dusk/story.md

Story

This document tracks the game's narrative - premise, world, characters, and lore - as it's developed. It will grow incrementally; sections marked TBD are placeholders for details not yet locked in.

Premise

At its core, this is a story about a prophecy someone tries to prevent, only to become the one who causes it.

A king is warned by a fortune teller that a mage wielding Culinary/Hospitality Magic (name not final) - a magic of creating and enchanting food, drink, and other everyday comforts, the kind of thing a normal person would dismiss as "nice to have" rather than a weapon - will one day be the one to bring him down.

Rather than risk it, the king moves to wipe out every caster of that magic in his kingdom. The culling nearly succeeds: only a handful of casters survive, among them our protagonist - who, at the story's start, doesn't even know she has the power herself. It is this act of trying to prevent the prophecy that sets in motion the very events that will fulfill it.

Story Structure

The story is told across a run of chapters, grouped into eight broad movements. Individual chapter-to-movement mapping is TBD - these are the beats each stretch of the story needs to hit, not a fixed chapter count.

1. The Intro - Establishes the protagonist. Plants the first, vague seeds that she's powerful in a way that's unfamiliar and a little unsettling - a kind of magic people haven't seen in a long time, if ever.
2. The Buildup - She starts learning about a wider world she didn't know existed. Something is subtly steering her toward conflict - not overtly, but persistently - and nobody around her can say why, or even quite agree that it's happening.
3. Early Realization - Threads start connecting back to the king. Former enemies let information slip, whether by accident or design, and the shape of something larger starts to form.
4. The Realization - The big reveal: who she thought she was isn't true. She is a culinary mage. This is who she is. The only questions left are why, and how.
5. Full Circle - The king's intentions and motives come out in full: why she's a threat to him, and how he orchestrated events from the very start.
6. The Buildup (Endgame) - Goals are set and motivations are clear on both sides. She has to stop the king, while he's simultaneously moving to stop her.
7. The Finale - The prophecy is fulfilled.
8. What's Next - This world has more stories left to tell - this is only the surface. Freedom has been won, but now it has to be maintained. Sets up potential future games in the same world.

Chapters

Detailed, scene-level breakdowns of individual chapters as they're developed. Currently covers the opening of Chapter 1 only; more to come.

Chapter 1: The Intro

The story doesn't open on the protagonist - it opens on a small party of bounty hunters, though they'd bristle at the word; they consider their work more noble than that. They've been secretly hired by the king on a straightforward job: rumor has it a culinary magic user is living far up in a freezing mountain range. Go get her. Bring her back alive.

We follow this chapter through the party leader's perspective - the story's second main character. He's honor-bound to a fault, treating the king's word as gospel without question. Even so, the job needles at him from the start: why this person specifically, why this remote location - questions he swallows, because it isn't his place to question the king.

Opening scene. The story begins in a village square - a small, quiet settlement with one modestly bustling street, the last real point of civilization before the mountain range swallows everything beyond it. The bubbly ranger enters first, delighted just to be somewhere new, already itching to go sample everything the village has to offer. The rest of the party follows a beat behind: the party leader, steadfast as ever, keeping everyone's eyes on the mission first and foremost; the fratboy mage, big and boisterous; and the rogue, shy and silent, saying nothing at all. The party:

• The Party Leader - the group's tank/paladin.
• The Bubbly Ranger - ranged attacker, longbow.
• The Fratboy Mage - support and primary magic attacker.
• The Rogue - shy and silent but strong, the party's main melee frontliner.

They head straight for the village's guild hall to find a teleporter up the mountain - there's no time to rest, and that urgency is exactly what surfaces the party's first real friction: funds are already thin, and every extra night spent in town is a night they can't really afford. A minor bicker over money breaks out - nothing serious yet, just the first crack.

Eventually they find a teleporter willing to take the job: rugged, plainspoken, a cowgirl through and through. She offers to take them up the mountain for a third of what the guild hall was asking - a deal too good to question closely. The catch, mentioned almost as an aside, is that she can't bring them back down; she's got a contract of her own to honor once she's up there. She waves it off as nothing much - they can figure that out later, can't they? - and the party, just relieved to have a way up at all, doesn't push it.

