Snow falls softly on a town dressed for the holidays, where lanternlight glows warm, hearths stay lit, and peace feels almost too easy to find.

When people begin to quietly disappear—without fear, without struggle, without alarm. The party is drawn into a mystery that refuses to call itself one. Homes remain warm. Bread stays in the oven. Chairs sit empty, waiting for someone who may never return.

As comforting traditions give way to subtle wrongness, the party follows whispers, rumors, and unfinished routines toward something the town insists is kind… even as it feels increasingly impossible.

Part I ends at the threshold of a place that shouldn’t exist. Where warmth lingers, music waits, and every visitor is promised one simple truth:

Everyone has a purpose.

Part II continues next week.

Follow the team after their fall through the red rift into an unfamiliar zone of cracked black stone and pulsing light. Their Codices activate on their own, warning of unstable readings and a nearby breach source. The squad follows a narrow path toward a circular chamber where the air is silent, the ground vibrates, and the zone begins to react to their presence.

As they descend into the Spiral Chamber, the stone echoes, the light shifts, and the environment responds to every movement. Lines of purple energy guide them inward while the pressure of the zone grows with each step. At the center, something waits. The episode builds tension through travel, observation, and rising instability, ending as the team reaches the heart of the chamber and prepares for whatever comes next.

The Universal Neomagic Isolation Team, U.N.I.T., deploys into the Echofields after violent wild magic spikes wipe out a full Syndicate scout crew. The landscape loops. Memories slip. Spellcasting fractures into unstable variants. U.N.I.T. navigates the shifting ground while hostile spell-spawned entities stalk the wastes. Every surge grows stronger, and every reading points to something building beneath the surface.

As the squad pushes deeper, their stabilizers struggle to hold. Temporal echoes overlap. Identities blur at the edges. The mission shifts from reconnaissance to containment as the team realizes the surges are converging on a single unseen source. The episode ends on a rising harmonic pulse that sweeps across the wastes, drowning out comms and shaking the entire region, leaving U.N.I.T. bracing for whatever comes next.

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