Shrines are one of the quietest systems in Vale Sangora. No story beat forces you to touch one, and the map never explains that the word covers two completely different things. That is worth fixing, because one kind of shrine is where your skill points get spent and the other is a 20-site restoration chain spread across the whole valley.
Two kinds of shrine
The map and item data use “shrine” for two unrelated systems:
- Road shrines — where perk points are spent. Each perk learned or upgraded at a road shrine costs 1–3 time segments on top of the point itself, which makes shrines the hidden time tax on your build. The skill trees overview holds the node lists; the 30-day timer guide holds the day cost.
- Destroyed Christian shrines — 20 roadside sites desecrated by Brencis’s men. Each has lost its heart, usually a saint’s figurine, and each can be restored by returning it.
This guide is about the second kind.
The twenty destroyed shrines
Twenty restoration sites are catalogued, each with a matching Shrine’s Heart quest item whose description is the same sentence with the name changed: “Can be used to restore [shrine] to its former glory.”
A Hidden Shrine (an attic in Svartrau), Bear’s Maw, Boarback Trail, Burner’s Clearing, Crossroads Inn, Eastridge Outpost, Lupila Riverpass, Manor Path, Maragir Wealds, Oghasti Crossroad, Pilgrim’s Bridge, Prince’s Crossing, Rockfalls Pasture, Small Bridge, St. Tyna’s Grove, Svartrau Outskirts, Tantari Woods, Ticha Riverpass, Vedera Marsh, Western Slopes.
None of the 20 hearts carries a buy or sell price, so they cannot be purchased or fenced. The only route to a heart is that site’s own chain.
Three ways a heart goes missing
Reading the objectives of all 20 sites, the chain takes exactly three shapes.
1. The desecrators are still there (4 sites). At A Hidden Shrine, Manor Path, Small Bridge and Svartrau Outskirts you walk in on guards or soldiers dismantling the shrine. There is no trail to follow: you intervene, then search the bodies.
2. The thief left a trail (13 sites). The largest group opens with Focus Mode at the shrine, then a track to follow. Where the trail ends varies, and the variation is the only thing that changes between these sites:
- A soldiers’ camp — Crossroads Inn, Maragir Wealds, Lupila Riverpass, Rockfalls Pasture
- An outlaw or bandit camp — Eastridge Outpost, Tantari Woods, Western Slopes
- The thief, already dead — Bear’s Maw, Ticha Riverpass
- The thief, killed by beasts — Boarback Trail and St. Tyna’s Grove (a bear), Oghasti Crossroad and Prince’s Crossing (wolves)
3. The heart was hidden, not stolen (3 sites). Burner’s Clearing, Pilgrim’s Bridge and Vedera Marsh have no thief to chase. Their objectives point you to a letter from Dawid Breslauer — the man who pulled the hearts out of the shrines ahead of Brencis’s purge.
The stash route: Hidden & Safe
The Breslauer thread is the one real shortcut in the system. Brencis ordered all old Christian shrines destroyed; Breslauer took the hearts out first and hid them rather than let them be destroyed. Following his letter means finding his house in the Neustadt district of Svartrau, searching the attic with Focus Mode, and then finding the stash — the objectives ask you to “collect the missing shrines’ hearts”, plural.
Why the shrines were destroyed
Three of Brencis’s written orders are readable in the world, and all three carry the same description: “Orders concerning roadside shrines and other symbols of old faiths and beliefs.”
- Brencis’s Orders – False Idols
- Brencis’s Orders – Old Shrines Must Be Destroyed
- Brencis’s Orders – Root Out Old Superstition
So the shrines are not scenery. They are the physical layer of an anti-old-faith campaign, which is why the restoration chain reads as quiet resistance rather than a collectible hunt.
Two other shrine-flavoured sites are worth knowing, and neither is part of the 20: Enshrined Obsession (an abandoned attic in Svartrau) and The Champion of Old, whose fresco and key point to an ancient champion’s shrine elsewhere in Vale Sangora holding Erkas’s Sword.
Fitting shrines into a run
The 20 sites are catalogued as map activities, not quests, and they sit across the valley’s regions — the world map is the place to route them and the world guide gives the region context. Because the timer guide’s list of what consumes days covers hourglass-marked quests, key conversations and learning skills, and does not include map activities, the chain is the kind of content you can clear without spending the clock. What you can run out of is tracked in the missable content guide.