Hello, heroes, and welcome to Campaign Skyjacks, a show set in an anti-colonial folktale-punk

world inspired by the music of The Desembrists, the board game Ilamat by two-gather studios,

and classic adventure fiction.

I'm James DiMotto, and normally I'm your host and game master.

Welcome to a special presentation of The Maiden and the Heart.

This is a short story that I wrote and recorded for the Campaign Skyjacks Actual Play Podcast.

Once we posted this story, I got a lot of truly touching and wonderful feedback from

it.

So I wanted to put it in a format that was more digestible and not attached to an episode

of Skyjacks that's already in the middle of an ongoing story, mainly because I wanted

people to be able to share it with people in their lives who they thought might appreciate

it in a format that was as easy to find as possible.

In the hopes that this little glimpse into the world of sphere might inspire them to

listen to Campaign Skyjacks, but I also wanted to give this fable the opportunity to

affect as many people as it could, as so many of you were so generous in saying that you

found meaning in it.

This story tells the mythological and true origin of Heartroot T, an aspect of the world

of sphere that I came up with myself, that I see as both critical to the kind of world

that we've created for the show, and also very minor.

This story is told by Margaret, a member of the Society of the Black lily.

The Society of the Black lilies is a concept created for our show by Ali Brinken, one of

the freelancers we hired to expand the world of sphere beyond our own experience.

...