None of them understand yet how ordinary an arrangement this actually is. A teleporter at the mountain doesn't care what she's paid to carry upward, only that it gives her an excuse to make the climb, since all that actually matters to her - to every teleporter working that route - is filling her mana hauling ore back down (see World Notes). Getting a teleport back down the mountain, the party will learn, is another matter entirely.

They arrive to find an isolated, blizzard-bound mining town built around that rare ore. The culinary mage they've come for is well-liked and respected here, and a group of outsiders showing up to take her away, on the word of a king who has never done anything for this region, does not go over well - the town turns on them.

Then comes the first real complication. The party's funds - a stipend from the king that was never generous to begin with - come nowhere close to what it costs to buy a teleport back down: ore shipments and deep-pocketed royalty take priority over everyone else, always. With no way down, and nowhere welcome to wait it out, the party fractures. Some see easy, guaranteed pay in the town's mines and no reason to stay loyal to a king who clearly doesn't value them; others still see the king's request - however small and uncertain the eventual payout - as the job they signed up to finish. The bubbly ranger is the first to go, no longer willing to freeze and starve for a job that was never straight with her. The party splits, and what's left sets out to trek down the mountain the old-fashioned way. (Whether the fratboy mage and/or the rogue also leave here, or stay through to the castle: TBD.)

What remains is a smaller group, supplies dwindling, no clear sense of why any of this is still worth it, hauling what feels like dead weight: a prisoner who, as far as anyone can tell, wouldn't hurt a fly.

Around the chapter's midpoint, the party leader gets the sense they're being followed. Nothing confirmed, no confrontation - just a feeling, a shape at the edge of the blizzard, tracks that shouldn't be there. He says nothing to the rest of the party. The audience is left aware someone or something is watching, well before anyone in-story can do anything about it.

As the journey back wears on, she shows her true character - even as a captive, she uses her magic to help the party survive. It's this, more than anything, that starts cracking the party leader's certainty. He keeps carrying out his orders. He just isn't sure of them anymore.

The chapter's climax comes at the castle. The party presents her to the king, and she's dragged off to the dungeon - implicitly to be executed, or simply to disappear. In open defiance, the party leader confronts the king: who is she, and why did his party go through hell to drag her here? The king, unwilling to admit to anything about hunting culinary mages specifically, dismisses him as a traitor for questioning the crown - denies him payment, and all but tells him to be grateful he's keeping his head.

(The presence felt at the chapter's midpoint is, unknown to anyone in the party at the time, The Detective - see Characters.)

Chapter 2 (early notes)

Partial beats only for now - not a full breakdown yet.

The protagonist, imprisoned and awaiting execution, is freed when a key is thrown through the bars of her cell - by the Detective. He tells her, briefly, that he's the one who's been following the party this whole time, and that their paths will cross again, before leaving her to make her own escape.

Separately, the Detective seeks out the party leader, now dismissed and adrift - having gone through hell to complete the king's request with his honor intact, only to be discarded for asking the wrong question. Already in the middle of his own crisis of faith about honor, authority, and everything he's built his life on, he's approached by the Detective, who reveals - sparingly - that he's a detective, and that he'd been following the party since before they ever reached the mountains. He won't say much more than that; he can't show his hand. But he does suggest, deliberately, that the protagonist might be worth looking into further - and floats that she may have some connection to the Great Explosion, given that she practices the forbidden magic herself.

Between these two encounters, it's becoming clear the king has some concrete reason to distrust the protagonist specifically - though no one, including the audience, knows what it is yet. Doubt about the king has been planted, in both the party leader and the player, but nothing is confirmed. As quickly as the Detective appears, he's gone again, already moving on to other threads of his own investigation - this, as far as he's concerned, is a dead end not worth lingering on.

The Great Explosion

The event is so significant to this kingdom that it reset their calendar around it. Where the rest of the world reckons time by the old calendar (currently Year 4192), this kingdom counts years as AGE - "After the Great Explosion." The story opens in Year 25 AGE - which puts the protagonist, born the night it happened, at roughly 25 years old.

Within the kingdom, the event itself is barely spoken of - referenced only obliquely, in hushed tones, as "the Great Explosion." What actually happened is not public knowledge, is actively lied about by the crown (see "The Official Story" below), and is revealed to the player gradually over the course of the story, rather than up front. What follows is the truth of it, for reference - not something the player, or the protagonist, knows this early.

