The stone under Huarti shudders again, then splits with a wet blue glare. A crack runs wide at his feet, and the chamber breathes out cold corruption from below.
The floor drops away in broken slabs, exposing a crystalline core pulsing in rhythm with the desert. Each beat sends sickly light through the seams, as if the land itself is being leashed.
Annika Mal
Huarti, that thing is the anchor. If it keeps beating, the rot keeps spreading.
Nomad Envoy
Then break it, or claim it before it claims everything above us.
The core swells, its surface flashing with hidden runes and a shadowed name-mark. The pulse answers Huarti's presence, harder now, like a challenge waiting to be answered.
Huarti
It is tied to the border.
Below the crystal, a darker chamber opens for a breath, and Huarti can feel the corruption fed from deeper stone. The hidden hand is not gone, it is rooted under his domain.
“I listen to the evil script of it for who or what made it”
SUCCESS (Legendary Arcana, rolled -1)
Huarti lowers his hand to the broken seam and lets the core speak through his senses. The blue pulse is not wild corruption, it is shaped, threaded with old command.
A foreign hand-mark hangs inside the script, worn but exact. It points back to a desert-name carried through warding circles, a maker who knew border rites and how to poison them.
Huarti
A border-caller. Not local stone.
Annika Mal
You feel it too, then. This was laid by someone who wanted the land to obey from below.
The core flashes once, and Huarti catches a second trace, a hidden rider in the spell. The poison is being fed, but its author is already marked by the work.
Nomad Envoy
Name it, and we can hunt the source. Say the word, Huarti.
The pulse steadies under his palm, now readable, now known, while the chamber waits for his next command.
“I cast vampiric drain on it”
SUCCESS (Mediocre Vampiric corruption, rolled +1)
Huarti presses his will into the core, and the pulse answers like a mouth opening. Pale blue light drains inward along his hand, thinning at the edges as if something old is being pulled loose from the stone.
The foreign hand-mark buckles. Its neat border-rite lines fray, then peel away in strands of dim ash, leaving the crystal’s beating center exposed and raw to his senses.
Annika Mal
It is weakening. You are pulling the hidden thread straight out of it.
A sour tremor shudders through the passage, and the chamber’s air cools at once. Whatever fed the corruption recoils, but the core keeps dimming under Huarti’s grip.
Nomad Envoy
Good. Hold it there. If it breaks free now, we lose the trail.
The last of the mark collapses into Huarti’s pull, and the border-signature dies from the crystal like ink washed from a seal. The core remains, but the poison’s visible hand is gone.
Annika Mal
Tell me what you want done with what remains. Leave it, shatter it, or take it.
Quest Complete
Cut out the hidden hand poisoning the border
Attribute Upgrade: Agility Great→Superb