Effect: When used to imprint a wax seal on a letter, the letter will be destroyed if opened by anyone other than the addressee.

Jason stared at the bloody knife in his equally bloody hand. After a few moments there was an unusual tingling, slowly rising to become pain. He tightened his grip until the pain became too much and the dagger clattered to the floor.

You do not meet the requirements to use this item.

Finally, he turned to the body. Its eyes were open, face frozen in a final expression of surprise.

The room was still and silent, Jason’s eyes locked on the corpse.

“You did this,” he accused it. “You did this.”

He didn’t sound convincing, even to himself.

Jason’s mind was nothing but white noise as he stood over the body. When a new sound broke him out of his trance he didn’t know if it had been seconds, minutes or hours. The sound came from above, a metal ventilation pipe in the ceiling. There was a hollow, echoing timbre to the sound and it took Jason a moment to recognise it as a hissing noise. It was coming from the hole.

He watched the hole, eyes unfocused and disoriented. His mind was still on the knife, as he watched absently. He could feel it, even after it fell back to the floor. He could taste the hot blood spilling out of the wizard’s neck. His gaze sharpened when something came out of the hole in the ceiling. It was an enormous, pitch-black snake, head barely small enough to pass through the aperture.

Jason and the snake looked at each other, frozen for a moment. Jason could sense intelligence in its eyes, although he may well have been imagining it. Then the snake hissed at Jason and continued emerging from the vent shaft, body dangling down from the ceiling. Jason sprinted for the door back to the cave, snatching up the lamp as he moved.

New Quest: [Time to Run]

The familiar of the Builder Cultist sensed its master’s death and has come to investigate.

Objective: Escape [Umbral Mountain Snake] 0/1.

Reward: Iron-rank (rare) magical dagger.

Jason almost stumbled as the window popped up, flailing wildly at it as he willed it closed. He bolted through the metal door, dropped his lamp and grabbed onto the wheeled handle, hauling back with adrenaline-fuelled strength. The rusty hinges groaned shut and Jason yanked on the wheel to latch the door. There was another wheel on the other side, but snakes didn’t have thumbs.