The common room quiets as Nhal holds the silver charm above the table. Violet script tugs toward a different quarter of Baldur’s Gate, precise as a compass needle.
Nhal
The direction is clear. I can keep the bridge open long enough for you to follow it, but I will cut the spell if it begins giving commands.
Kynes follows the beacon without touching the charm or taking control from Nhal. Its trail bends east, toward streets crowded with warehouses, countinghouses, and late-night traffic.
Bren
I will watch the doors and the street. If anything comes through here while you trace that signal, it will meet me first.
The violet script suddenly tightens. Far along the traced route, something notices the investigation and turns its attention back through the beacon.
Nhal
It saw us. Not clearly, perhaps, but enough to know I am no longer practicing alone. I am interrupting if it reaches through me.
The charm remains in Nhal’s keeping, its script pointing toward the eastern quarter while a second pulse travels back along the connection. The next choice is Kynes’s.
✓ Quest Accepted
Prevent the beacon from reaching through Nhal
✓ Quest Accepted
Identify the hidden presence behind the beacon
“I match the way the signal acts and send my own trace to its location”
SUCCESS (Legendary Arcana, rolled +1)
Kynes matches the beacon’s pulse, rhythm, and magical cadence, then threads a precise trace through its returning current without touching Nhal’s control. The trace takes hold and travels east.
The silver charm flashes once. Kynes’s trace arrives at its source: a shuttered cooperage beside the eastern warehouses, where the hidden signature coils beneath a mundane ward.
Nhal
You found it. The trace is sitting inside the source now, and it cannot mistake your presence for mine.
The beacon’s returning pulse changes shape around Kynes’s trace, revealing the cooperage’s sealed rear room and a second magical pattern nested beneath the floorboards.
Bren
Then we know where the signal lives, love. Nhal keeps the charm, and you keep the trace. No one gets to use either of you without being noticed.
Nhal
The connection is stable, and it is no longer steering my spell. I can feel the hidden pattern clearly now. It is waiting beneath the cooperage.
Kynes’s trace remains anchored at the source, marking the cooperage and its concealed lower chamber through the charm’s violet glow. The signal’s location is no longer hidden from him.
Quest Complete
Prevent the beacon from reaching through Nhal