Indeed, until now, the story of how they did it has only been recorded in the accounts of one of them, Colbalt Soul Expositor Beauregard Lionnett, which remain within the Cobalt Archives in Rexxentrum. But from those, from the various writings of other members of the group and others who knew of them, some of them never before consulted by historians, and interviewing their last survivor, the drow elf Essek Theylss, Elveren has put the pieces together with his expert skill to tell their entire tale to the general public at last.
The Mighty Nein: How an Unlikely Group of Misfits Left Wildemount Better Than They Found It-And Also Saved the World, published by Engels Press, will be available everywhere Brussendar 5. Meanwhile, check out an excerpt from the book below:
Located within the infamous Savalirwood, not far from the once infamous city of Shadycreek Run, and closer to places where, if rumor is to be believed, criminal activity still abounds, the Blooming Grove is not the easiest place in the world to get to. Omon Radus, the grizzly-haired human whom I've hired to escort me there, has regaled me with a story of how he fought a ghast here once, but gossiped more about the supposed Kryn spies still lurking around the Grove, since, after all, the drow living his final years there is technically still wanted for treason.
Still, even those that believe in such spies don't believe anything will come of it. When Essek Thelyss revealed himself to have taken up residence in the Blooming Grove, he also revealed himself to be in the early stages of Alvar's Syndrome. There was some uncertainty over the following months, but now it is clear the Dynasty has decided to let a drow who has earned great respect in multiple regions of Exandria during his long life die in peace.
It perhaps helped that the group of people he has become associated with still remain most famous within Xhorhas. While the reputation of the Mighty Nein within most of Wildemount's nations remains somewhat mixed, the Kryn still consider them, first and foremost, to be the Heroes of the Dynasty, who returned their stolen religious artifact to them, and brought about the end of a war. Although one of their number, Beauregard Lionnett, may now be even more known for bringing about Rosohna's branch of the Cobalt Archives. The house in which they all briefly lived, and Beauregard and her wife Yasha lived in for several years later, is still one of the city's biggest tourist attractions.
Since about the time it was officially consecrated to Melora and christened, the Blooming Grove has been tended by the same family of Firbolgs. The Clays, currently headed by their grand matriarch Carina Clay, come out to greet my companion and I, and Carina surprises Omon by remembering who he is. At nearly four hundred years of age, she is a bit gaunt for a Firbolg, but her eyes are lively. Also quick in her words and her movement; within a couple more minutes, we are introduced to her sons Colm and Carsten, Colm's wife Cammie, and their daughter Caroline, and then bustled into their main room, where they already have tea ready.
"Mighty Nein tea," Caroline proudly tells us-in other words, tea made from leaves grown over the eight graves placed around each other, with one spot left over, now likely to be filled within the next decade. Eight of nine friends, plus one spouse; the last is buried at sea, near the island of Darktow. All the tea brewed in the Blooming Grove is grown in soil fertilized by the remains of those buried there, and the Clays will tell anyone who shows discomfort over this that it is all part of the cycle of life. Cammie brewed tea appropriate for this occasion.
Essek and the Clays even joke about what effects his remains might have on the tea. "You'll give it a new tart taste, no doubt," says Caroline, while her father and uncle speculate about how that'll mix with the tastes from the rest of the Nein.
"Jester will never stop being sweet," Essek comments. "Not in another five hundred years. I'll never be as tart as Beau is anyway, and she couldn't prevent that." The tea does indeed have underlying sweetness to it.
The tea from their plot isn't the only legacy the Nein have left in the Grove. The others are less obvious, but the Clays take me around to each of them. A tree planted by an elderly Yasha right after Beauregard's funeral. One of the small pools that dot the Grove filled with unnaturally green water, with contradictory accounts as to whether the blame for it lay with Caleb Widogast, Veth Brennatto, or both. Two carvings of dicks on the surviving foundations of the original temple to Melora, just another defacement of a religious structure by Jester Lavorre, although maybe the only one where those tending it didn't mind. A statuette of the Wildmother donated by Fjord Lavorre after he purchased it in the Shattered Teeth.
Essek, too, will leave behind the things he's planted, though there isn't really room to plant trees anymore. He has now lived in the Clays' home for a little less than two years, and they have given him a room to himself, albeit a small one, not quite big enough to hold all the various treasures he had laid out on his table and around the two chairs we sit in. "The elves of southern Tal'dorei have a custom for an elder's final years," he tells me. "The elder will divide their life into different chapters as they deem appropriate, and they will present objects from those time periods to their family and friends and invite them to ask questions about them.
Of course your main interest is in the events of a few months. Which is fine, that apparently often happens to elves who do this ritual, where everyone wants to hear about one particular part of their life. And in truth, even over six hundred years after it all happened, and I wasn't even there for most of it, I find my own mind dwells on these people, almost exclusively on some days."
A lot of his objects are from them, too. As he talks, he occasionally clutches at an old, rusted rod that he eventually tells me was originally a parasol handle. Hung on the wall is the amulet that kept the Dynasty from scrying on him for over six hundred years, and the first thing he tells me after identifying it is the hair-raising tale of how the Nein obtained a dozen of them, one of which they gifted to him. Most of the books he has on display were recommended to him by at least one of them-tomes of knowledge, largely, but he also points out the 9th Century romance novel Tusk Love, which, he says, he enjoyed reading far more than he expected to.
