The blackened crown fragments inside Aurelion’s dagger suddenly turn cold. Dust slides from the chapel walls, and the faded salt ring beneath the threshold breaks apart.
Beneath the salt, human fingerprints emerge from the stone, pressed outward from inside. Behind the doorway, a second outline appears: a prison built around someone who could still see the living wound.
Elvira the Black
The maker trapped a witness inside the wall.
Aurelion
Not a tomb, old friend. A watching cell. Whoever made it feared the wound, but needed someone to see it.
The dagger’s cold fragments draw a thin line across the threshold. Letters surface beneath the dust, their grooves shaped by a human hand rather than the Lich’s crown.
Aurelion
The hand belonged to a keeper of the dead king’s road. She sealed the witness here when the first crown-throne began to breathe.
One final imprint remains beneath the broken salt: a narrow palm marked with three cuts. The outline answers with a muffled knock from inside, and the prison door begins to open.
“Elvira concentrates and searches for traps or hidden magic protections”
SUCCESS (Good Investigation, rolled +0)
Elvira stills her breathing and lets her perception move over the broken salt, the fingerprints, and the opening prison door. The stone answers in layers of pressure.
Elvira the Black
The threshold is protected, but the protection is meant to contain, not harm.
A faint numbness gathers at Elvira’s talons where the salt ring broke. Beneath it, three ward-lines cross the doorway and turn inward toward the watching cell.
Aurelion
The first line bars intrusion. The second preserves what watches. The third would have punished anyone who entered without knowing the keeper’s mark.
Elvira follows the lines without touching them. Their power is spent at the threshold, and the broken salt has severed the punishment ward. No concealed working remains active beyond the door.
Aurelion
You may cross safely, old friend. The prison still holds its witness, but it no longer holds a blade for the curious.
✓ Quest Accepted
Be recognized and addressed by the hidden witness
“lets go in”
SUCCESS (Superb Agility, rolled +2)
Elvira crosses the threshold. The spent ward-lines remain dull beneath her feet, and the prison door opens inward onto a narrow cell smelling of stone, dust, and old breath.
A gaunt elderly woman, Irena Salk, a human woman with sallow skin and a wiry frame, sits upright against the rear wall, her iron-gray hair braided close to her skull and her weathered face marked by three pale cuts across one palm. A rust-dark keeper’s coat hangs from her shoulders.
Irena Salk
You carry the dragon’s fire. Then the crown-thief is truly gone.
The woman rises carefully. Her joints crack, but the cell does not resist her. Beyond her, a slit in the rear stone reveals the living wound below the chapel, gold pulsing beneath blackened rock.
Irena Salk
I am Irena Salk, last keeper of the dead king’s road. I watched the wound breathe for seventy years.
Aurelion
Ask what she witnessed, old friend. Her memory was preserved for this hour, not for the Lich.
The keeper steps fully into the corridor. Behind her, the watching cell settles into silence, while the golden wound below beats once and throws her three-cut mark across the stone like a summons.
Quest Complete
Be recognized and addressed by the hidden witness