Vonara Silverstream was a Half-Elf bard and one of the five adventurers who answered Syndra Silvane’s call to Port Nyanzaru.12 In Omu she bound herself to the service of Valindra Shadowmantle of the Red Wizards, who held her parents as undead, in exchange for the lives of her companions,34 and she carried a jar out of the Tomb of the Nine Gods for her.56 She survived the expedition, married Kaelar Veilthorn and opened a courtesan house in Port Nyanzaru.7
Vonara, to the Boy
“You are already a fantastic hero.”8
Description
Vonara stood five feet five inches, slender and athletic, with short, asymmetrical white hair and red-pink eyes. She favored custom-made traveler’s clothing that projected wealth, and wore a hat and a velvet blazer embroidered with gold thread.
She smoked cigarettes. She watched the rescue of two triceratops from a tar pit with one in hand,9 called out for cigarettes when the party found one another at the lodge in Valachan,10 and smoked to steady her nerves in the Tomb.11
From the twelfth of Eleasis she bore an invisible tracer sigil, the brand of Valindra Shadowmantle.4
Personality
Vonara kept things to herself. She and Vogal said nothing to the others about the detour the two of them had made in the jungle.9 Compelled to speak the truth at Moa’s Shrine, she gave a different last name.12 When the party proved their identities to one another by sharing personal memories, she withheld hers.13 When she told the story of the Cradle to those who had waited for the party, she left out that Takhesis Calva had turned against them.7
She used charm and performance to get what she wanted. She flirted with a bartender for information,1 and haggled a crossbow down to a bargain by performing an advertisement for the seller on the spot.14 Before Vogal’s duel with Tharn Veilthorn she bet on both men.15
Asked in the Gorge of Teeth whether her flight served Order or Chaos, she answered that it served neither.16 In Omu she refused to deal with the spirits of Moa and Shagambi, to avoid acquiring more “puppets” for her pedestal.12
Abilities
Vonara was a bard and a performer.14217 She bolstered Vogal in the arena by inconspicuously working up the crowd,15 and played a tune for a troop of capuchin monkeys in Omu.18 Spells she was recorded casting include dispel magic, dimension door, wall of force, wall of thorns and Yolande’s regal presence.1915202122232248 She healed the fallen.25
She scouted for the party, on foot and on her broom,262728 and picked locks.288 She recognized the Yuan-ti origins of a deinonychus,29 knew an hourglass in the Tomb for Dwarven work,30 and read Infernal.8 On arriving in Valachan she tried to commune with the plants, which only echoed the malice of the monkeys there.31
Possessions
- A broom of flying, first recorded in her hands on the twenty-second of Flamerule and used until the end of the expedition.266
- A carved human femur, taken from the nest of the pterafolk elders at Firefinger.32
- The Blazer of Benevolence and the Anstruth Harp, taken from a statue made in her likeness beneath the Hungerer’s throne.33
- Everyday cigarettes and a set of “very fine” cigarettes in a fancy container that doubled as a lighter, bought from the tobacco merchant Begär in the Grand Souk.34 Her cigarette holder was torn from her and destroyed in the Tomb’s attraction room,35 and her cigarettes decayed in the Hall of Decay.36
- A light crossbow, bought from Zarri in the Grand Souk.14
- A custom outfit from the clothier SURE, ordered for the gala.2619
- A Harper token, the gift of the merchant prince Wakanga O’tamu, who said that it would give safe passage out of Port Nyanzaru if the party obtained the Eye of Ubtao.37
- A gift from Vogal, in thanks for her support in his duel.38
- The Conductor’s Pedestal, a celestial orrery of bronze gears that hummed with captured soul energy.39 From the tenth of Eleasis the spirit of Wongo inhabited it.40
- A disguise kit.20
- The puzzle cube of Kubazan,20 and afterward seven of the puzzle cubes of Omu, handed to her by the Red Wizards. The door of the Tomb consumed the cubes.18
- The gear of the dead paladin Sephirius, and a red crystal eyeball found with him.2
- A cloak of displacement.24
- The Formless Fabric, a mithril chain shirt that let her alter her appearance at will.
