The rune scar splits open with a deafening crack. Frigid air spills out, and the grass around it blackens to ash in an instant. A translucent hooded figure rises from the fissure, its shape wavering like breath on glass.
It lifts a withered hand and points straight at Yllamaris's blade, ignoring Bram, Elowen, and the others as if they are no more than fence posts in the dark.
The Hooded Figure
That steel is not yours alone. It remembers the ground beneath it.
The Hooded Figure
You have sealed the wound, yes, but only by pressing your curse deeper into it.
The Gray-Cloaked Guard takes a cautious step back, hand tight on his weapon. Elowen goes still, eyes fixed on the figure. Bram shifts between Yllamaris and the apparition, ready to interpose.
The Hooded Figure
If you mean to live, half-elf, listen. The scar answers to hunger, and hunger answers to the blade.
✓ Quest Accepted
Learn the truth about the blade and the corruption beneath the fields
“"then speak plainly... My life is forfeit already, but I inherited this to do good, not spread a curse. What feeds the blades hunger? What is the scar?"”
SUCCESS (Legendary Willpower, rolled +1)
Yllamaris
Then speak plainly. My life is forfeit already, but I inherited this to do good, not spread a curse. What feeds the blade's hunger? What is the scar?
The Hooded Figure
Good intentions do not feed it. Blood, sorrow, buried oaths, all of it sinks into the wound and wakes what lies under the fields.
The Hooded Figure
The scar is not a cut in the earth. It is a lock, and your blade is a key shaped by grief.
The Hooded Figure
Your elders named it rot because they feared the thing they chained below. They fed it silence, then called the silence wisdom.
The Hooded Figure
The dead below stir whenever the rune-scar opens. If he understands that, he may yet choose where the burden falls.
Elowen
A lock... then the hunting was never for justice. We were keeping a lie intact.
Bram
And if the key is here, then whatever is beneath us is listening now.
Quest Complete
Learn the truth about the blade and the corruption beneath the fields