"Thank you," the captain mouthed silently. Then the fire took him.
He clicked the Tracker shut and began the descent into the Cinder Wastes. The Conflagration was hell with geography. Rivers of molten slag, air thick with sulfur and the screams of things that had once been men. Elias moved like a machine. He didn't dodge the cinders; he walked through them, skin blistering and peeling, because the pain was a compass. The Tracker on his thigh grew warm. He didn't need to look at it. He knew what it would say: Objective Updated: Locate Captain Sobb. grim dawn quest tracker
Elias glanced down. The Tracker had fallen open. A new line was writing itself in charcoal that seemed to bleed from the page: "Thank you," the captain mouthed silently
Elias’s knuckles whitened around the Tracker. The Quest Tracker wasn't magic. It was a contract. He had written a rule on the inside cover in his own blood: No new quests until the last is closed. And for two years, the last one had been Sobb. The Conflagration was hell with geography
Elias did know. He had seen it happen to a woman in Arkovia who had crossed out her missing son's name. The next morning, she had walked into a rift and never come out. The Tracker wasn't a tool. It was a leash. And once you wrote a name, the world conspired to make you finish it.
His hand trembled over the leather-bound journal strapped to his thigh. It wasn't a diary of memories or a log of supplies. It was his Tracker . A crude, desperate invention of a man who had lost everything else. On its yellowed pages, names were written in charcoal, iron-gall ink, and once, in blood. Beside each name: a status. Alive. Missing. Deceased. And for a precious few: Resolved.
Three years ago, when the Aetherials tore the sky open, Elias had been a simple cartographer. Now, he mapped only one thing: the debts of the damned.