Critical Role / Critical Role: The Mighty Nein--The Nine Eyes of Lucien

Chapter 1

Shadycreek Run

822 PD

Lucien shoved open the cellar door and tumbled out into the sunlight. His stomach gurgled a desperate tune (priority one) and as he lifted his arms to stretch, he noted how light his pockets felt (priority two). Some enterprising so-­and-­so had left a twig crossed over a thistle in the dirt just outside the stone lip of the cellar. Crouching for a better look, Lucien discovered ten slapdash marks under the twig and thistle. Ten coppers. To a boy of twelve squatting in a cave-­cold cellar belonging to a retired madame, that was a lot of coin.

Priorities one and two, he smirked, were quickly getting sorted.

These little signs appeared outside the door from time to time, and only when someone on Clover Street had a job for an itinerant, broke, morally unbothered freelancer. Check, check, and check. Lucien swept up the pile of rubbish, inspected it, and discovered the stick had been dipped in mauve paint. That meant someone from the Mardoons was offering the work, and they tended to be good for whatever coin was promised. A beggar couldn t be a chooser in Shadycreek Run, so Lucien stuffed the twig and thistle in his pocket and locked the cellar door behind him. He didn t pocket the key, but instead tossed it to himself idly and whistled a made-­up song while he swung around to the front side of the townhouse.

Viewed from the street proper, Auntie Mama s two-­story shack listed drunkenly to the right, nearly leaning on the shoulder of the also precariously crooked building beside it. Auntie Mama s place always reminded him of a teakettle ­squat, tapered toward the foundation, and with a single tower that jutted out to the east like a spigot. Jammed between two swillholes of competingly ill repute, the stoop smelled alternately of piss and vomit.

A stiff, threatening wind blew down the lane, rattling the entire ramshackle block. That gust ran straight through Lucien s threadbare coat, slicing like a cutpurse s

Madeleine Roux is the New York Times bestselling author of the Asylum series, which has sold in eleven countries around the world. She is also the author of the House of Furies series, Salvaged, Traveler: The Shining Blade, and the Allison Hewitt Is Trapped series, and she has contributed to anthologies including Resist, Scary Out There, and Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View.

Founded by veteran voice actors Matthew Mercer, Ashley Johnson, Marisha Ray, Taliesin Jaffe, Travis Willingham, Sam Riegel, Laura Bailey, and Liam O’Brien, Critical Role has grown from a weekly improv storytelling campaign set in an ever-evolving world to a media company centered on connecting with communities in new and meaningful ways, including fiction (Critical Role: Vox Machina—Kith & Kin) and nonfiction (The World of Critical Role) books on the New York Times bestseller list, comic books (Vox Machina Origins, Tales of Exandria), graphic novels (The Mighty Nein Origins series), collectibles, tabletop and role playing games, podcasts, live events, and a critically acclaimed animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina.