Misty and Bram leave the caravanserai behind. The lantern leads them into an ancient forest, where moss softens the ground and the trees crowd close under a bruised dusk sky.
The green light pulses ahead of them, steady and legible. Leaves shiver overhead in a rhythm that echoes the inscription on Misty’s pendant, as if the woods are reading along.
Bram
This path is older than the gate. Someone tied the spirit to a mark, and this grove remembers it.
Bram slows beside a ring of pale stones half-swallowed by roots. The lantern’s glow tightens, then points deeper between the trunks, toward a narrow hollow where the air turns cold.
Misty
The pulse matches the pendant again.
Bram
There. Whatever anchored the sorrow-spirit is near. If you can feel the pattern, Misty, now is the time.
+ Story Quest Added
Find what anchored the sorrow-spirit in the grove
“I inspect the pale stones for a binding mark”
SUCCESS (Superb Perception, rolled +1)
Misty kneels by the pale stones and runs her gaze over their faces. The nearest one bears a shallow groove, old but deliberate, cut in a spiral that ends in a split notch.
Misty
That carving is not natural. It is a sign.
Green light from Bram’s lantern slips into the notch and wakes a second mark hidden in the stone, a faint handprint layered beneath moss.
Bram
I missed that on my first pass. The spirit kept tugging here, as if the stone were a nail in the world.
Misty traces the pattern, and the whole ring answers with a low shiver. The cold from the hollow gathers toward the marked stone, then threads down into the roots.
Bram
That is it. A binding mark, and an anchoring one. Someone fixed the haunting to this grove, then left the mark to hold it in place.
The lantern steadies, pointed straight at the hidden hollow, while the spiral on the stone dims to a workable glow, as if it has been waiting for touch.
Quest Complete
Find what anchored the sorrow-spirit in the grove
Quest Complete
Learn everything Bram found about the gate-haunting
Attribute Upgrade: Reasoning Good→Great