Gertie's Empty Gift

Morgan came back to himself with the taste of the banquet still in the room. The cannibal dinner trance broke after concentration slipped, leaving the horror behind without letting anyone pretend it had not happened. Then the red mirror took over the scene. Gertie appeared there for Morgan. She did not welcome him like a patron pleased with a promising servant. She mocked him. She spoke as though his loyalties were already dirty, as though cheating on Vithyrex with her was not ambition but bad taste. Morgan had been drawn into powers and relationships larger than the party understood, but Gertie made the connection feel less like a grand initiation and more like a humiliating review. Then she threw him a reward. A Staff of Necromancy. It should have meant something. In a cleaner story, it might have marked Morgan as chosen, claimed, or dangerously advanced. In Gertie's room, it landed hollow. Zero charges. No stored necromantic power. A regular wooden staff wearing the shape of a better prize because Morgan had failed the test. Gertie made sure the insult was understood. She would take clanger over Morgan. So Morgan entered the wider campaign with direct supernatural ties to Vithyrex and Gertie, but his first visible gift from that web was empty. Not absence. Judgment.