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 spells like Burning Blood and Feral Mind |
Defensive | Protective abilities (specific spells not yet detailed) |
Investigative | Information-gathering spells like Compel Soul |
Utility / Traversal | Movement and field hexes like Mercurial Fervour |
Known Hexes
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.
Feral Mind
An offensive hex that forces enemies to attack their own allies. This is crowd control through confusion. Turn a group of enemies against each other while Coen deals with individual targets. The hex inverts a fight's tempo: instead of facing many opponents at once, Coen creates moments where the group fights itself.
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.
Acrid Dust
A stun hex that consumes activation charges and momentarily disables enemies. Effective when Coen needs to break momentum from a numerically superior group or buy time for a heavier hex to come off cooldown.
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.
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 Attack 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: a Human branch deepens hex magic and sword combat, a Vampire branch deepens claw combat and supernatural mobility, and a Shared branch contains passives that work in both forms.