- The Cigarette Case, the gift of The Boy.17
- The phylactery jar she took from the Cradle, which she returned to Valindra.57
Relationships
Kaelar Veilthorn was her husband. He was a brother of Taban Veilthorn, and flirted with her openly at their first meeting in The Golden Serpent.14 At the gala he reintroduced himself and spent the rest of the evening getting to know her.37 Valindra threatened him, by scrying, to force Vonara’s cooperation.4 The party saw him in the tapestry of the Sewn Sisters before the descent to the Cradle,17 and when the survivors reached the camp above the caldera Vonara went to him.7
Sylvia and Vostra were her parents. They were murdered by Red Wizards,3941 and were raised as mindless undead puppets in Valindra’s service.34
Valindra Shadowmantle held her parents and bound her by a geas from the twelfth of Eleasis until Vonara returned the jar to her.4137 Seeing her in the Sewn Sisters’ tapestry, a pale figure on the terrace of the Heart of Ubtao, Vonara said, “Ornery old bitch.”17
Begär, the Beggar King, sold her cigarettes in the guise of a merchant,3441 and kept an altar to her in the viewing chamber of the Temple of Euphoria. It held a frozen tear, a broken lute string and a miniature stage that replayed the tragedy of her early life. It held no harvested pain, only the promise of it, and was his private gallery for his “most coveted, unopened vintage.”42 When the party reached his throne he said to her, “My songbird. You came.”43
Takhesis Calva lost her trust on the third of Eleasis, when she watched him execute a family in the Grand Colosseum.44 On the morning of the thirteenth, when a vision struck him, she recalled the efficiency he had shown in the arena.18 Acererak, speaking through Takhesis, demanded “the bard’s sorrow,”43 and in a later vision demanded Vonara’s sorrow of Takhesis as part of the price of true power.45
Vogal was her frequent partner when the party divided.29154612212524 She twice carried him out of danger by dimension door,2021 and it was to him that she sent her one warning from the Heart of Ubtao.4 He called her “Fancy Lady”.
Taenae saved her life in the Tiryki River, and Vonara saved Taenae’s in the Tomb.472 On the first night in the Tomb Taenae quietly warned the others to keep an eye on her.22 On the fifteenth of Eleasis Taenae thanked her before the party for making the bargain with Valindra, which had protected them and Alice, and said that she wanted to help her break it, though she did not know how.13
Glade borrowed her broom to scout the Fane of the Night Serpent after its fall.18
Savriel Tirinath, a Watcher freed from a mirror on the fourth level of the Tomb, was at first watched closely and with suspicion by Vonara.48 Vonara stood guard over her rite for the dead, confessed the geas to her, and received her promise that they would find a way to break it.13
The Boy, a child clone of Takhesis, kept all of Vonara’s songs in memory as tunes without words, and asked her anxiously whether that was a good thing to keep.8 By her own account she did not get to say goodbye to him.17
Wongo, a Trickster God of Omu, inhabited her pedestal from the tenth of Eleasis and bonded with her on the sixteenth.408 He left her without a word after the death of Takhesis.6
Pip Proudfoot, a Halfling pickpocket, served her as an informant from the twenty-first of Flamerule,34 and warned her of the poison at the gala.19 Valindra showed her his corpse.4
Taban Veilthorn, a gladiator who joined the party on its first day,1 was sought by Vonara in Port Nyanzaru in Flamerule.3414 When the party fought him in the Sunken Temple he said to her, “Your songs won’t soothe this beast… But I remember how your ballads made me smile. A lifetime ago.”49
History
Early life
Vonara spent her childhood at the Verdigris House with her parents, Sylvia and Vostra. Red Wizards came to the house and murdered them, and she was raised on the road by a bard, her mentor. Vonara notably buried the traumatic memories of her upbringing underneath the demanding training of her mentor.39413
Chult and Valachan
On the thirtieth of Mirtul, 1492 DR, Vonara and four others accepted Syndra Silvane’s commission to find the source of the Death Curse and were sent to Port Nyanzaru. At Kaya’s House of Repose she and Vogal heard two rumors: that “terror folk” nested on the spire called Firefinger, and that the ruins of Mezro were an illusion.1
