[h3]The Hunter's Dream[/h3]
While Ophelia and Farren made their observations regarding what had happened and retrieved the object that had been left behind by the apparition, Torquil rolled onto his back and – breathing heavily – stared up at the sky through a face covered in his own blood.
“Ow,” he said dispassionately, while inwardly observing that that was likely the single most thoroughly truthful thing he had ever said. Whatever had just happened to him, it had hurt [I]a lot[/I], both in terms of how painful it was and the damage it had done... and that was just the physical component of it. The other thing with what it did to his mind had probably been even worse, and though the specifics of the agony he had just gone through were starting to fade from his memory, little fragments of it seemed to linger. That panicked breathing and those eyes staring into his were as though burned into him, though he lacked the context to understand why it impacted him as much as it did.
He could feel himself regenerating most of what had just happened to him, but then he felt his healing slow and found that there was some lingering aches that suggested he had not been restored to full health. He could tell that he was probably not in mortal danger, at least, and externally he appeared to have mostly recovered, but he definitely would not want to fight anything else while this weak.

“That's what people call 'frenzy',” Gerlinde informed them, having wisely kept at a distance where she would not get splashed with Torquil's blood. “I don't know the specifics of it, but it has happened to me a few times. It's a kind of Nightmare-madness of some sort that turns our insight against us until our bodies just self-destruct like that. Luckily it's pretty rare, because its really dangerous.”

Ophelia, meanwhile, showed the Messengers the orb the spirit had left behind:
[QUOTE=Scroll from the Messengers]Arcane Blood Gemstone
A blood gem that fortifies weapons and adds various properties. Blood gems are especially rare blood stones that grow on coldblood.
Blood gems are kneaded into weapons using workshop tools. Each weapon can only hold one gemstone unless it has been reinforced with blood stone.
This gemstone will partially shift the weapon into the Nightmare, diminishing its physical presence but allowing it to channel a measure of raw eldritch power.[/QUOTE]