Return to Wildemount with this first-of-its-kind official sequel to the hit Mighty Nein campaign from Critical Role, exploring the fates of “Empire Kids” Caleb Widogast and Beauregard Lionett.
The adventures of the Mighty Nein have ended.
With the Cloven Crystals hidden and Uk’otoa once again imprisoned, all that’s left for the Mighty Nein is to settle back into their well-earned retirements. For some, this means peace and solitude; for others, a recommitment to unmitigated chaos. And for Caleb Widogast and Beauregard Lionett, it marks a return to the empire they once called home.
But ancient, arcane threats still fester in Wildemount: the Cerberus Assembly and its only living founder, the calculating and secretive Ludinus Da’leth. When an old friend offers Caleb a chance to investigate Ludinus, he can’t help but take it, even if it means betraying those he once held dear. And as Beau struggles to settle into domesticity, a good infiltration is the perfect distraction.
The Cerberus Assembly is unlike any foe the Empire Kids have faced before, rooted into the history of their homeland. It’s not an evil that can be pummeled into submission—but that doesn’t mean they can’t try.
Written by Hugo, Nebula, and Ignyte Award-nominated author Nibedita Sen, Children of Empire ties together the stories of Campaigns Two and Three of hit series Critical Role, complete with intrigue, machinations, and the occasional fist fight.
Release date:
November 10, 2026
Publisher:
Random House Worlds
Print pages:
336
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Critical Role: The Mighty Nein--Children of Empire
Nibedita Sen
Chapter 1
Caleb
He buys a house in Rexxentrum. It is small, a cottage really, much like the humble homestead in which his parents raised him. There is a room in which to cook and eat, a room with a bed, and a room for his books, and that is enough. Let the Cerberus Assembly peer down upon the city from the shining jagged heights of the Candles. Caleb Widogast does not need a grand tower of stone and silver, nor one of glass and steel. If the walls of his cottage ever seem to close in on him, all he need do is choose a doorway and tesserate the space between threshold and lintel, unfolding it outward into nine polyhedral floors of pure possibility.
His tower exists in the space between thought and memory: mortared with geometry, roofed in axioms. It can conjure every book he has ever read, fill its larders and laboratories with the rarest meats and metals, resurrect a haunted memory, and hold a sea of stars. His tower is his will made manifest: mind, magic, and heart woven together into a feat of arcane engineering few mages can hope to replicate.
But his tower does not last forever. Magic costs blood and breath, and he can invest only so much in his tower every time he raises it from nothing. It can last from dusk to dawn and must then collapse in on itself like a house of cards, taking with it everything that was conjured within.
And so, in the end, his humble cottage can do something his tower cannot. It can have a garden. Two boxes of soil in which Caleb can plant green beans and watch them grow.
You put this thing into the ground, Caduceus once said to him, and it’s going to do what it’s going to do. It doesn’t know its purpose, but it’s moving toward green beans. The gods plant us, and we move toward the fruit we will eventually bear for them. Destiny has planted you here and now, and it hopes that you will bear its fruit.
The alchemy of life takes water, seeds, and sunlight and transmutes them into green tendrils that put out coin-sized leaves. Caleb adds wooden stakes for them to climb and remembers apple orchards and swaying fields of wheat. His mother scattering feed for chickens, his father turning the earth.
He wants to believe this twisted trunk can still bear good fruit. He wants to be not the scythe, but the hand that sows.
So he lives in his little cottage in Rexxentrum. He buys more books. He teaches at the Academy. He tutors in private. The weeks turn into months, and he adopts one cat, then another. His friends visit often, and sometimes, so does Essek. A leviathan is released from its ancient cage, and the Mighty Nein reunite to drive it back beneath the waves before it can devour the Menagerie Coast with froth and fang.
The first anniversary of their return from Cognouza’s mad ruby-fleshed depths finds him in his study, carefully placing chunks of amber onto his desk. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. He taps each stone in turn, moving clockwise. Each tap gathers a fold of reality and anchors it to a piece of amber, preventing it from snapping back into place. The air grows taut and trembling.