Before the party left Port Nyanzaru for Firefinger she secured rations and holy items. On the seventh of Kythorn the party’s canoe was destroyed in the rapids of the Tiryki River, and she and Glade fell in and were saved by Taenae in the form of a giant octopus. Both nearly died in an ambush by su-monsters afterward. The party also found a dead beholder being eaten by vultures, and Vonara scared the birds off.47
On the eighth she and Vogal were separated from the others and, at a remote jungle temple, were joined by the sorcerer Fenro Silver. A deinonychus ran in, chased by wolves, and by means of a scroll introduced itself as Finethir Shinebright, a wizard trapped in the form of a beast. A Half-Orc enforcer named Guz arrived with wolves and a golem to demand its return to his master, Noke. The three refused and fought. Guz and his wolves were cut down, and Noke was destroyed by the backfire of his own wand.29
Between the eighteenth and the twenty-sixth, on the road to Firefinger, the party met a patrol of Red Wizards, and Vonara deceived them and avoided a fight. In the first cave of the spire four giant spiders ambushed the party. She was heavily wounded and poisoned, and Taenae gave her first aid.9
In Valachan she lived in the body of Lira, a native thief and the sister of Jarek, whose body Takhesis inhabited. Giant poisonous snakes did her significant damage on the first day.10 On the second day, in a battle among spike traps, Jarek, rushing to help a fallen companion, accidentally knocked her into a spike pit, and she died instantly. Jarek killed himself over it.50
On the night of the thirtieth of Kythorn, in a battle under water among ruined bookshelves, a water elemental and a water weird did significant damage to her and to Glade.51
Port Nyanzaru
On the evening of the twenty-first of Flamerule, at the Dead Fish, Vogal noticed a thief working the room. Vonara confronted him, a Halfling named Pip Proudfoot, and in place of turning him in intimidated him into her service, to find word of Taban in the city’s underbelly.34 On the morning of the twenty-second she, Glade and Takhesis set out for the Temple of Savras and found Taenae on the way, robbed and unconscious on a trash heap.52 At the Golden Serpent that day she dazzled the crowd with a performance into which she wove a call for information about Taban. It drew his three older brothers, Korrak, Tharn and Kaelar, who said that they did not know where he was.14
On the same date she flew over Wakanga’s Villa on her broom and noted heavy traffic of servants, then landed to speak with a nobleman, Lord Cedric Montclair, who called himself the “12th Richest Man in Port Nyanzaru” and sneered at her for having no invitation to the coming gala. Couriers found each member of the party with an invitation shortly afterward.26
At the gala of the twenty-third Montclair intercepted her and mocked her presence and her dress. Ekene-Afa then touched his goblet, and the wine boiled into blood and ash. A servant refilling Vonara’s glass, who was Pip Proudfoot, slipped her a note: “The wine was a ruse. The true poison is in the air. Breathe shallowly.” She cast dispel magic on the dining table and felt a weave unravel. It had carried a gaseous form of the poison Midnight Tears, enchanted into the air, and her spell saved most of the guests. A few nobles and servants were poisoned and died before it was fully contained.19 She and Glade turned at once on Jessamine, believing her the poisoner, and Jessamine and her bodyguard teleported out of the hall.19 At the close of the gala Vonara spoke briefly with Wakanga, who was deeply concerned that Lady Nyrule now held the Eye of Ubtao.53
On the evening of the twenty-fourth she went with Vogal to the Grand Colosseum.15 The next day, in his duel with Tharn, a tiger that appeared in the arena ignored Tharn and went for Vogal. Vonara cast dispel magic on it, and it turned on Tharn, who crushed its skull.15 That afternoon she, Vogal, Glade and Inete felt the tremor of a death, hurried to a warehouse and went down into the Maw Below, where they found Taenae and Takhesis alive.54 Vonara freed Jessamine and her fellow prisoners from their shackles.55
On the way to the Sunken Temple the party came into the twilight glade of Lady Sansa, a fey noble of the Summer Court. Vonara made a side deal with her, her darkest memories in exchange for immediate passage, and the whole party was set down at the temple’s door.56 On the twenty-seventh of Flamerule, inside the temple, the party crossed the Gorge of Teeth one by one on her broom.16 That night she dreamed of the Verdigris House, of a quiet happiness with her parents and of their murder, and came away from the dream with the Conductor’s Pedestal.39
