3.8.0: Burn keyword, new Excavations battle, library gets new art

Burn lands as the second effect keyword. Cast a Burn spell and every enemy in the area picks up an active fire effect that ticks damage at the end of each turn for its duration; re-casting refreshes duration instead of stacking, so spamming Burn keeps the heat on without piling up extra ticks. Burning enemies wear a 🔥 BURN badge at the top-right of their field square while the effect is active, so the state is legible at a glance. Nell's first Burn sigil drops as the completion reward for the Name the Dead side quest, slotted into Ch1's economy at the new T1 effect-sigil price (100c own-school).

A new walking battle, To Excavations, slots in between Old Road and Broken Bridge. Two fights — Iron Strider + Iron Wraith + Fire Ghoul, then Iron Ghoul + Fire Djinn — with Maya, Nell, and Tara as the required party. The cutscene that used to live at that slot got renamed to Old Waystone. Start and end dialogues carry a Tara/Grey beat where Tara teases Grey about sitting the fight out. Three sigil unlocks shuffled along the chapter (Tara Edge, Tara Slash, Grey Gust) so the gating still lines up.

Library aspect screen got new mid-ground art (the 2400×1080 source rebuilt into a cleaner webp roughly half the old file size). The seven per-hero aspect triggers collapsed into a single central trigger — tap once to open the panel, with focus defaulting to whichever hero you have selected. Grey's join popup at the library is no longer suppressed; it shows the celebratory card and the base tutorial waits to start until you dismiss it. The aspect popup now matches the story-map zoom so the read across the two views is consistent, and closed sigil nodes are tappable so you can see what they lock behind.

Combat readability picks up too. Fight playout zoom went from 1.25× to 2×, so the playback frames characters and effects tighter. Spell selection in fight planning is gated by the energy you actually have — spells you can't afford no longer look pickable. Heal targeting now skips dead heroes automatically (and the server rejects an invalid target if a client sends one anyway). The spell-card gem socket renders its gradient from the spell's school color now, so Heal cards read Earth-yellow and Burn cards read Fire-red. The Wraith picks up its proper art on the field, and Golem and Wraith spell sets swapped to match their actual range tags.

Two more ergonomic wins: a connection-error screen with auto-retry on bootstrap means a flaky backend recovers without forcing a relaunch (which turned out to be very well timed, see the May 20 note), and the CRAFT button is now anchored inside the spell-crafting popup so it doesn't drift off-screen on shorter viewports. Version bumped 3.7.0 → 3.8.0 → 3.8.1 across two staging promotions, with a version-sync precommit check added so api/e2e/app can't drift apart again.