Dungeons & Dragons' New Spelljammer Novel Features Pirates in Wildspace (Exclusive)

Read an exclusive excerpt from Spelljammer: Memory's Wake by Django Wexler.

By Christian Hoffer

Next month, the world of Spelljammer will return to bookstores. On June 4, Penguin Random House will release Spelljammer: Memory's Wake, a new novel by Django Wexler that brings the beloved Dungeons & Dragons setting to life to a whole new audience. The setting is inspired by space fantasy stories and features the magic of Dungeons & Dragons taken into "wildspace," the literal space in between other campaign settings. Notably, this space isn't filled with stars but rather phlogiston, a gaseous and combustible substance with a rainbow-colored hue, and can be traversed using ships propelled by magic. 

The Spelljammer setting was originally released in 1989 and was explored both through Dungeons & Dragons novels and a six-book series of Spelljammer novels. In 2022, Wizards of the Coast revisited the setting with a new Spelljammer boxed set, updating the setting for 5th edition rules. Spelljammer: Memory's Wake will use the revised Spelljammer setting and marks the first Spelljammer novel to be released in 20 years. ComicBook.com has an exclusive excerpt of the novel, which features an amnesiac woman named Axia forced into the role of Blacktongue, a fierce pirate who disappeared years ago but happens to be her spitting image. In this exceprt, Axia meets her new crew, who helm the Blacktongue's ship Silencer. The new book will be released on June 4th. 

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Axia took a deep breath and mounted the top step. There was a small crowd gathered around the base of the stairs, and at the sight of her they gave a collective gasp. When she started down, they fell silent, holding their breath.

Axia found she was holding hers, too. Her boots clumped heavily on each step, and the sword Kori had insisted she wear flapped against her side. She put one hand on the hilt to steady it—a gaudy gem-studded thing, not a practical sword at all—and felt a moment of helpless vertigo. For an instant, she was absolutely certain she was about to topple off the stairs to the deck, possibly breaking her neck but definitely breaking the spell.

I won't. Axia gritted her teeth. She'd chosen this, accepted the danger, and now there was no choice but to see it through. If I'm going to find the way to my real self, I'm certainly not going to be beaten by a set of steps.

Besides, a sly voice in her mind suggested, if she was Blacktongue after all, she'd probably done this a hundred times.

Occupied as she was with these thoughts, it came as a surprise when her boots reached the worn decking of Silencer's sterncastle. She paused there for a moment, trying to collect herself without looking like she was doing so. Kori and Nia descended behind her, their footsteps breaking the profound silence.

Directly in front of her was a giff. He was big, even for that large-framed species, easily two feet taller than Axia and broad as a cart. He wore a dark uniform, chased with silver and sporting blood-red epaulets at the shoulders, but its dark fabric couldn't conceal the corded muscle on his thick limbs. His face—gray-skinned, thick-snouted, with the flared nostrils and tiny ears that reminded humans of a hippopotamus—was a mass of scars, crisscrossing his bald pate like a road map and running down one cheek. A particularly gnarly one bisected his left eyebrow and descended nearly to his lip. Instead of an eye on that side there was the red glitter of a ruby in the depths of the socket. His other eye was black from edge to edge, set into a bulging socket.

He regarded her with that black-on-black eye, unmoving, until Axia wanted to scream just to break the tension. Then his right hand shot out, rigid and precise as an automaton, and snapped up to rest at an angle just above his good eye. At the same time, his bootheel came down with a snap that rang across the deck like the crack of one of the giff's beloved pistols.

"Captain!" he said, at a volume more appropriate for a parade ground. "Silencer is ready and fully at your disposal, sir!"

To Axia's astonishment, his one eye glimmered with unshed tears.

"Good to see you, too, Brecher," Kori said, stepping out from behind Axia. "I told you we had something important to do. I hope you agree this was worth our borrowing the Vespid?"

Brecher remained rigid, but his cheek twitched as though an irritating fly were crawling across it. Cords stood out in his thick neck like ship's hawsers. Axia's jaw began to ache in sympathy, and she realized he wasn't going to move without a word from her.

"Thank you, Sergeant-Major." In spite of all her fretting, her voice didn't even waver. "Well done."

Brecher snapped his arm to one side and relaxed fractionally. Behind him, a small group of beings now came forward, and it was all Axia could do not to retreat a step.

"Beings" was definitely the right word. On Zolreng, Axia had considered herself reasonably cosmopolitan. She'd met elves, like the tall, morose-looking man with a gauzy hood pulled down like a veil. The diminutive creature that resembled a purple-feathered penguin was a dohwar; she'd made a sale once to a pair of the notorious merchants. But she knew the mantis-like thri-kreen only from illustration books, and the plasmoid—an amorphous, blood-red blob temporarily stretched into a humanoid shape—only by description.

And there were more: a gnome-shaped construct that periodically emitted small puffs of steam; gray-skinned, withered-looking creatures with bald, spotted heads; a massive, furry, bull-headed thing with a pair of wrought iron horns, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a leather vest. The humans among them seemed determined to make up for their relative ordinariness with colorful dress. Garish parti-colored outfits with broad sashes seemed to be the norm. Blacktongue's wardrobe no longer seemed so outlandish.

Every member of this menagerie was looking at her.

Now what? Kori was at one shoulder, Nia at the other, but Brecher was too close; Axia didn't dare ask for help, even in a whisper. I have to say something.

She cleared her throat, and the rustle and murmur of the crew died instantly. The deck creaked, and someone coughed.

"Well," Axia said. "I'm back."

There was a thump as Brecher returned to ramrod stiffness. Mutters rustled among the others. The thri-kreen emitted a series of clicks that might have been speech or might not have.

"Cap'n," someone said. Axia had to look around for a moment before realizing it was the plasmoid—the creature didn't have an obvious mouth, though their voice sounded human, with a deep drawl of an accent. "Three years, Cap'n. Where ya been?"

"Smart money said you were dead," said a scruffy-haired gnome.

"Hard times," rumbled the bull-headed thing in a deep voice.

More muttering.

What would Blacktongue say? Axia thought about the books, the room. The paintings, the weapons. The girl whose memory she'd glimpsed in the journal. She looked from one face to another, Brecher's one narrowed eye, the thri-kreen's cocked head.

"Where've I been?" Axia took a deep breath. "That's no gods-damned business of yours, you gang of sweet-feathered scum-climbing Capulian Septernauts! Now get out of my grouse-dragging way! I need a gods-damned bath!"

Another stunned silence.

Then the crew erupted in raucous cheers, boots stomping, fists pumping, a multispecies chorus of ecstatic approval. Brecher gave his clockwork salute again, heel slamming into the deck like the crack of doom, and his voice got even louder.

"You heard the captain! Back to your posts, all of you! Clear the damned way!"

"Kori! Nia!" Axia barked. "Stay with me, we've got business."

She didn't wait for a response, just started stalking forward and hoped they would follow. Hoped, in fact, they'd catch up, because she had no idea where the Hells she was going. A short staircase descended from the sterncastle to the main deck, a broad open space with a square hole in the center leading down to the cargo hold. At the other end of it was the forecastle, with a door leading inside to—hopefully—crew quarters.

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Reprinted from Dungeons & Dragons: Spelljammer: Memory's Wake by Django Wexler. © 2024 Wizards of the Coast. Published by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 

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