Ammon served as a court wizard of Neverwinter for eleven years, a respected sage and archivist trusted with the city's most sensitive correspondence. His downfall began as an anomaly: supply requisitions for the Watch that referenced grain never delivered, arms never forged, payments routed through intermediaries that dissolved like smoke. Following the paper trail, he discovered that a cabal of Neverwinter's elite—lords, guildmasters, and at least one high-ranking archmage—had been in secret commerce with a figure they called only 'the Shadow King,' trading coin, corpses, and access for power. The dead were not merely the Shadow King's soldiers; some of them were Neverwinter's own, sold by name.
Ammon did what archivists do: he copied everything, hid the originals, and began quietly building a case. He was too slow. Warned by a sympathetic clerk—later found floating in the harbor—he fled the city with his evidence and helped raise the alarm. When the Shadow King's undead host marched on Neverwinter, Ammon stood on the walls as a battle-wizard, and when the fiend-lord himself took the field, Ammon met him.
He banished the Shadow King—or believed he did—and the army crumbled. Neverwinter celebrated. Ammon was not among the celebrants: at the moment of victory, a backlash of the Shadow King's dying magic, or a betrayal he has never proven, tore him from the material plane and hurled him into Avernus.
He survived the First Layer the only way possible—by becoming useful. He bartered lore for water, mapped infernal supply routes for warband chiefs, and learned infernal contract law out of necessity. Cornered at last by a devil's legion on the shores of the Styx, he accepted the offer of a demon of Avernus: passage home, and assistance identifying the conspirators who had sold the city—in exchange for service. The demon was a collector of debts, and it needed hands on the material plane.
Ammon became its quartermaster's agent, 'helping' collect what mortals owed: souls pledged and forgotten, contracts defaulted, oaths broken. He tells himself he only ever collected from the deserving. The ledger does not agree with him.
He returned after more than twenty years to a Neverwinter that had made him a martyr. Statues, songs, a memorial arch. And beneath the mourning, the same rot: the conspirators had survived, thrived, and buried their trail—except that Ammon still had his copies, and now had infernal means to read between the lines. A string of assassinations has gripped the city: lords, archmages, even members of the royal family, slain in their locked and warded homes.
Some of the dead are names from his old evidence. Some, he suspects, are not—the demon's ledger growing its own list, using his war as cover. Ammon works the murders from the shadows, hunting the last conspirators while trying to determine how many of the killings are truly his justice and how many are his patron's appetite wearing his hand. The city that made him a hero may yet have to decide what to do with the man who came back.
