The Ghostbloods
Status: Active. Technically. In practice: down one demigod business partner, down one lifelong deep-cover asset (see below, see also: everything below), and currently being hunted by a man they raised from age five specifically to prevent this exact outcome. Local Leader: Mraize Key Members: Nucko (former deep-cover asset — now openly hostile, and actively working to take the organization apart from the outside), Theren (deceased former agent), Vesper (“Blue”), Jernah, Halidar, Melania
Overview
Somewhere above every other faction on this wiki, in terms of patience, resources, and sheer willingness to play a decades-long con on a child, sits the Ghostbloods. They are a far-reaching secret intelligence organization with fingers in enough pies that “coincidence” should probably be struck from the party’s vocabulary entirely at this point. They do not announce themselves. They do not need to. They simply arrange the board years in advance and wait for everyone else to think they’re making their own choices.
Thirty years ago, their local Rosharan cell had Nucko’s off-world Scadrian parents assassinated. Then — and this is the detail that should have set off every alarm in the building — they took in the orphaned five-year-old survivor and raised him as an unwitting embedded agent, alongside another child marked for the same purpose: Theren. Somewhere in Ghostblood HR, this was filed under “asset development.” Everywhere else, it’s just called what it is: they killed his parents and then raised the orphan as one of their own, and he didn’t find out which parts of that sentence were true until he was an adult. This wiki does not have a stronger indictment of an organization than that single fact, and it hasn’t needed to look for one.
History with the Party
- Quietly engineered a suspicious number of the party’s early “coincidental” detours long before anyone clocked it as a pattern: the Vedenar boat theft, the sudden pull toward Kharbranth, the button factory fire (cover for stealing Voidbringer-hunting spores), even the tracking of Hansy’s axehound pups. None of it was luck. All of it was homework, done well in advance, by people who were never in the room.
- Nucko’s mid-campaign confession — that he’d been a lifelong double agent for exactly this organization — detonated that entire history in one sitting and triggered a Blood Oath with Kael on the spot, on the logic that the next lie would be the last one. The oath never got tested. Kael died before it could be.
- Nucko subsequently worked with Mraize on a forged copy of The Book of the Returned, feeding Sebarial false intelligence to misdirect him toward Shinovar and away from Odium’s Perpendicularity on the Shattered Plains. He got promoted for it. He used the promotion to extract a promise: help finding the two people who’d killed his real parents. Everyone at that table thought they were the one running the game.
Current Status: Open Rebellion
They were not, in fact, running the game. Nucko interrogated Jernah — one of the three responsible for his parents’ deaths — until he broke and confessed, and spared him anyway, on a warning that would not repeat. He learned that Blue, a prisoner aboard Sebarial’s ship, was actually Vesper (Blue), his own handler, who had let herself get captured on purpose. And in the fight that also cost the party Kael, Nucko personally drove a stolen Raysium dagger into Sebarial’s chest and ended him — trapping the demigod’s cognitive shadow inside the gemstone for good. The organization’s most valuable piece of leverage against the party is now a paperweight, and its most valuable long-term investment just walked off the board on his own terms.
Nucko has since left the party entirely, taking Vesper (Blue) with him, to hunt down Halidar and Melania — the two of his parents’ killers still unaccounted for — and to dismantle the Ghostbloods from the inside, using thirty years of institutional trust they handed him personally. Whether that trust was ever theirs to spend is a question this wiki suspects the Ghostbloods are only now starting to ask themselves. Late. As usual.