When he touches the fifth stone, all those lines come together. The disjunction collapses in on itself and is gone. So too is the book he had set between the amber chunks.
“There,” he says. “Do you see?”
His student nods, unsmiling. He’s never seen this girl smile. Elielor is what his mother would have called an old soul in a young body. Not literally so, though her ash-lilac skin marks her as being of Kryn descent. She is Dwendalian-born, and only fifteen, with the colorless hair of the myrk’alfen and small curling horns that hint at something infernal in her family tree.
A difficult lineage to wear so visibly in the Empire, even for the daughter of well-off merchants. Now more than ever.
“Does it need to be amber?” she asks.
“An excellent question. The short answer is no.” Caleb picks up the largest amber nugget and runs his thumb along the rough edge. “The long answer is, make your tools match your task. You will recall that amber adheres most closely to the principle of combustibility. This means it shares my affinity for fire. Then there are its other attributes. It is organic. Resinous. It congeals and preserves. Do you know the one shortcoming shared by all basic dimensional storage spells currently in circulation?”
That makes her ears prick up. “Time passes normally within the folded space,” Elielor says without hesitation. “Organic matter will decompose.”
“Precisely. I wanted the Vault to be able to hold organic material in stasis—preserved in time, if you will. Hence, amber.” Caleb nods to the creature in her lap. “I thought you would appreciate that, given your, ah, research interests.”
She nods solemnly. “Is there a limit to how long the stasis lasts?”
“We are currently at one year, two months, thirteen days, and four hours with no signs of decay.”
“So the spell is still under testing?”
“I—I suppose you could put it that way.” Ah, students. They never fail to keep you humble.
Elielor stares, brow furrowed, at the elaborately folded piece of paper in her right hand and absently strokes her cat’s head. Meo rubs his mostly naked skull against her chest, rumpling his one mummified ear. The dots of blue flame in his skeletal eye sockets briefly wink out as he cranks open a bony jaw and utters the low death rattle that passes for his purr.
Folding reality is not so very different from folding paper. Both require some knowledge of projective geometry. Make a three-dimensional box to put things in, then flatten it back into empty air. Caleb has devised a lesson plan that walks his students through increasingly complex crease patterns. With any luck, his class will have learned to open and close the Vault of Amber by the time the semester ends. It seems to be working so far.
Working too well, in this case. Despite not being in his class, or indeed a student at the Academy at all, Elielor is chewing through the patterns he has prepared at a prodigious rate. He will have to make some new ones before he sees her again next month.
Caleb clears his throat. “Well,” he says. “Continue practicing the folds we have covered today. Ah, and also—Una.” The Vault is dispelled, dropping the book back onto the table. He lifts it and holds it out to her. “A little extra credit, if you will.”
“Thank you, Professor Widogast.” Polite as always. Elielor scoops up Meo and stands, smoothing down her skirts. “I do appreciate you letting me borrow your books.”
“I have far too many and am somehow always gaining more. You do me a favor by removing some from my house.”
He walks her to the door. He is just reaching for the knob when he hears someone knock, twice. Rat-tat. Caleb raises an eyebrow at Elielor, who gazes back, impassive.
He opens the door.
Afternoon is shading into evening. The figure standing outside his door, one hand still raised from knocking, wears a fashionable burgundy capelet and kid gloves. Astrid meets his gaze steadily. She has the hood of her cape pulled up to shield her face from anyone on the street.
“Hello, Bren,” she says. “Is this a bad time?”
“Astrid.” Caleb stands a little straighter. “No, not at all. We were just finished.”
“Good evening, Master Becke,” Elielor says, cool as a cucumber. Not so much as an eye twitch for being suddenly confronted with a member of the Cerberus Assembly. She steps past Astrid onto the street, undead cat tucked into the crook of one arm, and opens a frilly black parasol to shield her from the weakening sun. “And thank you, Professor Widogast.”
They stand there, awkward, as the girl walks away. Then Caleb steps back, holding the door open for Astrid.
“Come on in,” he says. “Would you like some tea?”
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