Once per turn, Lys can deal an extra 3d6 damage to one creature she hits with an attack if she has advantage on the roll or if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it. She can use a finesse or ranged weapon. This damage increases by 1d6 at levels 7, 11, and 15.
Lys can hide when lightly obscured from creatures she is at least lightly obscured from; missing a ranged attack while hidden doesn't reveal her position; and she doesn't suffer disadvantage on Perception checks in dim light.
Lys can nimbly dodge out of the way of certain area effects. When she is subjected to an effect that allows a Dexterity saving throw to take only half damage, she takes no damage on a success and half damage on a failure.
When Lys casts Mage Hand, she can make the spectral hand invisible and perform tasks like picking locks, disarming traps, and retrieving objects in containers. She can use her Bonus Action to control it.
Lys knows Thieves' Cant plus one additional language (Elvish). During her informal apprenticeship in the capital's underworld, she learned to understand messages hidden in seemingly normal conversation.
Lys can take a Bonus Action to gain advantage on her next Dexterity attack roll this turn, provided she hasn't moved yet this turn and her speed is 0 until the end of the turn.
Lys adds her proficiency bonus to Initiative rolls and can swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling. As a spymaster, she is never caught off guard.
If Lys is hidden when she casts a spell that requires a saving throw, creatures that would be affected have disadvantage on the saving throw.
When an attacker that Lys can see hits her with an attack, she can use her Reaction to halve the attack's damage against her.
Lys increased her Dexterity by 1 (to 17) and her Wisdom by 1 (to 13), sharpening her instincts and her aim.
Lys's proficiency bonus is doubled for Deception, Stealth, Investigation, and Perception skill checks.
Lys can take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action as a Bonus Action on each of her turns.
Arcane Trickster spells use Intelligence. Magical Ambush applies disadvantage to saving throws against Lys's spells when she casts from hiding.
Lys creates a spectral hand within range that lasts for 1 minute, obeys her mental commands, and can manipulate objects. With Mage Hand Legerdemain, she can make it invisible and use it to pick locks, disarm traps, and retrieve objects from containers.
Lys points at a target and whispers a message that only the target can hear, allowing the target to whisper a reply during the same round. Essential for coordinating her network of informants.
One humanoid within range must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or be charmed for 1 hour. Lys treats it as friendly. When the spell ends, the target knows it was charmed. At 2nd level or higher, Lys can target additional humanoids (one per spell slot level above 1st).
Lys changes her appearance for 1 hour, including her clothing, armor, weapons, and voice. Physical interaction with the illusion reveals its nature. She uses this to move through the capital unnoticed.
When Lys is hit by an attack or targeted by Magic Missile, she gains a +5 bonus to AC (including against the triggering attack) and immunity to Magic Missile until the start of her next turn.
Lys creates a 20-foot-radius sphere of magical slumber. Creatures in the area make Constitution saving throws in order from the lowest to highest current hit points; on a failure, a creature falls unconscious. The spell can affect creatures with 5d8 total hit points or fewer.
Behind the character
Lys Ardent is the Aurelian Crown's spymaster: a sleek human woman in her late twenties, dressed in charcoal-black layered leathers with no visible insignia, her dark hair pulled into a severe braid. She moves with a courtier's elegance and a killer's economy, and her pale gray eyes catalog a room's exits, occupants, and loyalties before she has finished entering it. A thin scar runs along her left jawline, mostly hidden by her collar — a souvenir from the orc war she never explains.
She wears a signet ring bearing the Aurelian Crown on her right hand, carries a slim rapier she is reluctant to draw because drawn steel ends conversations she prefers to win, and keeps a lockpick set in her sleeve because some doors should open without witnesses.
Her smile is practiced and does not reach her eyes. Those who mistake it for warmth learn quickly that Lys's courtesy is a tool as sharp as her rapier; those who earn her trust — a short list, carefully maintained — learn that beneath the performance is a woman of rigid, exhausting integrity who believes the monarchy is the only wall between humanity and the abyss. She is Lawful Neutral in the way a surgeon is: precise, unsentimental, bound by rules she chose herself.
Lys serves the Crown but despises Chancellor Vaelor Thorn, who holds a forged dossier over her and has hollowed her service from within. She is brilliant at reading people, ruthless about protecting her network, and haunted by a failure from the war that killed two brothers — a guilt she carries in perfect silence. She will help the party save the peace, but only on her terms: Vaelor removed, the monarchy preserved, and the truth — eventually, on her own schedule — told.