Most prominent of all are the two paintings that sit behind him-paintings that are now considered a valuable pair of Lavorres that more than one art gallery has shown interest in obtaining. Essek is currently leaning towards bequeathing them to the Master Gallery of Nicodranas, but is quick to say they aren't going anywhere while he still lives. "I want them to be the last thing I see," he says.
He has plenty to tell about both of them-when they were painted, how long it took Jester to get them to him, messaging him the entire time, and also the location of all the dicks hidden in them. ("She would never forgive me if I left that out," he says.) Art scholars would probably kill to hear all of it, and when I tell him this, he speaks of writing it all down if I really think so, but looks rather embarrassed about it. "I don't know if Jester would be excited or dismayed by their attitudes towards her paintings."
The first is a portrait of the red-haired man whom Essek calls "the most important person of my life." Caleb Widogast was in his late thirties when Jester made him sit for it, insisting that if the two of them were going to so often be apart when they were so obviously in love, they needed to at least have pictures of each other. "Of course she made him look exceptionally handsome in it," Essek concedes, before adding, "she really didn't have to work very hard to do so. I was far from the only one who recognized his beauty."
Jester painted him in his office at the Soltryce Academy in Rexxentrum, surrounded by his books and tins of various consumable spell components, as well as two cats. His blue eyes are warm in the picture, his long hair and short beard a little unkempt. "It was good to see him like this, for me," Essek says to me. "To see him happy, at peace, in a place he wanted to be in. It was good for me to see all of them like that."
The second painting did its best to give him that, showing the Nein together on a beach in Nicodranas. Jester herself, a blue Tiefling in an almost piratical green and white dress and jewelry all around her neck, wrists, and horns, with ribbons tied in various places, sits in the middle, arms wrapped around her fellow lavender Tiefling. She flashes a grin to the viewer, her tail bobbing up behind her. Kingsley Tealeaf, as he was by then, is trying to match it best he can. His long, large black coat covers most of him, even his tail mostly curled under it, but the single pink ribbon tied around one of his horns matches hers.
Next to Jester, the human Beauregard crouches, looking the least relaxed of everyone, even with her outer robe off and her hair mostly down. She even still holds her staff, albeit loosely. Her stare doesn't come off as unfriendly, but she still looks like she's trying to see through anyone and everyone that might be on that beach. Sitting behind Beau with a hand on her shoulder, Yasha, the buffest of all of them, nonetheless makes herself look gentle with a hand on her wife's shoulder and shy smile almost hidden behind the pale white hair blowing in her face. The word ORPHANMAKER is incongruously tattooed in sparkling green on her arm, though that too is hard to see.
Next to Kingsley, on the other hand, the halfling Veth Brenatto is well complemented by the sparkly blue patterns around her eyes, nice and prominent against her tan skin. She winks as she leans against him, hands lightly resting over her bright yellow skirt and swollen belly. She is also clutching a pouch of something Jester apparently claimed she had just stolen. "Wouldn't tell me what. I've had many theories." Essek also tells me that he never in his life saw her wear her dark hair in the wild curls she has in the painting. "I did sometimes think she was bored much of the time in her later life. I know she tried many different activities, especially once both her children were grown."
Behind Jester, her half-Orc husband is perhaps a slightly grander sight than he was in real life. Even his coat, similar to Kingsley's, and accompanying large hat are very broad and pristine, and his tusks look positively polished. He, too, has a hand on his wife's shoulder, and of all the faces in the picture, his might be the most serene. Caleb stands next to him, his hair tangled and falling over his pale shirt; he wears no coat. He looks a little pensive, perhaps, and seems to be gazing at Fjord, "as if his inner peace ought be impossible to his troubled mind," Essek says to me sadly.
Noone, Essek tells me, would expect anything but peace and serenity on the face of Caduceus Clay. "Not that he never felt things otherwise, mind you. Indeed, I think he did far more than he let on. But that was the thing. Except when those feelings were at their strongest, he kept a placid face. Was always there to help others with their pain instead." That was the way Jester painted him as well. His tall Firbolg frame and garments are not so composed, his hair wilder and curlier than Essek remembers it being, his tunic, leggings, and cloak a little haphazard, but still he somehow exudes a steady, comforting presence. His eyes, perhaps, show his age; like Essek himself, he was nearly a century older than the others, and Jester captures the emotional depth of that.
He also outlived all of them. Essek's memories of him are strongest, because he's only been dead about two centuries. Indeed, outside Xhorhas, most people who have heard the story of The Mighty Nein either heard it here at the Grove, or heard it from someone who had. "It's a very different version of the story from the way I'm going to tell it," Essek advises me.
He never has been able to really tell it before, due to his having to constantly having to hide his true identity. Perhaps that is why, over the next few days, his account proves a rambling, disorganized one, which his younger self, he says, would've been ashamed of.
Yet by the third day, we found ourselves agreeing that the story of the Mighty Nein is hard to tell any other way. I have done my best, but this may still be the most discombobulated book I have ever written. It also feels appropriate for such a group, who were more often than not a force of chaos during the year they spent traveling around Wildemount together, more often than not with the hope of doing good, but this was not even necessarily their priority.
It may also be why, from all the survive accounts, those who crossed their path never forgot them. And most of them never even knew that they saved the world. Nor did they have to. Most of the time, if someone's saved the world, that's the most interesting and significant part of their history. Not so the Mighty Nein. Indeed, it may be the least interesting part.