Pyrirtras
Third Mate aboard the lead vessel of the Black Fleet, under Captain Rinder Mardek — charged as a principal actor in fifteen years of piracy, mass murder, forced abduction, village burning, and unlawful enslavement across the island chains, and marked for death on sight. Catalogued missing, presumed drowned, since 1395. She is not dead. Under the name Latar she was fished out of the sea by a reclamation ship, conscripted into the reclamation force, slipped past Varian vetting, and is — as of the archivist's note — serving in a reclamation adventuring group in Rivalon.
The record of her is Archivist Gianni's Itinerary of Pyrirtras (Latar), filed under Piracy, Mass Murder, Looting, Slavery, Arson, Reaving, Crimes Against Atollia. Its seal is listed as broken — original wax removed, which is to say the dossier has been opened by someone other than its intended reader before reaching the hands it is in now.
Identity
- Name: Pyrirtras · now going by Latar
- Known rank: Third Mate, lead pirate vessel of the Black Fleet
- Captain: Rinder Mardek
- Species: Human — the itinerary marks this (presumed)
- Age: mid twenties
- Years active: 1380 to 1395
- Distinguishing marks: great height, vast muscles, red hair, ink on the back, rounded features
Witnesses across the island chains identify her consistently by size, inks, hair, and actions — she is described as the pirate who frontlined the shore raids, performed the prisoner selection, and carried out the exemplary killings meant to break a settlement's will before the looting began. The body of the itinerary is written in the neutral "their"; the archivist's closing line and the added note both use "her".
The charges
Aggregate totals, confirmed, attributed to her participation:
- Dead: 30,000+
- Injured: 100,000+
- Missing: 60,000+
- Kidnapped: 10,631
The itinerary states plainly that the true numbers are believed higher, and that Rinder Mardek's fleet is one of the most active and violent operating in Orathi waters. The archivist's verdict on her fate as then understood: "May her soul meet the afterlife it deserves."
This is the same predation Laku described firsthand aboard The Expedition Ship in Session 05 — pirates sailing into the Isles' waters at will, taking people, money and weapons, and killing for sport — and the reason the Coalition's Atollian objective exists at all (see Atollia, Seadog Jon Thomas).
How she got out
Per the archivist's added note (signed Gianna, where the document's title reads Gianni — see Canon Questions):
Pyrirtras — now Latar — fell overboard during a battle and was found by a reclamation ship. That ship took her to Varia, where she conscripted to the reclamation force, somehow slipped by Varian checks, and re-emerged in Rivallon as part of a reclamation adventuring group fighting.
(The handout spells the province "Rivallon"; the vault's settled spelling is Rivalon.)
The chronology fits without strain: she goes into the water in 1395, the year the reclamation pact is signed and the first foothold is taken in Rivalon, and the transports are running out of Port Quaybay from then through the campaign's opening in 1396. A drowning pirate pulled aboard a Coalition ship in that window would arrive in Varia exactly as the recruitment drive was swallowing every willing body it could find.
Two things in that note deserve weight. First, Varia's checks failed — the nation that archives everyone who files a road-tax form at an embassy (Session 08), that runs the vetting for the whole expedition, put the Black Fleet's third mate in a reclamation tabard. Second, she is on the island now, under the Code of Honorable Conduct, carrying a Reclamation Signet with a number on it.
Who is Latar?
The Shattered Coin is one of several parallel adventuring groups serving the reclamation, and Latar is in one of them. No NPC currently in the vault matches the description — great height, vast muscles, red hair, back ink, human woman in her mid-twenties — and no one the party has met has been named Latar.
The nearest things to a lead, both weak and both worth checking rather than believing:
- The unnamed rival adventuring group the party kept being mistaken for in Session 03 included "a freshly recruited gladiator woman" and a "tall shirtless bleeding human", neither described further and neither since identified.
- The parallel "Red Group" (tracked across Session 08, Session 19, Session 22, Session 23, Session 37) is the group the campaign most often places off-screen in Rivalon, and its roster has never been fully written down on this side of the table.
The Varian Trio — Timothy Leisten, Pavid, Patricia — is a parallel Coalition group the party has met in full, and none of the three fits. Treat the identification as open: the vault does not know which group Latar is in, and asserting she is a stranger is as unsupported as asserting she is someone met.
Open questions
- Which parallel group is she in, and does anyone in it know?
- Does Varia know? The itinerary's seal was broken and its wax removed before it reached its present reader — someone has already read this and not acted, or read it and acted quietly.
- The itinerary is an Atollian-interest document (its charges are "Crimes Against Atollia"). If it reaches Atollian hands, or Seadog Jon Thomas's, the marked-for-death-on-sight order is live.
- She is bound by the Coalition's Code of Honorable Conduct — the article forbidding indiscriminate area effects against Orathi settlements is, word for word, the thing her captain built his reputation on.