What Really Happened

Having traced the culinary mages to their hometown - a whole town built around them, led by their most powerful practitioner, the Great Mage (name TBD), who is also the town's mayor - the king moves to have them all executed in a single, coordinated purge. He doesn't delegate this one: he's there in person, with a large force of soldiers, to make sure it happens exactly as planned.

The town is rounded up into the streets - every citizen, women and children included - and the king demands the Great Mage surrender himself. The Great Mage has done nothing wrong; there is no plot, no uprising, only a prophecy and a king who has convinced himself, completely, that this man is the one fated to end him. The soldiers aren't there to prevent some future act - as far as anyone in the crowd can tell, they're just there to make sure nothing stops the execution.

To force the issue, the king takes the Great Mage's wife hostage, along with their newborn daughter - the protagonist - and threatens to kill them both on the spot if he doesn't come forward. The Great Mage relents and agrees to surrender himself into captivity.

It isn't enough. Having gotten what he demanded, the king - by this point well past reason - orders the entire village executed anyway. Soldiers begin killing citizens one by one in the street. It is, plainly, a massacre.

With no options left, the Great Mage begins casting: a spell built on an old, well-known melody, one every villager grew up knowing as a soothing folk song. As he chants it, others in the crowd who can cast start singing and casting along with him - even now, even like this. What starts as one desperate act becomes the whole town casting together, and the combined spell detonates as the Great Explosion.

The king escapes only barely, teleported clear at the last second by his own personal, and extremely rare, teleporter. Everyone else in the town is killed - along with nearly the entire army the king brought to enforce the purge. It's a catastrophic loss on every side: the king loses the bulk of his military in an instant, and every known culinary mage but a scattered handful dies with the town. In the aftermath, even the king isn't sure what to make of it - whether this was the prophecy finally arriving, or whether wiping out every culinary mage in existence means he's just avoided it for good.

He's wrong either way. In the same instant, the Great Mage's wife casts a protective spell of her own on their newborn daughter - small in scope, powerful enough to matter, enough to keep only one person alive through what's coming. It saves the protagonist, and nothing else. She ends up one of a literal handful of survivors, alongside a few surviving soldiers and a handful of villager stragglers. Not all of the soldiers who survive stand down - some try to finish what they were ordered to do, hunting down and killing a few more of the survivors even after the explosion. Those who can still run do, and they take the newly orphaned protagonist with them.

The Official Story

History gets written by whoever's left standing. The king and what remains of his army return home with a different account entirely: the culinary mages were insurgents, plotting to overthrow the crown, and the Great Explosion was their own doing - a last, failed act of rebellion, not a massacre. It sticks. It becomes the official record, and it's why the truth of what happened stays buried, spoken of only in fragments and hushed tones, for the twenty-five years since.

World Notes

• Two calendars: the wider world uses a conventional year count (Year 4192 and counting); this kingdom alone uses Year N AGE, counting from the Great Explosion. The disparity itself is a hint to outsiders - and to the player - that something happened here.
• Culinary/Hospitality Magic: magic themed around food, drink, and comfort - underestimated by most as domestic or decorative, not martial. Exact mechanics/rules TBD. Following the Official Story branding its practitioners as insurgents, it's now known within the kingdom as "the forbidden magic" - officially outlawed, which is part of why the protagonist has never been trained in it and doesn't know she has it.
• Teleportation Magic: the rarest and single most valuable magical skill in the world - fewer than 1% of magic users can do it at all. Teleporters are indispensable for logistics (messages, cargo, urgent travel) and can effectively name their own price; they're held in correspondingly high regard almost everywhere.
  • This reaches its extreme in the mining mountains. A rare ore is mined there (name TBD), valuable enough and difficult enough to move any other way that the teleporters working that route are among the highest-paid individuals anywhere in the world.
  • A teleporter at the mountain cares about exactly one thing: getting ore down. They'll spend their entire reserve of mana hauling as much of it downward as they can carry, and nothing takes priority over that
    • short of a royal client with genuinely deep pockets.
  • Because of that singular focus, teleporters will take almost any paying job to get back up the mountain first - they don't care what (or who) they're carrying, only that it justifies the trip so they can turn around and come back down loaded with ore. Supply runs upward are therefore easy and cheap to arrange; there's never a shortage of teleporters looking for an excuse to make the climb.
  • Getting a teleport down the mountain is the opposite problem entirely - one outsiders unfamiliar with the trade routinely underestimate. See Chapter 1.
  • The king keeps a personal teleporter on retainer - rare enough to afford only for a monarch. It's this teleporter who gets him clear of the Great Explosion in the instant before it kills nearly everyone else present.

Characters

The Protagonist

One of the last surviving casters of Culinary/Hospitality Magic. Does not yet know she has this power. Born the night of the Great Explosion to the Great Mage and his wife, and saved from it only by her mother's protective spell cast in its final instant - a fact she has no memory or knowledge of. Raised after by whichever survivors and stragglers fled the scene with her. Her arc is the prophecy's fulfillment - the king's attempt to prevent her existence is, narratively, what creates her. (Name, background, and how she discovers her power: TBD.)

The King

Ordered the culling of all Culinary/Hospitality mages after being warned of the prophecy, and personally oversaw the resulting massacre at the Great Mage's town. Tunnel-visioned to the point of ordering the entire village executed even after getting the surrender he demanded - a decision that costs him nearly his whole army in the Great Explosion he provoked. Escaped only via his own personal teleporter. Still doesn't know whether he caused the prophecy or avoided it, and doesn't know the protagonist survived at all. Motivations beyond self-preservation, and his current awareness of how the prophecy is unfolding: TBD.

The Fortune Teller

Delivered the original prophecy to the king. Role beyond the inciting incident: TBD.

The Great Mage

The protagonist's father, the most powerful known culinary mage of his generation, and the mayor of the town the king wipes out in the Great Explosion. Innocent of the plot the king believes in - there was no plot. Surrenders himself to try to save his wife and newborn daughter, only for the king to order the massacre anyway. Leads the town's final, collective casting - built on a spell that doubles as a folk song every villager already knew - that becomes the Great Explosion. Dies in it. (Name: TBD.)

The Protagonist's Mother

The Great Mage's wife. Held hostage alongside her newborn daughter to force her husband's surrender. In the Great Explosion's final instant, casts a small but powerful protective spell that saves the protagonist and no one else, at the cost of her own life. The protagonist has no memory of her. (Name: TBD.)

The Bubbly Ranger

One of the party leader's original bounty-hunting party - the group's ranged attacker, fighting with a longbow. Enters the story first, ahead of the rest of the party, delighted at the chance to explore the small village at the mountain's foot. Her enthusiasm doesn't survive the mountain: she's the first to abandon the mission once the party's stranded and broke, unwilling to keep freezing and starving for a job that was never honest with her from the start. (Name: TBD.)

The Fratboy Mage

One of the party leader's original bounty-hunting party - support and primary magic attacker. Big, boisterous, overconfident energy. Whether he stays with the party through to the castle, or leaves alongside the ranger: TBD. (Name: TBD.)

The Rogue

One of the party leader's original bounty-hunting party - the group's main melee frontliner. Shy and silent, says almost nothing, but physically strong and imposing - a quiet contrast to the ranger's bubbliness. Whether she stays with the party through to the castle, or leaves alongside the ranger: TBD. (Name: TBD.)

The Mountain Teleporter

A rugged, plainspoken, cowgirl-type teleporter met at the village guild hall at the foot of the mountain. Offers to take the party up for a third of the guild's asking price - a deal too good to question - and mentions, almost as an aside, that she can't bring them back down; she has her own ore-hauling contract to fulfill once she's up there. Framed as an innocent, easily-dismissed detail in the moment, it's actually the seed of the chapter's central complication (see World Notes on Teleportation Magic). Likely a one-scene character, not expected to reappear. (Name: TBD.)

The Party Leader

The story's second main character, and whose perspective opens Chapter 1. Leads the band of bounty hunters secretly hired by the king to retrieve the protagonist from the mountains. Honor-bound to a fault, and treats the king's word as absolute - but the ordeal of the retrieval, and the protagonist's own conduct as a captive, starts opening cracks in that certainty. Still carries out his orders even as he stops trusting them. Publicly denounced as a traitor by the king at the end of Chapter 1 for questioning why she was really taken.

Backstory. As a very young soldier, he served in an army squadron under a mentor he idolized - a strictly honor-bound officer who was, to him, something like a superhero. On the night the army was dispatched to the Great Mage's town, that mentor broke orders outright: he told the entire squadron to stay behind and went in alone. With their mentor gone, the squadron had no one to hold it together - it disbanded, and everyone in it eventually left the army to find other work. The mentor never returned; he died in the Great Explosion.

