How Hex Magic Works
Hex magic is Coen's primary supernatural tool during the day. To use magic in this world, a practitioner needs a gate to let it flow. That gate is carved runes. Coen's left arm bears rune scars, inscriptions carved into his flesh that make him a living conduit for supernatural energy.
The magic is described as grounded and ritualistic, tied to blood, heat, and pulsing air rather than flashy fantasy effects. Hexes are only available during daylight hours. At night, Coen's vampiric regeneration kicks in and his rune scars seal over, rendering hex magic inert. This is the biological reason for the day/night ability split. His vampire nature actively heals the very wounds that channel his human magic.
Spell Categories
Hex magic divides into categories:
Category | Effect |
|---|---|
Offensive | Direct damage and combat control hexes such as Burning Blood and Ravenous Flock |
Defensive | Protective abilities, the branch the witchcraft ultimate Runic Bulwark sits in |
Investigative | Information-gathering spells like Compel Soul |
Utility / Traversal | Movement and field hexes like Mercurial Fervour |
Known Hexes
Post-launch coverage of the shipped game counts ten Witchcraft abilities. No official roster has been published, so treat the count as the best figure currently available rather than a settled one. Four of the ten are taught to Coen by Anca towards the end of the prologue. The other six are locked behind manuals that have to be found or bought before they can be learned and levelled.
Hex | How It Is Unlocked | Effect |
|---|---|---|
Compel Soul | Taught by Anca at the end of the prologue | Lets Coen speak with the dead. An investigation tool rather than a combat one. |
Astral Communion | Taught by Anca at the end of the prologue | Effect not published in any source reached so far. |
Burning Blood | Taught by Anca at the end of the prologue; further manuals are scattered across the valley | Deals damage over time to a single target. |
Mercurial Fervour | Taught by Anca at the end of the prologue; a second manual sits in the convent library at St. Tyna’s Grove | Grants haste while exploring by briefly slowing the world around Coen. |
Ravenous Flock | Manual, from either of the two Pilgrimage of Power quests | Area attack that stuns a target with a flock of crows. Attacking the target triggers further area attacks. |
Cycle of Ruin | Manual, from the Ancient Circle at the west end of the Cursed Chasm, among other places | Extends the duration of active Witchcraft abilities with every landed attack, block and Perfect Block. |
Soul Reaping | Manual, from the Ancient Circle east of Maragir, among other places | Drains health from the target over time and keeps it at a distance. |
Unholy Vitality | Manual, from the Haunted: Site of Crucifixion in the southern Maragir Wealds, among other places | Regenerates health after an ability is used. |
Soul Stigma | Manual, from the Ancient Circle in northeast St. Tyna’s Grove, among other places | Raises critical chance and critical damage against the marked target. |
Life Lock | Unlocked automatically during the Manumit questline | Blocks incoming damage and reflects it back at the attacker. |
Compel Soul
An investigative hex that lets Coen speak with the dead. Useful for unraveling mysteries, gathering information about NPCs no longer alive, or learning details about past events. It is a quest-and-exploration tool more than a combat tool, and it ties into the game's investigation systems alongside the new focus mode detective vision.
Burning Blood
An offensive hex that boils the blood of enemies and burns their skin, dealing physical damage over time. The name is literal. Coen heats the target's blood until it starts to cook them from the inside. It is one of the first hexes shown in gameplay demos.
Mercurial Fervour
A traversal hex that accelerates Coen's footspeed across open terrain during daytime. Since there is no horse system in the game, Mercurial Fervour is the primary fast-travel-equivalent for sunlit movement; wolf transformation handles the same role at night. The hex was named on stream during the Road to Launch event as the way Coen covers ground when he is not within sprint range of a shrine fast-travel anchor.
Ravenous Flock
An area attack that stuns a target with a flock of crows, with follow-up area hits triggered by attacking that target. Before launch this ability was filed with the night-side vampire abilities, on the strength of a dev-stream clip that showed it among a run of combat moves without naming a tree. Coverage of the shipped game places it first among the six manual-locked Witchcraft hexes, with its own manual locations and vendors, which is the stronger evidence of the two. The dev-stream appearance is real and is not in dispute; only the tree it was filed under has changed.
Compel Soul is confirmed by its own achievement, awarded for speaking with a dead person using it. That places it firmly in the investigative half of the toolkit rather than the combat half, and confirms the dead are a usable source of information rather than set dressing.
