It’s a great time to be a fan of Critical Role’s most deliciously diabolical adventuring party, The Mighty Nein. Since the animated series debuted in December 2025, plenty of spin-off material has expanded on Campaign 2’s colorful cast, including novels like Critical Role: The Mighty Nein - Stories Untold and live-show one-shots like Projekt Funball.
However, another Critical Role tale is on the way. Critical Role: The Mighty Nein - Children of the Empire, written by author Nibedita Sen (a Hugo, Ignyte, and Nebula Award nominee) and published by Random House Worlds, follows the fates of the “Empire Kids”: Caleb Widogast and Beauregard Lionett.
After facing powerful organizations and overwhelming odds, most of the Mighty Nein have decided to settle down for some well-earned rest. However, Caleb and Beau have old demons to confront: returning to an empire they once called home, and the chaos and strife that follows.
Not long after their return, Caleb gets the chance to investigate the Cerberus Assembly and Ludinus Da’leth, and he seizes it — even though doing so may force him to betray people he once loved. When Beau, struggling to settle into domesticity with her lover, Yasha, hears about the investigation, she tags along, hoping that sleuthing will distract her from her worries.
Beau and Yasha unite in Critical Role: The Mighty Nein - Children of the Empire
In this exclusive excerpt from Critical Role: The Mighty Nein - Children of the Empire, Beau grapples with her new life alongside her partner, Yasha, and wonders whether she deserves the happiness she’s found after years of travel and fighting. Thankfully, Yasha is there to reassure Beau of her worth.
The training ground is packed dirt. A barrel holds training weapons: wooden swords, cork-wrapped staves, blunted daggers. There’s a bunch of step platforms, a balance beam, and even a climbing net. Damn. Veth really went all out.
Children scramble to attention as they see Yasha coming. They’re all so tiny. Not literally. Some of the leggiest ones, like a cherry-red drakona and an orcish girl, are nearly as tall as Beau. It’s the faces. Baby-plump cheeks. Nubby horns. Proportions that make them look like they were put together from a bin of mismatched parts, all elbows and shins and giant paws.
“All right, kids.” Yasha stalks to the middle of the field, where there’s a ring of empty ground. “Today, we are doing a demonstration. This is Beauregard Lionett. She and I will be showing you how to fight.”
Beau makes a show of cracking her knuckles, then her neck. Awed gasps float among the kids.
“Weapons?” she says. “Or should we do this the old-fashioned way?”
“Let’s keep it simple.” Yasha steps back, putting a few feet between them. “Don’t hold back. Okay?”
“For you, babe? Never.”
They spar often. It’s a dance, and one that always begins the same way. Yasha spreads her weight. Beau stretches out her calves and elbows, limbering up. They lock eyes and nod.
And then Beau lunges.
Quick. It has to be quick. Her strength is in deftness, in balance, in catlike reflexes and knowledge of the body’s vital points. Beau will never come close to matching the titanic force Yasha wields. A couple good hits from those mighty fists would have her seeing stars and slurring her words.
Which means she just needs to not—get—hit.
She goes for a stomach jab. Yasha knocks her hand out of the way. Then Beau bends her knees and folds backward at the waist so the blow aimed at her passes harmlessly overhead. She sidles around Yasha in the blink of an eye, coming up behind and to her left—and then loses all the breath in her lungs as she gets an elbow to the sternum.
Ow. Ow. Oh, that’s going to bruise. Beau skids back, gasping, and only just manages to bring her elbows up in time to block the next punch.
“You said you wouldn’t hold back,” Yasha says.
Duck, weave, jab. Try to stay out of reach of those long arms. Beau lands a few torso hits that Yasha barely seems to feel. She takes another blow to the sternum and has to back up until she can breathe again.
Sweat slicks her forearms. Yasha is sweating too, though she has barely moved compared to Beau. The Nicodranasian sun shines off her white hair and bathes the rich heft of her biceps and thighs. She’s so fucking beautiful. Power and grace, balanced on the knife edge of stillness. Beau drinks her in and thinks, as she so often does, How did I get so godsdamned lucky?
“Don’t hold back,” Yasha says again.
“I’m not!”
“You won’t hurt me.”
You don’t know that, Beau thinks.
She lunges again all the same. Rains down a quick, brutal flurry of blows and darts back out of reach before Yasha’s fist can find her. Her muscles burn with that deep, satisfying prickle only a good workout can bring….
The kids gasp and cheer, but Beau’s barely aware of their existence anymore. Her world has shrunk to the dirt beneath her feet; to her knuckles, her heaving breaths, her aching heart, and this woman she loves like she didn’t even know it was possible to love. No one—not the people who brought her into the world, and not the ones who taught her afterward—ever showed her love could be like this.
Yasha bounds at her. For someone so big, she is frighteningly fast when she wants to be. Beau pivots out of the way, but Yasha gets a handful of her shirt and drags her back, startling a yelp from Beau’s throat as her feet rake uselessly through the dirt. She hits the ground on her back, sending dust billowing around them.
Yasha bends over her, hand still fisted in Beau’s shirt. Her mismatched eyes hold Beau’s without flinching.
“You’re not too much,” she says.
For some reason, that makes Beau furious. Not furious at Yasha, but furious all the same, an anger so bruised and tender that it makes her eyes well. Fucking hell, is she going to cry in front of a bunch of kids?
She breaks Yasha’s grip on her shirt with the flat of her hand and rolls to the side, springing rapidly back to her feet. Beau knows she’s losing this fight. She’s all over the place. Sloppy. Out of control. Dairon would slap her upside the head and set her to doing drills for a week if she could see her right now.
“You deserve better,” she says, panting.
“But I want you.”
Yasha steps toward her. Beau tenses, bringing up both arms to block again. Everything hurts. She has dirt in her mouth and hair, and her stamina is running dry. She has to end this, and soon.
Her height puts her at a disadvantage here. She would have to get in close and stretch to the furthest extent of her reach to get at the crook of Yasha’s neck. Find that spot where two fingers could stab a nerve cluster and lock a body up for several precious, shuddering seconds.
She tries it anyway. Beau lunges, arm drawn back for this final strike. Yasha doesn’t try to dodge or block. She just stands there, takes the hit, and then doesn’t let Beau back up. Her arms go around her, one hand gripping the tattooed nape of Beau’s neck hard enough to hurt, pulling her in so close only Beau can hear her next words.
“I promised Zuala I would never let her be my shackle,” Yasha says. “I will never be yours.”
Her eyes are burning. Her nose threatens to run. “You’re not,” Beau says. “You—you could never. You’re my fucking wings.”
“Then fly, Beauregard Lionett. I want to watch you fly. And I will be here when you come back down.”
Beau kisses her. Yasha lifts her into her arms like she weighs nothing at all, and Beau winds her legs around her powerful thighs, puts her hands to her cheeks, and kisses her again, open-mouthed and hungry, not caring that the kids are watching. She hears squeals and exclamations. “Gross,” someone says. Another few break into a smattering of applause.
Yasha does not put her down when they break apart to breathe. Beau rests her forehead against hers and speaks without thinking.
“Hey,” she says. “Wanna get married?”
She has a close-up view of Yasha’s thunderstruck expression. She looks at Beau as if the Stormlord came out of the sky and smote her, blue and purple eyes wide as Beau’s ever seen them go. And then she smiles.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I would like to do that.”
Critical Role: The Mighty Nein - Children of the Empire by Nibedita Sen will be released on Nov. 10.