If you missed them, the previous turns are linked here -The Blightburner's Story
The Shrine of the Whispers
The fire had burned low by the time the last of the gold changed hands. Two marks total. Sigrid counted them out herself and pressed them into waiting palms. No speeches. Just the weight of coin and the quiet understanding that the Blightburners still walked together. She then turned to Garric and handed him her old bastard sword. He took it without a word, testing the balance like a man measuring a new debt.
Camp was quiet that night. The trees around Thornvein Sink leaned in close, listening. Someone started talking about the Hollow again—the worms, the dagger, the way the air had tasted of rot and old magic. One story led to another. Old scars. Narrow escapes. The kind of talk that settles deep in the bones. By the time the embers died, the warband felt the shape of their own legend settling around them like a cloak. One more story point, earned the hard way.
Dust left before first light. He returned with a small pouch of springwind berries, the blue-black fruit still dusted with dew. Useful. The sort of thing that kept a man moving when the trail turned foul.
Finn tried to range ahead, looking for the cleanest path to the shrine. The woods gave him nothing. Trails faded. Signs lied. He came back empty-handed and sour, muttering about the land itself turning against them.
Grimwald spent the morning with his notes and the letter taken off the robber captain. The words had already burned themselves into the warband’s purpose—deliver the strong ones, the hunter, before the new moon. Now the mystic sought more. The research brought an unexpected offer, a second path opening. Rules were rules. One quest at a time. The second chance recognized the first and gave something in return. Grimwald felt it settle into him like a second heartbeat. Luck. +1. Temporary. Tied to the shrine and whatever waited there. Emboldened.
They moved out.
The forest closed in hard. Dense. Roots like grasping hands. Branches that clawed at cloaks and faces. A lesser guide would have lost half a day fighting it. Dust did not. He found the animal tracks, the old deer runs, the places where the undergrowth thinned just enough. The warband followed in single file, boots sinking into soft earth, the smell of wet leaves and something older underneath.
By late afternoon the trees opened.
The shrine stood ahead—crumbling stone arches wrapped in thick, pale vines, a broken tower of gray rock half-swallowed by the forest. Strange growths clustered at its base. Red and green fungal bursts. Twisted trees leaning in like conspirators. Cultists moved among the ruins. Hooded figures. Spears. One of them stood higher than the rest, watching the approach with the patience of something that had already decided how this would end.
The letter had brought them here. The robber captain’s last words. The shrine in the Hollow. The strong ones. The hunter. Delivered before the new moon—or not at all.
Sigrid checked the edge of her blade. Rose flexed her fingers around the hilt of the Fey Rapier. Garric rolled his shoulders. Dust and Finn melted toward the flanks. Grimwald’s new luck sat quiet and sharp behind his eyes.
Meeting engagement. Whispers from Beyond.
Kill the leader. Take what he carried.
The Blightburners stepped out of the trees...
Table Set Up
The Blightburners broke from the treeline too loud. Boots on stone. A snapped branch. Sigrid felt the moment slip. She tried to seize the initiative the way she always had—Battlewise, the old instinct that had kept her alive on worse ground. It failed. The cultists were already waiting.
One crossbowman crouched high in the ruined shrine, another farther back among the rocks. Hooded figures. Pale faces under dark cloth. The High Whisperer—tall, staff in hand, the one who carried the map—moved with his Acolyte into the broken cover of the shrine’s lower arches. The rest of the cult spread out like rot.
Dust and Finn were already moving. Flanking left through the twisted roots and fungal bursts. Arrows left the string almost together. Finn’s shot hissed wide into the stone. Dust’s found the shrine crossbowman’s shoulder and bit deep. The man staggered, blood dark against the gray rock.
Dust and Finn take position
Return fire cracked. A bolt slammed into Dust’s side and spun him half around. He stayed on his feet, teeth clenched. The second bolt skipped past Finn’s ear and vanished into the undergrowth.
The rest of the warband came up as one. Sigrid, Rose, Garric, Grimwald. No more quiet approach. Just the grind of boots and the weight of steel.
Round two opened with Dust’s second arrow. It punched into the same crossbowman high on the shrine. The man folded. Blood ran down the stone steps.
Sigrid did not wait. She burned a Will point and went first. Battering Storm came off her shoulder in a rising arc that split the air with a wet, heavy crack. The High Whisperer’s torso opened from collarbone to hip. He dropped in two pieces, map still clutched in the fingers of the upper half.
A cultist thug screamed and lunged at her from the side. Sigrid turned the bastard sword without thought. The man went down at her feet, bleeding out into the dirt, still trying to crawl.
The remaining crossbowman on the shrine rim leaned out and drove a bolt straight into Sigrid’s chestplate. The iron held. The point flattened and fell away. She barely felt it.
The Acolyte came in hard, blade flashing in a vicious exchange. Steel rang. Neither drew blood. Then Rose was there, voice raw and cutting across the fight.
“The fuck you attack my friend.”
The Fey Rapier found the Acolyte twice—once high under the arm, once low across the thigh. He staggered. Garric closed the distance and finished him with a single heavy sword blow. The Acolyte dropped beside his master.
Finn’s next arrow took the shrine crossbowman clean through the back. The body toppled forward and landed in the growing pile of the dead.
Grimwald strode forward, staff raised, and simply pointed at the last crossbowman still crouched among the rocks. The man looked at the bodies. Looked at the warband. Then he turned and vanished into the dense brush without a sound.
I think I'll be going....
Silence settled over the shrine, broken only by the drip of blood and the slow creak of the vines.
Two Adventure Points. Finn and Dust both leveled, the hard miles and harder fights finally adding length to their stride. Sigrid’s blade-work sharpened another notch. Five gold in coin and jewelry scavenged from the dead. And in the shadowed rear of the ruined shrine, bound and gagged, a young woman of Blackthorn Manor. Elara. Household blood. Eyes wide but unbroken.
They cut her free. She did not speak much on the walk back, only watched Rose with a quiet, measuring look that said she knew exactly whose blood walked beside her.
Blackthorn Manor rose on the western ridge exactly as the old stories claimed—thick stone, blackthorn hedges grown wild and mean, fires burning low in the windows. The rival house still held the keys, but the land remembered. Rose stood at the edge of the grounds a long moment and said nothing.
They took rooms at the small inn below the ridge. That night a sealed letter arrived, carried by a nervous servant in the rival’s colors. The family of the manor—whatever thin claim they still pretended—thanked the Blightburners for the return of their own. One Story Point, written in careful ink.
The map taken from the High Whisperer’s dead hand showed the next step. Another place. Another name. The quest was not finished.
Rose Blackthorn was home.
The Blightburners would start the next turn here.
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