The market square boils with festival noise, ribbons, torchlight, and trampling feet. Then the inn doors slam wide.
A knot of robed cultists spills into the crowd, heads down, moving fast. One of them clutches at a hidden parcel under his cloak.
At the threshold, a stranger lies crumpled in the doorway, dead still. His eyes burn with a faint, wrong glow that stains the air around him.
Surazal
Residual necromancy. Fresh.
Vaelin
Keep moving. Do not look back.
The cultists split into the crowd, trying to become ordinary shadows among the dancers and shoppers.
Across the square, a guard captain spots the body and starts pushing through the press, hand going to his sword as suspicion sharpens into alarm.
Captain Harlen
You there, stop. Nobody leaves this square until I know who touched that man.
✓ Quest Accepted
Intercept the cultists before they vanish
“Can I sense the necromantic energy lingering on the cultists?”
YES (VeryLikely, rolled 67)
Surazal
The same sickly, cold resonance clings to the robed figure's cloak like a shadow.
The trail of necrotic energy pulses faintly, a tether of dark magic leading directly from the corpse to the fleeing cultist.
“Is the cultist carrying the necromantic focus?”
YES (Likely, rolled 33)
Surazal
The parcel he clutches is not merely cloth, it is the source of the decay.
The violet haze intensifies around the bundle, revealing the jagged, bone-like edges of an artifact protruding from the cultist's grip.
“I close in on the hooded cultist”
SUCCESS (Legendary Agility, rolled -1)
Surazal slips in fast, white hair flashing once between bodies as he cuts the distance to the cultist.
The violet trail quivers taut between them, then shortens as the hooded man jerks back and loses the edge of the crowd.
He reaches the cultist before the stall and the fleeing knot of festival-goers can swallow him.
Vaelin
No, stay back.
Captain Harlen
You, hold him there! What is that thing?
The artifact’s glow stains the cloth and the cultist’s hands violet, pinned in plain sight.
Quest Complete
Intercept the cultists before they vanish