The party picked their way through the bone-strewn crypt beneath the cathedral. Momeline's hand burned as she reached into a coffins, a ward Dravencoles recognized as harmless but old. With Lirielle and Ferinthria's help she wrestled one of the lids free, and Dravencoles saw a holy amulet around the corpse's neck. It was the symbol of the lost Saint Calros himself.

The bones behind them began to shuffle. Aghash, a bone devil bound to the crypt, burst from the pile and swung at Momeline before she could fall back. The first strike should have landed, and the second after it, but Ferinthria tipped the scales of luck with a nod of her head and turned them aside. Only the scorpion sting caught Momeline, grazing her shoulder. Lirielle threatened Aghash with banishment, Momeline Misty Stepped onto his back, and Ferinthria cracked him with a lightning bolt while Talan healed Momeline and Landor, still fog-headed from the curse, swung wide. Outmatched, Aghash begged for mercy and bargained instead. The relic they wanted lay under the altar above, its seal never properly closed, and that was the source of the Witchwood's madness.

Upstairs, Dravencoles and Landor lifted the altar-lid. Green light poured out. Dravencoles held his mind together, but Landor dropped his side and forgot who the others were. Lirielle's Otiluke's Resilient Sphere snapped shut around the relic just in time. Momeline read the Valaen inscription aloud and the party noticed the light flicker at the word Elatar: death, or to close. The sphere muffled their voices, but Momeline, due to a recent Ethereal slip, was able to pass through it. She stepped inside, and the curse reached her instantly. In the space of a breath she forgot where she was, and then who she was, and then she was forgetting even that. Through the curved wall of the sphere she caught a blur of pink hair and a glint of magic in Ferinthria's eyes as her friend bent luck one more time to pull her back, and Momeline remembered. She spoke Elatar from within the sphere, and the relic closed. The party let Aghash remain as the cathedral's keeper; grateful, he gave them a rib-bone to summon him once, and a tooth for Momeline's collection.

They emerged from the Witchwood with Tomas, who grumbled about his forfeited fee until Momeline reminded him the curse was gone. At the desert's edge Ferinthria spotted a figure fleeing, and the party tracked him to a cliffside wagon belching blue smoke. The fleeing man was Silas Mott, a twitchy old Dreamvale powder refiner also chasing Khasim's Crown to escape the Duskrunners. Over his trinkets and maps he confessed he could never reach one particular stretch of the dunes, no matter how carefully he followed the stars.

Days of travel proved him right. The dunes turned them aside again and again. One night Momeline took a pinch of Dreamvale Powder and dreamt of her brother sharing an ale with Lirielle at a tavern, his tunic cut from the same embroidered silk Silas had pulled out of his trophy pile. The next morning Momeline asked Lirielle if she'd ever drunk with another halfling, and Lirielle said no, but that she did have future memories of it. Lirielle cast Dream on the strength of those future memories, the desert sand somehow bringing her more in tune with her divination, and Momeline stepped into her brother's sleeping mind. He stood on a bridge over Sweetwater creek in Brandyburrow, watching a boy leave a small child on the stones and run. He turned at her approach and stared as if she were a ghost. The last time he had seen her, she had been small and lifeless on that same bridge. He called her Alana. She corrected him with the nickname he had given her. She told him they were looking for him in the desert and wher they were. He told her to wait and that he would come to them. And that's exactly what the party intended to do.