Where is the loose stone in the spiral stair, and where are the boy’s bones?

Steps

1. Reach the hole first. The quest-giver stands beside it, and the main quest sends you there anyway.
2. Talk to the child and let him finish. The request only appears after he explains his drawings; asking about his parents first does not trigger it.
3. Take the quest as a direction, not an address. What he gives you is below, outside the sainted light, reached by going down — not a floor number or a room name.
4. Look at his maps if he offers them, and expect them to be unreadable. He says so himself, and tells you to rely on your own eyes instead.
5. Go down through the hole and search stairwells for a loose stone. Nobody cited on this page has found it, so budget time rather than following a route.
6. Bring the bones back to him when you have them. He asks to bury them, and no source records what he does when he gets them.

What the child asks for

This is the passage four separate channels transcribe the same way, across four different sessions. He says: “In my dreams, I am beneath the earth. A pile of bones entombed inside the spiral stair. This is a place I have never seen. It is outside the sainted light.”

Then the request itself: “I beg of you, stranger. Find the loose stone in the spiral stair. Buried beneath it lie the bones of the boy who died there in my place. Exhume him and bring me his bones that I might bury them properly.”

“In my place” is doing a lot of work in that sentence and no source explains it. The child does not say who the other boy was, why he died instead, or how he knows. He also volunteers, when asked about his parents, that they are sleeping down the hole along with everyone else who has entered it, and that their graves are shallower than the other boy’s.

Why he cannot tell you where

The reason this quest has no map marker in the dialogue is stated in the dialogue. Before the request, the child explains that he has been blessed with vision, that it is a blessing to receive the vision of the Saint but a terrible penance for the chosen, and that he sees things in his drawings which he does not understand — things that always come true eventually. He says the Saint speaks through his chalk and that it is his burden to realise the visions.

He has drawn maps his whole life — “I have done nothing but draw maps for my entire life”, he says when asked for one — and he warns that they will not help. He describes stairways, corridors and deep pits where old things lie, says he has never been any further than that himself, and that his maps depict the true nature of a place, which only the sainted and the blind may see. If they are nonsense to you, he says, you must rely only upon your own eyes to guide you. He then puts it plainly: he needs your eyes to delve below and find the bones of the other boy.

So the quest is deliberately given without coordinates. That is a design choice recorded in the script, not a gap in this page’s sourcing — though the two are easy to confuse, and the limits below say which is which.

Where he stands

Every recording read for this page meets him in the same place: on the ground beside the hole, before the descent, at the point where the main quest has already brought the player. One player notices him only after remarking on the hole itself.

Asked how he got there, he says he has been there for as long as he can remember, and suspects even longer still. One recording carries the sentence that follows, which the others cut off: “It was here that I first heard the saint. And so it was here that I knew I must stay.” He is not waiting at the hole by accident, in other words, and he is not going down it.

Two lines play as the player approaches the edge afterwards — “He’s waiting for us”, then “Jump right in” — and all four recordings catch them in that order. One player stops to ask his chat what that dialogue was and where it came from. No source establishes who is speaking or who is waiting.

Requirements / limits

• Nobody in the sources completes this quest. The bones, the loose stone and the reward are all undocumented, and this page does not guess at any of them.
• The only location information published here is what the child says out loud: beneath the earth, outside the sainted light, reached by going below. There is no floor, no landmark and no direction because no source has one.
• One player later recalls meeting this child at the Amphitheater rather than at the hole, and hedges the recollection himself. His own earlier footage shows the conversation happening at the hole, so this page follows the footage.
• Machine captions render the second word of “spiral stair” inconsistently and one transcript writes “exume”. The quest name as it appears in the journal is not recorded by any source.
• The child is not named in any transcript, and no name for him is printed here.
• Update 7 rebuilt the place this quest sends you. NerveLabs list, under Updated, that the intro to the tower is now a proper dungeon crawl, and under Fixed that various holes and gaps have been filled. Every recording behind this page went down the hole before 21 August 2026. Whatever the four of them failed to find, they failed to find it in a version of that interior that no longer exists.
• That cuts both ways and the page will not pretend otherwise. A rebuilt dungeon may have moved the loose stone, added it, or removed it. It may also be why nobody found it: a section the developers judged incomplete enough to remake is not a section whose contents can be assumed stable.
• Update 7 also adds many new POIs with quests marking areas on the map in a TES3-style way, and improved directions for many quests. If this quest was one of them, the child’s deliberately vague instruction may now be accompanied by a map area. Nothing in the changelog names it, and nobody has recorded the quest since.

Common mistakes

• Searching the town for a spiral staircase. He says the place is beneath the earth and asks you to delve below.
• Treating his maps as a usable item. He says outright that they will look like nonsense and to use your own eyes.
• Assuming the bones belong to his parents. He distinguishes them explicitly — his parents’ graves are shallower than the other boy’s.
• Skipping past his first two lines to the dialogue options. The request comes at the end of the vision speech, not at the start of the conversation.
• Expecting a guide to name the room. Four recordings enter the hole after this conversation and none of them finds the stone.

Still unverified

• Where is the loose stone?Not verifiedNo recording read for this page finds it. The only guidance in any source is the child’s own: below, outside the sainted light.
• Did Update 7’s tower rebuild change this quest?Not verifiedThe changelog says the intro to the tower is now a proper dungeon crawl and that various holes and gaps were filled. It does not mention this quest, and no recording made after 21 August 2026 has been read for this page.
• Who is the other boy, and what does “in my place” mean?Not verifiedThe child says it once and explains nothing. No other source touches it.
• What happens when the bones are returned?Not verifiedNobody has returned them. He says he wants to bury them properly and that is the whole of what is known.
• What is this quest called in the journal?Not verifiedAll four recordings catch the dialogue and none of them opens the quest log afterwards.
• Who speaks the two lines at the edge of the hole?Not verified“He’s waiting for us” and “Jump right in” play in all four recordings. One player asks his chat where the voice came from and gets no answer.