Please join Bik as he journeys to one of the most dangerous places in all of Vianova for a piece of jewlery!

Quest Unlocked: The Crown in the Blightlands

The trail ends in Vignetto. Of course it does.

Vignetto is not a country that invites casual visits. It is a place spoken of in lowered voices by people who have heard enough to know better — a nation whose reputation for darkness is not rumor or exaggeration but simple, documented fact. At its heart sits the Duchy of Oscara, ruled without interruption for longer than most nations have existed by Duke Valdris Mourne — a man, supposedly, of extraordinary magical ability and apparently inexhaustible lifespan. Scholars who have attempted to trace his lineage through historical records tend to find the same unsettling detail: the name Valdris Mourne appears in documents that are very, very old. Always the same name. Always the same title. Always ruling.

Nobody discusses this openly in Vignetto. At least, nobody who continues to live there afterward.

What Mourne does — methodically, constantly, with the focused curiosity of someone who has made certain pursuits the center of a very long existence — is experiment. His creations are varied and deeply troubling: things that move when they shouldn't, mortals bound to his will and set to labor without rest, constructs of dark magical engineering that wander the edges of his territory on errands that nobody outside Oscara fully understands. He sends them all to the Blightlands.

The Blightlands are a strip of cursed earth that Mourne carved out along Oscara's border with the neighboring country of Avistan — not to defend his territory so much as to make the point that crossing into it was a deeply inadvisable personal decision. The land there is wrong in ways that are difficult to articulate precisely. The soil is grey. Nothing grows that wasn't already dead. The sky sits lower somehow, as if even the atmosphere has been encouraged to keep its distance. Mourne's creations toil through it in endless, purposeless labor — a warning written in flesh and curse and ruined earth for anyone in Avistan who might be considering whether the Duchy of Oscara was worth bothering. It is not.

The Crown of the Barrow King is somewhere in the Blightlands. How it got there — whether it was claimed by one of Mourne's wandering creations, lost by someone who had no business being that close to Oscara's border, or placed there deliberately by a Duke who has had a very long time to accumulate things that don't belong to him — is a question Bikaji will have to answer herself when she gets there.

Getting there means crossing into Vignetto, navigating to the Blightlands without attracting the attention of Duke Valdris Mourne's considerable network of eyes and experiments, finding the crown among terrain that is actively hostile to the living, and getting back out again.

Daddy's crown is waiting. It is, unfortunately, in the worst possible place.