Before the adventure
Lys Ardent was born in the capital's harbor district, the daughter of a dock clerk and a laundress, and she learned to read a crowd before she learned to read letters. The underworld apprenticeship came early and informally: by fourteen she was running messages for a smuggling ring, fluent in Thieves' Cant and in the arithmetic of who owed whom. What distinguished her was not boldness but pattern — she noticed that the ring's losses always followed the same inspector's rounds, and she sold that observation to the ring's rival for enough coin to eat for a month. The rival turned out to be a Crown intelligence asset recruiting for the service, and at sixteen Lys Ardent signed her first oaths.
The orc war made her. Attached as an analyst to the Accord Remnant's 4th Mixed Company, she learned the alliance's languages, its seals, its habits of trust. She also learned its fragility. Her misread of a forged dispatch — a document she now knows was a Choir plant, though she did not know the cult existed — sent Captain Eldrin Voss's brother and Halden Ashwalker into a breeding pit ambush from which neither returned.
Lys reconstructed her error within the week, told no one, and rebuilt her methods from the wreckage: verify the wax, verify the hand, verify the courier, trust the pattern and never the person. The scar on her jaw came later in the war, from a Choir sympathizer she had cleared and should not have.
After the war, her work breaking a dwarven smuggling ring that had penetrated the harbor brought her to Queen Mariana's attention, and at twenty-three she was appointed spymaster — the youngest in the Crown's history. For three years she built the best network the kingdom had known, and for three years she believed she served a realm worth the building. Then Chancellor Vaelor Thorn, her former friend, showed her a dossier proving she had taken Choir gold — a payment he had planted — and informed her, with perfect kindness, that her career now existed at his discretion.
She stayed. Resignation would confirm the dossier; flight would leave the intelligence service to him. Instead she fought a quiet war: documenting his alterations of the queen's orders in a memorized cipher-journal, protecting the Remnant's funding through misfiled budgets, and playing a solo disinformation game against the Choir cells she could identify but not safely arrest. Her deputy, Corvin Hale — the protégé she trained and the shadow Vaelor owns — has been feeding her curated falsehoods for a year, and she suspects it without being able to prove it.
Now the party arrives in the capital carrying evidence she has spent eighteen months dying to collect. Lys will test them, use them, and — if they pass her tests — trust them with the two things she has never given anyone: her list of Choir cells, and the truth about the brothers she sent to their deaths. She wants Vaelor removed without destroying the monarchy, because if the Crown falls with him, his story becomes the kingdom's story.
She has a smile for every occasion and a plan for every exit. What she does not have is a single person she can be honest with. That, more than Vaelor, more than the Choir, is what she is afraid of — and what, carefully, grudgingly, she is hoping the party will become.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Orla Flint's stolen ledger names Lys Ardent as a recipient of Choir gold — a payment Vaelor planted to frame her. Lys asks the party to recover the ledger from the breeding pits before Vaelor's agents destroy it or, worse, deliver it to Queen Mariana as 'proof' of Lys's treason. The quest runs parallel to the party's own business in the Scar and forces Lys to trust outsiders for the first time in years.
Meet Orla Flint in Scarfall Bazaar and learn the ledger's location beneath the pits.
Personal quest · 2
Lys's greatest failure is a buried one: during the orc war, she ran intelligence for the 4th Mixed Company, and her misread of a forged dispatch sent Captain Eldrin Voss's brother — and Oren Ashwalker's brother Halden — into a breeding pit ambush. Both died. Neither family knows Lys's dispatch caused it. When the party's investigations in Accord Hall surface Eldrin's private list of Choir-tainted soldiers, Lys quietly asks the party to carry a sealed letter to Eldrin and to Oren Ashwalker at the Throne of Ash, confessing her role. She cannot deliver it herself; her office would collapse if the story broke, and Vaelor would use her guilt to seize the intelligence service outright.
Deliver the sealed letter to Captain Eldrin Voss in Accord Hall.
Personal quest · 3
Lys's list of Choir cells in the capital is her life's work — and her only leverage. Vaelor knows it exists and has ordered her deputy, Corvin Hale, to seize it. Hale is the 'Chancellor's shadow' the coded hymn names, and he has been feeding Vaelor Lys's intelligence for a year. Lys asks the party to help her spring the trap: let Hale believe he has stolen the real list, follow him to Vaelor's private paymaster, and capture the exchange alive. The gambit is Lys's last, best chance to save her network and the monarchy together.