The party leader never learned the king was actually behind the massacre, so he never had reason to connect his mentor's last order to anything but a personal choice. Instead, he built his entire sense of honor around faithfully executing orders and serving "the greater good," now as a mercenary rather than a soldier - honor as obedience, just no longer to a chain of command, but to his own idea of duty (which is why the king's word still carries the weight of gospel for him in Chapter 1).

It's through the protagonist that this starts to crack: he comes to understand that real honor has to come from one's own judgment, not blind adherence to orders - his mentor's, the king's, or otherwise. By the story's end, he realizes the truth: his mentor almost certainly went that night already knowing the king intended a massacre, and chose to disobey orders specifically so his squadron would never have to take part in - or witness - that side of what "honor" can mean. Because the mentor sent them home instead of into the town, none of them died in the Great Explosion. The mentor's final act of disobedience was the honorable one

• the party leader just spends most of the story unable to see it that way.

Further chapters will follow up with other surviving members of that same squadron, now scattered across the world, each having drawn their own, different lesson from their mentor's example of what honor means. Of the five other survivors, three are met over the course of the story: Strider, Downes, and Egor (see below). (Name and background: TBD.)

The Mentor

The party leader's former commanding officer, and the closest thing he had to a hero growing up. Rigidly honor-bound. Ordered his entire squadron to stand down and went alone into the Great Mage's town on the night of the purge - almost certainly already aware of what the king intended, and unwilling to let his soldiers take part in it. Dies in the Great Explosion. His true reasoning is never stated outright; the party leader only pieces it together well after the fact. (Name: TBD.)

Strider

Former squadron-mate of the party leader, now a merc who's found his own, settled definition of honor. Runs a protection business for merchants who can't afford a teleporter's price - riding along their carriages, guarding their goods, and fending off bandits the whole way. Has found genuine peace in it: protecting people who have no one else looking out for them and no way to afford real protection. He's welcomed, loved, and respected in that niche precisely because his care for the people he protects is real, not transactional. The clearest example of the squadron's shared "honor" being taken somewhere quietly good.

Downes

Once one of the strongest fighters the squadron had. Now fully retired from soldiering, living as a farmer in a quiet village, and won't so much as pick up a weapon. His honor is his family - protecting them, and building them a life away from all of it, is the whole of it for him now. Tends his crops and animals, and wants nothing to do with his past. Represents the opposite lesson from the rest of the squadron: that there are things in life more important than fighting. That said, the story brings him to a moment where he has no choice but to fight again - proof that even he can't outrun what he used to be forever. (Circumstances of that fight: TBD.)

Egor

Once part of the same squadron, now a highly respected member of the Royal Guard, decorated for his power and his devotion. He's the story's clearest villain among the three, though he'd never see himself that way: he genuinely believes honor is following orders, full stop. He considers his former squadron-mates - the party leader especially - to have gone rogue, and is completely blind to what the king actually is, misreading their old mentor's final act as some kind of failure of nerve rather than its own form of honor.

Egor ultimately faces the party and the protagonist directly, and is defeated. He dies still certain his honor was sound to the very end - deluded about it right up until his last moments, when something finally breaks through: a flash of understanding that his blind devotion earned him nothing but pain and misery. Whether he actually regrets it, in the end, is left unknown - even to him, maybe.

The Detective

Deliberately kept thin by design - this entry should stay short even as the rest of the document grows. The less the audience (and we) nail down about him early, the better he works later.

Working for the king, he's been secretly tailing the party since before Chapter 1 even reaches the mountains - he's the presence felt at that chapter's midpoint. Neither the party nor the protagonist know he exists until Chapter 2, when he throws a cell key through the bars to free the protagonist ahead of her execution, tells her only that he's been following them and that they'll meet again, and leaves her to escape on her own. He separately approaches the newly-dismissed party leader, confirms he's a detective and that he's been on the party's trail from the start, and - without showing any more of his hand than that - suggests the protagonist is worth investigating further, floating that her connection to the Great Explosion may run deeper than anyone realizes, given she practices the forbidden magic herself. Then he's gone, back to his own investigation, treating this as a dead end not worth his time.

Physically described as looking oddly caught between two trades - "half banker, half farmer" - the kind of appearance that resists being placed or remembered clearly.