On the thirtieth she and Vogal went to the Golden Serpent to find Kaelar, and found him executing a man named Garrett and questioning another captive. Vogal told him that Taban had given his life in the Sunken Temple, and Kaelar offered the party information in future as a debt of honor.46 That afternoon the guards at the Merchant’s Gate extorted coin from her as the party passed into the Old City,57 and in the evening she went down into the ziggurat of the Temple of Euphoria with Vogal, Takhesis and Glade.58
During her rest that night she dreamed that she stood before Begär’s shop in a pearlescent Grand Souk. Begär showed himself as the Beggar King, a fey creature of moonlight and moss, and made her smoke a black cigarette, each breath of which showed her flashes of her lost memories: the Red Wizards, the murder of her parents, her mentor. He said, “I have brought every tear back from that hollow hag, Sansa. I have all of you now.” He offered her a place in his “Eternal Garden”, and she refused. He returned her memories all the same, believing that her pain would make her eventual breakdown more profound, and vowed to be there to “catch” her when she shattered. She woke weeping jade-green tears, whole for the first time in years.41 The party destroyed him on the thirty-first.43
On the third of Eleasis she watched from the stands of the Grand Colosseum, with Kaelar beside her, as Takhesis executed a man named Kalan and his family. Kaelar seemed to have known of the event beforehand but was surprised by its brutality. He comforted her, and warned her that Jessamine had sanctioned it and that “nothing good would come from associating with a schemer like her.” Vonara ended the night very drunk at the Dead Fish.4459 The next day Takhesis told the party that the executions had been Jessamine’s price and that the father had taken part in the massacre of the Calva clan. Whether this eased Vonara’s horror was not recorded.60
Omu
On the tenth of Eleasis Vonara read graffiti in Omu and spoke the name of Wongo. A vision followed, of Acererak crushing Wongo, and her pedestal awoke with Wongo’s spirit in it, chittering in her mind. She withstood its first assault.40
At Kubazan’s shrine that morning she attempted to take the puzzle cube by swapping it for an object of equal weight, and put a three-pound disguise kit in place of the half-pound cube. Poison gas filled the room and the door sealed. With Vogal close to death from the gas she took the two of them outside by dimension door, leaving the cube behind, and went back in for it once the gas had cleared.20 She stayed at the camp with Taenae, Alice and Inete while the others ambushed a party of Red Wizards.20
On the eleventh she went with Inete and Vogal to Moa’s Shrine. Vogal crossed a chasm on her broom, where a thermal updraft burned off his loincloth. An elder jaculi at the entrance compelled the three to speak the truth, and they admitted that they had come for the cube. They found the true one inside.12
On the twelfth she and Takhesis searched the ruins in the northeast. They drove off an attacker they could not identify near the waterfall bridge, and found the main entrance to the Fane of the Night Serpent beneath the Royal Palace, which they did not enter.3
That afternoon the Heart of Ubtao, a floating fortress of the Red Wizards, descended over the walled compound in Omu. Valindra demanded that the party bring its five puzzle cubes to Zagmira there, and sent Vonara alone a vision of her parents as undead. Vonara took the five cubes, left the party and went to the Heart by herself. She was captured and the cubes were taken from her. Inete, scrying, saw her enter the fortress and nothing more.3
Vonara woke bound. Valindra told her that Ishmakahl, the party’s guide into the Fane, was a Thayan spy leading her companions to slaughter. She offered the lives of the party, the return of the five cubes and an end to the attacks on Tawb, and in exchange Vonara was to retrieve the Soulmonger, or a specific artifact, from the Tomb. Vonara accepted. Valindra gave her a scroll of sending for a single message, and she sent it to Vogal: “Vogal, stop. Ishmakahl is evil. Walking into a trap. Don’t go. Tell everybody.” Vogal exposed Ishmakahl, who was killed and proved to be a doppelganger.4