Help Lys build the false list — a forgery good enough to fool Hale.
When the party first meets Lys in the rain-slick capital, she offers her help — but demands a price: the party must swear to remove Vaelor while preserving the monarchy. If they refuse or hedge, she walks away and the party loses their only guide through the city's spy dens.
Swearing: Lys becomes a full ally, granting the Cell List immediately and unlocking her safehouse. Refusing: the party must navigate the capital alone; all Stealth and Investigation checks in the city suffer a −2 penalty, and Lys may later act against them if they endanger the Crown. Negotiating: Lys agrees warily, granting half the benefits, but her trust must be earned through the Ledger of Ash quest.
During the Cell List Gambit, the party discovers that Lys's own network contains three Choir sympathizers she has been feeding false information to — a dangerous game she has played alone. Exposing them would purge her network but also expose her method to the court, where Vaelor's allies would call it treason.
Expose: Lys's network shrinks but hardens; the party gains three loyal informants but the court turns wary (Persuasion checks with nobles at disadvantage). Turn: the party gains three double agents feeding the Choir false intel, granting advantage on the Scarfall Bazaar and breeding pits infiltration. Leave: the network stays intact but the Choir continues to receive poisoned intel — and one of the sympathizers may realize the game and defect back.
After the Queen's Dilemma, Vaelor escapes to the Throne of Ash. Lys has one asset left: knowledge of the hidden tunnel from the castle to the throne. Using it means betraying the castle's structural secrets to outsiders — an act that, if discovered, would end her career even in victory.
Tunnel route: the party bypasses the Cinder Wraith guards at the doors, gaining a surprise round and avoiding the first wave of the final battle. Personal guidance: Lys fights alongside the party (adding a level 6 rogue to the fight) but if she falls, her network dissolves and the post-war epilogue darkens. Front gates: the party faces the full defense but arrives with Roderick's guards and any allied NPCs earned earlier, making the fight a straight battle instead of an infiltration.
Completing The Ledger of Ash with the truth told to both Eldrin and Oren.
Lys sheds her practiced smile. Her alignment shifts toward Lawful Good, and she begins telling the party uncomfortable truths unprompted. Mechanically, her Insight expertise extends to the party as a shared benefit during social scenes.
Lawful Neutral → Lawful Good
Gains 'Open Hand' — once per scene, Lys can reveal a true, damaging secret about herself to grant the party advantage on a social check.
The party betrays Lys's terms — working to abolish the monarchy, or selling her Cell List to the Choir.
Lys becomes a cold adversary who hunts the party through the capital's shadows. She retains every ability on her sheet and adds the city itself as a weapon.
Ally → Hostile
Gains 'Web of Eyes' — Lys always knows the party's location in the capital, and every city encounter begins with her one round of preparation.
Ally
Roderick Steel and Lys Ardent have served the Aurelian Crown together for nine years, and their alliance is built on a single night neither will discuss openly: the Harbor Purge, when Vaelor — then merely a rising chancellor — ordered a squad of guards to burn a smugglers' warehouse that doubled as an orphanage. Lys's intelligence had flagged the building as a Choir front; Roderick's guards found children inside. Roderick refused the order and was nearly court-martialed.
Lys, who had given the flag, quietly produced evidence that the Choir report was forged — by someone inside the intelligence service. She never named the forger. Roderick never asked. Since that night, the guard captain and the spymaster have operated on unspoken terms: he follows the queen, she follows the truth, and both understand that Vaelor was the forger all along. Roderick is one of only three people in the castle who knows Lys's safehouse locations, and he has covered for her twice when her methods drew noble complaints.
He is rigid, honorable, and slow to trust — but for Lys, he will bend. When the party proves Vaelor's treason, Roderick's help arrives faster and harder if Lys vouches for them personally.
Ally
Vex Copperlock sold Lys her first piece of Choir intelligence three years ago — a coded hymn fragment lifted from a dead courier — and has been trading with the spymaster ever since, always through cutouts, always in person, always at a different stall in Scarfall Bazaar. Lys considers Vex the best information broker on the Marches and the least trustworthy person she knows, which in her profession is nearly a compliment.
Vex, for her part, has deduced that her mysterious Crown customer is a woman with a scar on her left jaw and a signet she flashes only when the deal is good. The two have saved each other's lives exactly once each: Lys extracted Vex from a Choir ambush at the bazaar's edge, and Vex warned Lys off a poisoned meeting in the capital's harbor district. Neither acknowledges the debts.
