The terrace holds steady in gold light, but the riverbank answers with a shiver. From the reeds, a lean scavenger steps into view, one hand raised against the glow.
The Scavenger
That surplus belongs to the town’s first keepers. You’re sitting on their vein.
Kynes feels the sinkpoint throb through the stone under his feet. The pulse is not wild, but it is hungry, and it reaches outward toward the bank.
The Scavenger
Let the old claim stand, and I walk away. Refuse, and Phandelver keeps paying for your footing.
A deeper ripple rolls through the terrace foundation, a warning from below. The golden seam brightens, then narrows, as if waiting for Kynes to choose where the current goes.
Bren
If the flow spreads, the bank goes with it. Decide fast, Kynes.
✓ Quest Accepted
Hold the sinkpoint against the scavenger's claim
“Does the scavenger possess a genuine, presently valid claim or authority established by Phandelver's first keepers over this specific sinkpoint and its current, rather than merely asserting an old, expired, inherited, symbolic, or fabricated claim?””
NO (Unlikely, rolled 74)
Kynes probes the sinkpoint's resonance, finding only the hollow echo of a fabricated history. The scavenger's claim is a phantom, lacking any true tether to the archive's original keepers.
“" what's your proof there lad?"”
SUCCESS (Legendary Persuasion, rolled -1)
Kynes
What’s your proof, then, lad?
The Scavenger
Proof? Fine. The seam answers me, not you. It wakes when I speak the old claim, and it drinks my name like it remembers it.
The scavenger lifts a dirt-stained hand toward the glowing crack, but the light does not surge to him. It stays steady under Kynes’s touch, bright as housed gold.
Bren
That is not a claim. That is a performance.
The scavenger’s mouth tightens. For the first time, he looks at the bank, not the stone, as if measuring what his story can no longer bend.
The Scavenger
If the seam will not answer me, then I have brought empty teeth to a locked door.
The terrace holds. The golden flow sinks into the masonry under Kynes’s control, and the scavenger falls silent, forced into witness by the stubborn, unbroken pulse beneath the stone.
Quest Complete
Hold the sinkpoint against the scavenger's claim