He staggered to his feet. The fire-storms raged on. And with a bloody smile, he began to walk toward the nearest name.
Elias Thorne didn’t believe in ghosts. Not the wailing, sheet-covered kind, anyway. But as he stood on the broken parapet of the Slith prison, watching the last light bleed out over the corrupted moors, he believed in the ghost of a purpose.
"I don't want peace," Elias whispered.
Elias clawed his way out of the slag, half-blind, burning, alone. He lay on the blackened stone and fumbled for the Tracker. With a shaking, charred finger, he drew a line through . grim dawn quest tracker
Release Captain John Sobb from possession. Sub-objective: End his suffering. Reward: Peace.
"I'm sorry, John," Elias said, raising the sword.
The grim dawn, he realized, never ends. The Tracker just finds you a new purpose to survive it. He staggered to his feet
The possessed thing charged. The fight lasted ninety seconds. Elias had no magic, no relics, no aetherial augments. He had only the Tracker and a desperate, grinding will. He lost his sword. He lost two fingers on his left hand. He took a blow to the ribs that turned his vision red. But he tackled the armored monster into the molten slag.
"Thank you," the captain mouthed silently. Then the fire took him.
Until three days ago.
Elias drew his rusty shortsword. His heart was a cold stone. "John. Can you hear him in there?"
John Sobb was his brother-in-law. The man who had taught Elias to fish, who had lent him coin for his first printing press, who had carried Elias’s daughter to a medic when the blood ticks got her. Sobb had led a desperate rearguard action at the Burrwitch bridge, buying time for refugees to flee. Then the world went white, and when Elias woke up, Sobb was gone.
The armored head twitched. "Hear? He is a splinter under my nail. He screams to save you. He screams to run. But the Tracker… the Tracker says otherwise." Elias Thorne didn’t believe in ghosts