When the party arrives in the capital, Lys directs them to Vex for the Whisper Mask and local eyes, and Vex — knowing whose errand it is — charges them double out of principle.
Enemy
Vaelor and Lys rose through the Crown's service together, and for a brief period they were genuine friends — he charming and visionary, she sharp and indispensable. Lys was the one who first brought him intelligence on the breeding pits' corruption, believing it would strengthen the realm. Instead, Vaelor saw in the Choir's philosophy a tool, and in the corrupted artifacts a weapon, and he began quietly building his own intelligence channel parallel to Lys's, staffed with her own recruited agents — including her deputy, Corvin Hale.
When Lys discovered the parallel network eighteen months ago, she confronted him in his office. What he said to her that night is the reason she now serves the Crown with a smile that never reaches her eyes: he told her, calmly and kindly, that he had already given the queen a dossier proving Lys had taken Choir gold — the same planted payment recorded in Orla Flint's ledger — and that her career, her freedom, and her life existed thereafter at his discretion.
She stayed at her post because resigning would confirm the dossier and because, if she ran, no one would be left inside the intelligence service watching him. Her hatred is precise and patient. She wants him removed, tried, and the monarchy preserved — because if the Crown falls with him, his story becomes the kingdom's story, and she will have helped write it.
Enemy
Corvin Hale was Lys's protégé — a quiet, brilliant clerk she recruited from the archive corps and personally trained in ciphers, dead drops, and the reading of men. She trusted him with her second-most-sensitive files and, unwisely, with her doubts about Vaelor. Hale carried those doubts straight to the chancellor and has been the Chancellor's shadow ever since, feeding Vaelor a curated stream of Lys's intelligence while feeding Lys a curated stream of false confirmation.
Lys suspects — she has noticed the pattern of operations that fail just after she commits assets — but she cannot prove it without burning assets she cannot spare, and Vaelor has positioned Hale so that any accusation against him looks like the framed spymaster striking at an innocent deputy. The betrayal is doubly bitter because Hale is competent at the work and Lys, professionally, cannot help admiring the double game he has run against her for a year. The Cell List Gambit is her answer: a trap built by a teacher for a student who learned too well.
Faction
Lys is the Crown's spymaster, appointed by Queen Mariana six years ago after her work breaking a dwarven smuggling ring that had penetrated the harbor. Her relationship with the institution is complicated and defines her every choice. She believes, with genuine conviction, that the monarchy is the only structure that kept humanity from shattering during the orc war — three rival duchies, a contested succession, and a coastline full of warlords, all held together by a crown of silver and a soldier-queen.
She has seen what the alternative looks like: the breeding pits, the Choir's promised empire of ash, Vaelor's smiling regency. But the institution she serves has been hollowed from within. Vaelor controls the treasury's intelligence purse, half the court's appointments, and — through Hale — a channel into her own service. Lys's loyalty is therefore to the Crown as an ideal and to Mariana as a person, not to the court as it currently exists.
She operates in the gaps: reporting to the queen through one trusted chambermaid, running her network on funds she launders through Vex Copperlock's smuggling routes, and documenting Vaelor's every alteration of royal orders in a coded journal she keeps memorized, never written. If the party preserves the monarchy while removing Vaelor, Lys will spend the rest of her life in their debt. If the party's actions weaken or destroy the Crown — even accidentally — she will treat them as the Choir's useful idiots, whatever their intentions.
Faction
Lys's connection to the Accord Remnant is personal, buried, and painful. During the orc war, before her Crown appointment, she served as an intelligence analyst attached to the Remnant's 4th Mixed Company — Eldrin Voss's command. Her misread of a forged dispatch sent Eldrin's brother and Halden Ashwalker into the breeding pit ambush, and she has carried the guilt silently through her entire rise. She funds a discreet pension for the families of the 4th's dead through the same laundering channels she uses for her network, and she reads every Remnant casualty report that crosses her desk.
Institutionally, she views the Remnant as the Crown's most useful — and most expendable — diplomatic instrument: it keeps the passes open and the delegates talking, and the Crown will disband it the moment it becomes inconvenient. She has quietly protected the Remnant's Accord Hall garrison from two of Vaelor's budget purges by misfiling their funding under harbor security. If the party earns the Remnant's trust, Lys will treat that as strong evidence of their character — and she will test them with the Ashwalker letters to see what they do with a guilt that is not theirs to carry.
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