She returned to the party in the middle of the battle for the Fane, with a detachment of Red Wizards under Zagmira, Valindra’s lieutenant, who disintegrated the Yuan-ti defenders in the way of the inner sanctum.61 After the Fane fell, Zagmira handed her the five confiscated cubes together with those of Unkh and Papazotl.18 On the thirteenth Alice, reached by sending stone, did not know of the bargain.30
The Tomb of the Nine Gods
That day, when the floor of the Tomb’s first trapped room dropped the party into a spiked pit, they were ferried out on Vonara’s broom.30 In the attraction room she was flung across the chamber toward the mouth of the devil face and survived.35 At the wind tunnel she set off the pressure plate that started the fan, and took herself and Vogal past it by dimension door into Wongo’s tomb, where a skeleton with a triangular skull came out of the wall and attacked the two of them until the others caught up.21 The tomb’s three chests each needed a volunteer. Vonara climbed into the silver one and withstood its cold.21
On the way to the second level she scouted the underground waterfall on her broom and found a chest on a ledge halfway down. It was a mimic. She backed away and set it on fire, and it fell into the dark.27 In the false tomb, as wine poured in to drown the party, she capped one of the spouts with a wall of force.22 In Nangnang’s tomb she flew over a circle of salt that held an invisible gray slaad, against the party’s warnings. The circle broke, and the slaad attacked Glade before the party brought it down.23 In Papazotl’s tomb she held a swarm of skeletons in check with Yolande’s regal presence.23
On the fourteenth, on the third level, Taenae was sealed inside a rotating crawlway and began to suffocate. Vonara crawled in after her, setting off the trap a second time on purpose. Inside she found Taenae and the corpse of Sephirius, a Dragonborn paladin of the Company of the Yellow Banner, whose gear she took. She brought herself and Taenae out by dimension door.2
On the fourth level she and Vogal opened the serpent door by bleeding themselves into the serpents’ mouths. In the fight with the minotaur skeletons of Unkh’s tomb she and Glade twice revived Ersklan Ghostfang before he was killed.25 In the maze she found Glade, and the two fought a living minotaur until Inete and Raiketsu, a Goliath monk, reached them and Raiketsu killed it. The four found the purple key, returned to the main chamber, where Vogal stood against the minotaur skeletons, and destroyed them.62
On the fifteenth the shattering of the mirror that held Savriel cut her with silver shrapnel.48 While the rest of the party went to the grandfather clock she went back with Savriel to the place where Ersklan had died. There Savriel learned that the souls of those who died in the Tomb were held conscious and drawn downward. Vonara understood from this that the Soulmonger had to be destroyed, and at once the geas tightened in her chest. Valindra’s presence reminded her that she was to deliver the Soulmonger intact, and told her that destroying it would not free her parents and would likely send them into the same current.13
That evening she followed Vogal alone through the elemental trials into Shagambi’s tomb. Yolande’s regal presence woke its forty-eight terracotta soldiers and then blew them all to rubble. Her cloak of displacement turned aside their attacks. A rune then made a bat of her and sent her to the mirror room, where Vogal caught the bat to eat and killed it, which restored her.24
In the small hours of the sixteenth she flew back up the chute to the gargoyle room and on to the throne room, where she and Raiketsu took the twin scepter from Acererak’s throne.63 She led the way into the acid-scarred cog of the fifth level and told the party to “remain ready.” Savriel asked how, and Vonara answered that they should watch for traps.28 When the control room was sealed and filling with gray slime she perched on her broom above it. Once it had drained she picked the lock of the gold lever and helped Taenae walk the dials back in reverse order, and she and Inete then worked the controls for an hour while the others went out to map the rooms.28
Afterward she turned her mind on the geas, on the part of its command that she had never been able to see: the Soulmonger, and something else. It answered with a hazy image of a jar, which no one else in the party received.36 She and Inete worked the panel for a second hour. She then set the cogs to open the way down and left the controls to Savriel.36 The Hall of Decay took her hat, trousers and cigarettes.36 On the sixth level, at the sight of the small caged figure that proved to be the Boy, she was aghast.36
