Early Look At The Mighty Nein’s Return In Brand New Critical-Role Story

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Mud sucks greedily at the soles of Beau’s boots as she strides up the mountain toward her family’s vineyard. They pass the great wooden bas­ket presses, which are silent now but will later serenade the hills with their creaking, cranking song. She guides them through rows of trellises burdened with dusk-and-ruby grapes, deftly hopscotching along the strips of headland that cut the crop into blocks. The air is thick with bruised skins and spilt juice.

Workers move among the rows, de-stemming grapes and filling wicker baskets for the crushers. A few acknowledge her with a tip of the chin or a touch to the brim of a straw hat, and Beau raises a hand in re­turn.

The vineyard didn’t go under after the Crownsguard marched her father off to jail, but it was a near thing. Thoreau Lionett, lifelong para­noiac, never believed in delegating. Beau was the only person he ever taught to read his ledgers, and she wasn’t around for the aftermath of his arrest. Paydays were missed. Rich clients in Deastok got wind of the scandal and canceled orders. People quit. Beau suspects the Stassmans poached more than a few of them, seizing this opportunity to seduce their rival’s staff.

She could have helped, if she’d been here. She could have done what her father had been training her to do. But she’d been walking the dusty wastes of Xhorhas with Yasha to find Zuala’s grave, and after that, help­ing the Cobalt Soul put together their case against Trent Ikithon. By the time she mustered the willpower to hop on a carriage back to Kamordah, the vineyard was in a death spiral, hollowed out by wartime tax rates and an overseer who was taking advantage of her mother’s bewilderment to brazenly line his own pockets.

Beau absently cracks her knuckles at the memory. She and Yasha had, ah, persuaded the man to seek a change of career. Maybe even a change of location. They must have been pretty convincing too, ’cause he was on a cart out of town the very next day.

The sun is hot on the nape of her neck. The uphill trek is nothing for her strong calves, fed on a diet of lengthy morning runs and fifty crunches before breakfast. Caleb, on the other hand, is breathing hard.

“Beauregard,” he manages, Zemnian accent gone extra gravelly with exertion. “Would you like perhaps for me to transport us to our destina­tion? If you will only describe it to me, I will gladly make the attempt.”

“C’mon, it won’t hurt you to sweat a little. I’ve been climbing this mountain since I learned to walk.”

“We are not the same, you and I.”

“No shit. How’s the war criminal?”

She hears him sigh. “Eluding capture,” Caleb says. “For now. We thought it best he not stay in one place too long.”

“Still comes by to see you, though, huh?” Beau twists to glance back at him. She waggles an eyebrow with wicked glee. Caleb coughs.

“Yes, well,” he says awkwardly. “We enjoy each other’s company.”

She smirks to herself. “Oh, I bet you do.”

They continue to climb, crossing the terraces carved into the rolling chromatic hills. Beau can’t help but catalog every yellowed leaf and bowed rung she passes. They’re behind schedule. The first crop of purple cinder should already be macerating by this point in the season. The ice thistles will be rotting on the vine. They could try to dry some—even straw wine’s better than no wine—but they just don’t have the man­power.

She doesn’t want to see it. What’s the point in seeing problems she can’t fix? The vineyard’s not her responsibility anymore. Her old man made that real clear.

But before she became his misfortune, she was his heir. He taught her too well, and old lessons die hard. How to tell root rot from leaf blight; how to taste the difference between an oak barrel and a chestnut one. How to balance the books and make the numbers sing a good song. All the things she could and should have done instead of leaving the vineyard in the lurch when it needed her most.

This was all supposed to be hers someday. Still could be, if she felt like fighting a toddler for it.

“Your father will be a free man next month,” Caleb says.

He remembered. Of course he fucking remembered, it’s what he does, and he was right there beside her in the courtroom when the sen­tence was passed. Beau shoves her hands into the pockets of her loose pants and keeps walking. “Uh-huh.”

“Fuck no. I’m just checking on my mom. Making sure she didn’t freak out and run off to her parents or get swindled into selling the whole vineyard to a Marquesian prince. We were gonna be out of here before he gets back.”

And now she has a great excuse to cut the visit short. Sorry, Mom, duty calls. Gotta go save the Empire from itself. She can pack her bags, grab her girlfriend, and get out of this place where her own skin doesn’t fit right. Like she’s been stuffed back into something she’s outgrown and must tread carefully for fear of splitting her seams and spilling guts ev­erywhere.

The thought cheers her. Then Caleb sours her mood again by saying, very softly, “She must be glad to see you.”

Beau scoffs. “Her husband’s in jail because of me. I’m not winning daughter of the year anytime soon.”

She doesn’t really want to talk about it. It feels too shitty, even for her, to complain about her mom to a guy who lost his in the most god-awful way and would give anything to have her back. But her mouth keeps moving, saying, “She loves Yasha, though. Can you believe it? They have tea together. Yasha gets things from high shelves for her. It’s dis­gustingly cute.”

“This does not—huff—surprise me to hear.”

They’ve hit the western edge of the vineyard. A fence of rough-hewn petrified wood runs alongside a scattering of small geothermal pools. Little more than puddles, really—albeit puddles that stink and simmer, a brilliant coral blue at their heart and rimmed in orange.

The foothills of Mount Mentiri rear up here, dark stone protruding from the clay. Tucked into the shade of the resulting cliff is the long, low structure that houses the vats.

Some years ago, a tinkerer in Deastok came up with a clever con­traption to improve the fermentation process: iron pipes and bellows that blasted the grape must with hot air to turn it over. The fucking Stassmans adopted it at once, which Beau knows for a fact because she once snuck into their fields to see it for herself. She still remembers crouching in a bush, watching wide-eyed as the slurry of juice, skins, and tender mangled fruit-flesh swirled like an angry sea. The trapped gases of fermentation belched out in puffs of white, making the tall vats look like smokestacks.

She pitched it to her father as soon as she was back over the property line. He shot her down point-blank. And so they still churn their must the old-fashioned way here in Lionett land. Giant tubs, big wooden sticks, and workers with strong arms.

Stupid. Stupid, inflexible, risk-averse old man. Clinging tooth and nail to what he had, fearing change like the wolf at his door. All that cau­tion and control. What did it get you, Dad? An estranged daughter, a wilting wife, and iron bars.

“Just a bit farther,” she says when Caleb stoops, gasping, his hands on his knees. “C’mon. I promise the view’s worth it.”

“I—hah—very much hope so, Beauregard.”

Reprinted from Critical Role: The Mighty Nein—Children of Empire. © 2026 by Gilmore’s Glorious Goods LLC. Published by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Critical Role

Livestreamed weekly on Twitch since 2015, Critical Role brings together a group of professional voice actors as they play through a series of elaborate Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Originally produced by Geek & Sundry, the series garnered a large and devoted fanbase during the first campaign, allowing the cast to create their own company in 2018. Matthew Mercer heads each campaign as Dungeon Master, with a cast that includes Ashley Johnson, Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Taliesin Jaffe, and Marisha Ray.