coven

out in forest and taiga, on ground the generator has proved both flat and dry, stands a hearthstead: a seven-by-seven cottage with a lectern and a chest holding a worn folio and a dozen salt, a cauldron of water, a real closed circle of hedge's marks with four lit candles at its cardinals, and two or three cunning folk who live there. they are not encounters and they spawn nowhere else. they keep the place: a candle in the room goes out and one of them walks over and lights it; the salt line at their own doorstep wears and one of them lays it again. only their own doorstep — never yours.

they never fight, and killing one earns nothing at all. no loot, no xp, no challenge. what they throw is a splash of slowness and weakness with no damage in it, thrown while retreating behind their own salt, and the real answer comes after: strike a keeper and for three days every keeper turns their back and walks away from you. nothing else happens. a closed door is not a debuff, and the world simply remembers. the same book runs the other way — carry hedge's grimoire, stave, charm or folio near one and it stops what it is doing and gives you a nod made of gaze, once in a while, for as long as you are welcome.

vanilla's witch is redrawn here too, as a recluse in bog wool and leather patches — paint only, her behaviour untouched, a register away from the tended hearthsteads on purpose. coven takes folk's body and hedge's craft as hard dependencies and says so plainly. phase three, the wheel kept, waits on hedge's own; phase four, the acquaintance, waits on a design pass. what ships is the hearthstead, the tending, the nod and the shun.