The troupe began 37 years ago in the river city of Vel Aruun, when six performers who had been dismissed from separate courts for scandal, indecency, debt, or murder formed a bargain in a shuttered winter pavilion. Their first leader, the elf harper known as Serin Vale in those days, convinced them that the wealthy did not merely want music. They wanted proof that they belonged to the kind of world where music could ruin a person. Their first patron was Baroness Lethwyn Quill, who hired them for a midnight naming feast and demanded a song no one else had heard. The sextet improvised a ballad from gossip stolen that same night from the baroness's letter desk. When dawn came, three marriage contracts had been voided, one rival house had lost a shipping charter, and the baroness paid them double to keep playing. That was the moment they understood that performance could be leverage. Their watershed moment came seven years later at the Emberglass Masquerade. A rival noble tried to have them arrested during the second set, but the troupe turned the humiliation into legend by continuing to play while the ballroom caught fire from a sabotaged chandelier. They saved the patrons who mattered, let the others panic, and left with a ledger naming every guest and every bribe. Since then, the sextet has traveled from manor to manor, palace to palace, and feast to feast, always arriving where wealth is softest and secrets are richest. Over time they became more than musicians. They became arbiters of status, collectors of gossip, and quiet dealers in social ruin. Every major patronage earned them new enemies and deeper debts. Every elegant performance concealed a transaction. Their reputation grew so strong that refusing to host them began to look like a confession of poverty or fear.