Where Manuals Come From
The six manual-locked hexes are gated by a physical book rather than by perk points. Manuals turn up as rewards for Ancient Circles, Haunted Sites and the Pilgrimage of Power quests, and loose copies sit in bookcases around the valley. Duplicate manuals are not wasted: a second copy raises the level of an ability Coen already knows.
Merchant | Where To Find Them |
|---|---|
Becomes a vendor at the Crossroads Inn in St. Tyna’s Grove once Echoes of Silenced Bells is done. | |
Vera | East of the swamp in the Briar Sloughs, southeast of Mert’s Mill. |
Peddler of Wonders | |
Mevasser | Lives in Neustadt in Svartrau and is not marked on the map. |
Uriash Matriarch | Reached through Lacra’s Song of the Mountain quest. |
Sanzhana merchant | Opened up by completing Good Home north of Svartrau, then helping the Sanzhana through Letters to Lunka until Pearly and Precious is finished. |
Names Outside the Counted Roster
Two hex names this page has carried since before release do not appear among the ten Witchcraft abilities counted in the shipped game, and neither has surfaced in post-launch coverage. They are kept here with their provenance rather than dropped, because the count is a count of Witchcraft abilities and not a list of everything Coen can do. Both should be read as unconfirmed in the shipped build until the in-game ability panel settles them.
Feral Mind
Named directly as a spell in the publisher's own community bulletin question-and-answer, which describes it as prompting an enemy to start attacking random targets including their own allies, and shown under hex magic in the June 2025 gameplay deep dive with the same effect. Both of those are dated first-party attestations, so the name and the effect are not in doubt. What is unsettled is placement: Feral Mind is not among the ten Witchcraft abilities counted in the shipped game and nothing published since launch names it, so the hex classification in particular should not be relied on.
Acrid Dust
Described as a stun effect that spends activation charges to disable enemies briefly, useful for breaking the momentum of a larger group. The provenance is dated rather than vague: the name was shown in the June 2025 gameplay reveal and written up at the time, and the same description was still being repeated in August 2025. What is missing is the other half. Acrid Dust is absent from the ten counted Witchcraft abilities and no post-launch source mentions it, and one pre-release account treats it as a consumable item rather than an ability at all, so the hex classification is unconfirmed.
Activation Charges
Hex magic does not run on mana. Coen earns activation charges by performing well in directional combat (good attacks, good blocks, good parries) and spends those charges to cast hexes or perform execution moves. The system links spell access to swordplay quality: a player who fights well has hexes available; a player who fumbles the directional combat does not.
Charges are shared across the ability bar, which means a hex slot competes with execution moves like Artery Strike for the same charge budget. Players start with three ability slots, expandable through skill tree progression. The intended loop is fight well, charge up, dump a hex at the right moment, charge again.
Day Versus Night
Hex magic is one half of Coen's Dawnwalker toolkit. At sunrise the rune scars on his arm open and the hexes become available; at sunset they seal and the vampiric powers toolkit takes over. Mercurial Fervour belongs strictly to the day side. Players who push to do the bulk of a quest at night will lose access to the hex layer for the duration; players who push the day-only route lose access to Shadowstep, Plane Shift, and the vampire combat layer for the duration.
The skill tree splits along this same line: Witchcraft deepens hex magic, Swordmastery deepens sword combat, Vampirism deepens claw combat and supernatural mobility, and a band of generic perks spanning all three contains passives that work in both forms.
Named Witchcraft Perks
Perks on the witchcraft side of progression are bought with skill points and time at a road shrine, once the matching manual has been found or purchased. Several are confirmed by name.
Perk | Notes |
|---|---|
Frugal Witchcraft | Reduces what casting costs Coen. |
Forbidden Sigils | Opens an additional ability slot on the witchcraft side. |
Amalgam | A witchcraft perk on the same tree. |
Runic Bulwark | The witchcraft Ultimate Perk. Only one ultimate per tree can ever be taken, and it opens once thirty-five perk points have been spent in witchcraft. A single post-launch account gives its effect as a chance to apply a random hex to an opponent on a Perfect Block, with the figure quoted as 15 percent. Nothing else corroborates that number yet. |
Perks and active abilities are separate layers of the same tree. Mercurial Fervour and Life Lock were once listed here as perks; both are active Witchcraft abilities and belong to the roster above. Perks are the passive and slot-level upgrades that sit around them.
Perks carry a timing label of Daytime, Nighttime or Anytime. See Ultimate Perks for the full set of nine.