At dawn she dispelled the haze that rose from the cauldron there, and searched with Taenae for secret doors, finding none.8 The first attempt on the padlock of the Boy’s cage failed, to the words “Even heroes have bad days…” She then opened it with her broom, keeping her hands off the rust. When the Boy could not cross the threshold of the room she tried to free him with dispel magic, and failed.8 Of the five trials that sealed the green gate she solved one, reading an Infernal lullaby, working out that it had to go backward, and reading it backward.8 Wongo then came to the cage and begged to be taken in, asking again and again, until she gave way and accepted him.8
During the rest that the Boy gave the party she played for him at his request: showmanship, a show of magic and a folksy, feel-good song that told a story of the heroes saving the world. She let him fly on her broom. She weighed all that had happened, her greatest worry being the safety of her friends and loved ones, and thought deeply of “the Brothers Taban”.17 The Boy died soon after the party woke. She lit one of the cigarettes from the case he had left her.17 On the stair down she said, “I’m not nervous, are you nervous?” She liked the obsidian staircase.17
The Cradle
In the Cradle the geas turned Vonara’s head to the left, and her eyes settled on a squat dark vessel on the back-left balcony. It was the jar, and she named it for what it was.5 When the shadow formed behind Raiketsu she mounted her broom.5 When the Trickster Gods rose in their hosts, Wongo rose in her.5 She took the jar during the fight with Takhesis, and it was in her pack before the third strut fell.5
In the second stage of the fight the Trickster Gods answered again with less than before, and their strength did not reach Taenae, who fought as the Avatar of Chakuna. Vonara gave the whole of her own share to her.6 When the Atropal burst and the party ran, she carried Vogal and Taenae on her broom. The party knew that Savriel meant to stay, and Vonara looked back at her.6 She came out with the jar.6
Epilogue
On the morning of the seventeenth of Eleasis Taenae flew the survivors across the caldera to the camp of those who had waited for them. Vonara told the story there, and told the camp that the Death Curse had been dealt with at its root, to cheers.7
Vonara married Kaelar and stayed in Port Nyanzaru. She opened a courtesan house there, owned and run by women, which any woman might join and choose her own work in, as a courtesan or otherwise. It stood directly above one of Kaelar’s gambling dens, under the protection of the Sable Syndicate.7
At some point before this she returned the jar to Valindra, and the geas ended. Her parents remained with Valindra. Nothing further was recorded.7
Appendix
Notes
Behind the screen
Vonara was the last of the party to take a Trickster God, and the god she took was the first she had met. She woke Wongo by speaking his name on the tenth of Eleasis and carried him in her pedestal for six days, refusing Moa and Shagambi in the meantime, before she accepted him.
Vonara’s grief was sought by more powers than anything else in the campaign. Lady Sansa took her darkest memories as the price of passage, the Beggar King bought them back and kept an altar to her, Acererak twice demanded “the bard’s sorrow,” and Valindra used her parents to bind her.
Vonara was the first of the party to distrust Takhesis and the last to protect him. She is the only party member recorded watching the execution in the Grand Colosseum, and what the camp above the caldera heard of the Cradle was her telling, which left out his turn.
The geas lasted five days, from the twelfth to the seventeenth of Eleasis, and ran through Sessions 59 to 91, about a third of the campaign. The house Vonara opened afterward was one in which any woman chose her own work.
Valindra Shadowmantle was arguably the only antagonist of the campaign to get what she came for. The Soulmonger was destroyed, and her phylactery left the Tomb in Vonara’s pack and was returned to her.
Appearances
Session 1 to Session 33 · Session 35 · Session 36 · Session 38 to Session 44 · Session 46 to Session 54 · Session 56 · Session 58 to Session 91
In Session 10 and Session 11 she appeared in the body of Lira.