Damon and Morningstar's Collaboration

Damon Caldimore’s collaboration with Morningstar was a long-running secret partnership that linked the Duke’s private research to an organization with access to exceptionally dangerous material and weapons. The relationship gave Damon a way to pursue discoveries beyond his own expertise, but his insistence that he alone knew the whole picture made the partnership difficult to assess—and harder to contain once its consequences emerged.

A Decades-Long Channel

Rafael identified Morningstar as Damon Caldimore’s primary contact over the preceding decades. When Damon acknowledged that another organization knew many of the same secrets, Rafael understood this as a sign that more of the Duke’s work had escaped his intelligence network than he had feared. Damon’s admission established collaboration across time, not merely a single contact or an isolated exchange.

Damon also said that he had worked with several great minds, some more aware than others of what he had hired them to do. He claimed that he alone knew everything. The arrangement therefore appears to have involved a wider circle of specialists while keeping overall knowledge concentrated in Damon; the evidence does not specify who those experts were or exactly what each contributed.

Secrecy and Dangerous Discoveries

Damon had carefully covered his tracks, and Rafael recognized that even a strong information network could fail to penetrate a Duke’s personal dealings or Morningstar’s highest ranks. Rafael blamed himself for not uncovering the partnership earlier, though he acknowledged that the concealment had placed the dealings beyond ordinary scrutiny.

The danger became concrete through a weapon Vivi described: a dagger resistant to magic and skills, apparently connected to the dimensional anomaly above Prismarche. Rafael reasoned that its material came from the alien creatures beyond the dimensional boundary, whose violet-and-black, glass-like carapaces were encountered during the incursion. That origin was an inference, not a confirmed account of Damon’s manufacturing process. Rafael nevertheless feared that Morningstar’s access to such weapons and armor was especially dangerous because Vivi’s ability to overcome the material was not shared by most people.

Suspicion, Motives, and Consequences

Rafael suspected that Damon might have intended to harvest the creatures and produce more weapons from their carapaces. He could see a possible public benefit in equipping ordinary soldiers with weapons capable of harming a Titled-rank monster, but Damon’s decision to work secretly through Morningstar rather than submit his findings to a qualified council led Rafael to doubt that the purpose was purely benevolent. The Duke’s motives remained uncertain: Rafael considered ambition, greed, and some larger purpose, but could not settle which best explained the concealed collaboration.

The partnership also formed part of Rafael’s interpretation of a possible ritual plot. He suspected that the Wardens’ Vault had been prepared as a staging ground for a ritual led by the Fell Apostate, potentially drawing on Damon Caldimore’s dominion over his own guild and its sacrifice. This was Rafael’s developing theory, not confirmation that Morningstar itself led or participated in that ritual. In the aftermath, the stakes of Damon’s knowledge complicated any response: Rafael considered that his discoveries might be too valuable to discard, even as the Duke’s secrecy and access to dangerous materials had made him a serious threat.