumped into the fray against the devils to protect the citizens of Inethar. Finding themselves outnumbered, Sumac used a scroll to call upon an angel of [[Aegir]] to assist them. Once the devils were slain, they entered the palace to help protect the king, but found him to be safe in the throne room. As they prepared to tell him of the conspiracy, however, the door burst open and a well-dressed halfling in a wide-brimmed hat strolled in, announcing himself to be Stormfront. The king commanded his guards to seize him, but the guards instead pointed their weapons at the king, while the Black Wizard appeared and demanded that Drake's Company stand down. They watched as Stormfront explained that he had spent years working to gain control of the royal supply of armor, weapons, and regalia. He had used his control of the shipping company to deliver these authentic arms and uniforms to his own mercenaries, allowing them to hide in plain sight within the palace. He had used the Black Wizard to spread rumors of evil and corruption on the part of the king, and to sow chaos to weaken his hold. And now, with all his pieces in place, he intended to take the crown for himself. He revealed his true identity as Duke [[Ferrel Bree]] of Nord, and that he had done all of this as revenge against the king for his actions in the [[Nordin Rebellion]].

The Storm King responded by hurling a bolt of lightning, killing Ferrel instantly. As his storm genasi bodyguard, [[Stormdancer]], appeared and began attacking the false royal guards, the Black Wizard warned Drake's Company that Storm King Iskarr would almost certainly kill them for what they had witnessed, then teleported them away to his home, a cloud giant fortress floating in the clouds. The Black Wizard explained that his name was [[Elias Bartherin]], a noble from the Varenese duchy of [[Leyscar]]. An exceptionally talented wizard, he was apprenticed by the royal wizard to replace her when she retired. However, when the king demanded that Elias sacrifice the elderly wizard to take her place, he fled with whatever books he managed to grab on his way out. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that the royal wizard had died. Her replacement was [[Garin Ozram]], a wizard of middling talent but great ambition.

Elias explained that he had eventually been contacted by a halfling calling himself Stormfront, "the leading edge of a new storm." Elias thought he was pretentious, but they both wanted to get rid of the king. So, under Stormfront's direction, he took on the persona of the villainous Black Wizard to destabilize the country and weaken Iskarr's rule. The devil summoning rituals came from one of the books stolen from the palace, but he ensured that all of them were commanded to only scare and threaten civilians, and to only attack the guards. As a final revelation, Nikki Underbough confessed that she was in truth [[Honeysuckle Bree]], Ferrel Bree's secret wife, though she had only spoken to her husband in coded letters since their wedding twenty years ago and knew nothing of his plots.

When Elias told them that the king had been searching for something amidst the ruins of Drakkengarde, and that his agents had seemingly found it recently, the heroes knew that whatever the Storm King's true goals, they had to be stopped. While the Black Wizard used his cloud fortress to attack the palace directly, Drake's Company used the attack as a distraction to enter the palace via an upper balcony. Most of the guards had descended to fight the Black Wizard's attack, but they were met in a hallway by Garin Ozram. Before the wizard could even cast a single spell, Honeysuckle shot a single arrow into his forehead, killing him.

When they reached the top of the palace spire, they found Lanak Iskarr with the spear ''Windvane,'' attempting to summon Yan-C-Bin. When they disrupted the summoning ritual, he instead channeled the archomental's power into himself and became an aspect of the Howling Hatred. During the battle that followed, Drake killed Stormdancer and Honeysuckle delivered the killing blow to the Storm King, who exploded in a burst of lightning. Unwilling to risk the spear falling into the wrong hands again, Sumac cast a spell to fly them down to Jib's ship, and then sailed them on magical winds across the [[Dragon Sea]], through the cave mouth leading down into the ruins of [[Belsimar]], and into the windswept caverns below. There, Sumac plunged the spear into the stormy gateway to the Plane of Air, closing the portal with a mighty thunderclap and causing ''Windvane'' to rust away into dust.