Investigation Summary

What the Party Learns in Macridi

The evidence gathered across Old Macridi points toward a single disturbing pattern. The corruption affecting the Palakar Forest does not appear to be spreading naturally along Profit’s Flow. Blighted timber, affected animals, and contaminated underground water all suggest that the corruption is reaching living things from below, through roots, soil, groundwater, or some deeper subterranean source.

Records at the Veridical Scriptorium make that discovery more troubling. Older agreements governing Reiver’s Right explicitly prohibited mining, tunneling, deep boring, and excavation beneath established root depth, but that restriction vanished when the camp reopened roughly three years ago. No surviving amendment or authorization explains why.

Financial records from the same period show Reiver’s Right purchasing unusually large quantities of structural bracing, heavy chain, pulleys, lamp oil, ventilation canvas, drainage pipe, hauling equipment, and similar supplies. Individually, each purchase could belong to a remote logging camp, but together they suggest the needs of a substantial underground work site.

Following the ownership and financial trail leads toward a concealed investor in Kerse, hidden behind representatives, holding agreements, freight accounts, and several apparently unrelated companies. Several associated contracts bear the same small seal: a golden hand curled into a circle, enclosing a serpent within its palm. The records do not explain its deeper meaning, but taken together the evidence raises a troubling possibility: Reiver’s Right may have been reopened not only to harvest timber, but to gain access to something beneath the Palakar Forest.