Works for the king, but his actual loyalties, goals, and how much he personally knows about the Great Explosion or the prophecy are all intentionally undefined for now. (Name and everything else: TBD, on purpose.)

Themes

• Self-fulfilling prophecy - the act of prevention is the cause.
• Power in what's dismissed as harmless or domestic.
• Institutional violence and its cover-up - a kingdom that has to reorganize its own sense of time to live with what it did.
• Blind loyalty vs. conscience - orders followed even as faith in them erodes.
• Honor redefined as judgment, not obedience - real honor sometimes looks like disobeying orders, and can go unrecognized as such for years. The same mentor and the same night produced six different soldiers who each landed somewhere completely different: quiet self-doubt (the party leader), care for the unrepresented (Strider), retreat into family and peace (Downes), and honor curdled into blind, fatal devotion (Egor).
• You can't outrun who you were - Downes builds a life as far from soldiering as he can get, and the story still forces one more fight out of him.
• The tragedy of unshakeable certainty - Egor never once doubts himself, and it kills him without ever teaching him anything, except perhaps at the very last second.
• The crown's disregard for the people who prop it up - a distant king extracting from a region (soldiers, subjects, this mage) that owes him nothing and gets nothing back.
• Humanity mistaken for weakness - the "prisoner" who helps her captors anyway.
• History written by the victors - an entire massacre rewritten into an insurgency, and believed, because there was no one left to say otherwise.
• Collective action under duress - an entire town choosing, in its final moments, to act together rather than die separately.
• Duality of the same magic as comfort and catastrophe - a lullaby every villager grew up with becomes the spell that ends them.
• A mother's sacrifice narrowed to the smallest possible act - saving one life, not the town, because that's all that could be done.
• Everyone acting on partial information - the king, the Detective, the party leader, the protagonist, and the player all hold different, often incomplete pieces of the same truth.

Open Questions / TBD

• Final name for Culinary/Hospitality Magic.
• Protagonist's name and how her power surfaces.
• How much of the Great Explosion's truth the player learns, and when.
• What the "couple of casters" who survived alongside the protagonist are doing now - allies, threats, or unaware of each other entirely.
• Why the king specifically wanted this mage, from this location - deliberately left unanswered in Chapter 1, to be paid off later.
• The party leader's name and background.
• Names for the bubbly ranger, the fratboy mage, the rogue, and the mountain teleporter.
• What becomes of the bubbly ranger (and possibly the mage/rogue) after they split off from the party at the foot of the mountain.
• The name of the small village at the mountain's foot, and the mining town's name and its rare ore.
• Whether/how the party leader and protagonist's paths cross again after Chapter 1.
• Whether teleportation magic (and its rarity) becomes relevant again beyond Chapter 1's logistics trap - e.g. a named teleporter character, or its scarcity mattering to the wider plot/prophecy.
• Names for the Great Mage, the protagonist's mother, and their hometown.
• The name/nature of the folk song that doubles as the spell behind the Great Explosion.
• Who exactly fled with the infant protagonist (soldiers vs. villager stragglers), who ultimately raised her, and whether any of them reappear later in the story.
• Whether the king ever learns the protagonist survived, and if so, when.
• Whether/how the protagonist eventually learns the truth about her parents and the Official Story's lie.
• Names for the party leader and his mentor.
• The two remaining, still-unnamed survivors of the mentor's squadron - whether they're ever introduced, and if so how.
• Which chapters/movements Strider, Downes, and Egor each actually appear in, and in what order the party leader reconnects with them.
• The circumstances that force Downes back into a fight.
• How Egor and the party actually cross paths, and what leads directly to their confrontation.
• How and when the party leader pieces together that his mentor already knew what the king intended that night.
• The Detective's name, true loyalties, and how much he actually knows about the Great Explosion, the prophecy, and the protagonist's parentage - kept deliberately unresolved for as long as possible.
• What the Detective's other "threads of investigation" are, and whether they connect back to this story later.
• Where and when the Detective and the protagonist "cross paths again," as he promises in Chapter 2.
• What the party leader does with the small amount the Detective tells him - whether he acts on it immediately or it simmers.
• Exactly what concrete reason (if any) the king has to distrust the protagonist specifically, beyond her simply being a surviving forbidden mage - left unconfirmed at this point in the story.