The Blood of Dawnwalker: Search for the Forbidden Books in the Catacombs

The catacombs under St. Tyna’s are the last stretch of Anca’s side quest, Echoes of Silenced Bells, and the point where the quest stops being a stealth puzzle and turns into a straight fight. The passage is narrow and mostly linear, but the objective does not tick off when you pick up the books. It ends when Leonica does.

Quick answer: Push the movable bookcase in the library’s western room, follow the open passage northwest through the undead nuns, loot the Banned Book from the shelf behind the metal grate, then open the large double doors and defeat Leonica, She Who Speaks with the Devil. The quest log then updates to “Talk to Anca.”

Before you go down: what unlocks the catacombs

You only reach the catacombs after clearing the courtyard for Anca and walking her to the library. Once inside, she leads you to a shelf, talks, then moves on and stops in the western room. That second bookshelf is the one you can move, and Focus Mode marks it if you can’t spot the interaction prompt.

The forbidden books are no longer on the library shelves. Someone carried them down into the catacombs, which is why the objective changes the moment the passage opens. Budget one time segment for this leg of the quest, plus a second segment when you push open the boss doors.

Note: go in near full health with your vampire form available. The corridors are short, but the fight at the end has no checkpoint before it.

Catacombs route to the Banned Book

Examine the bookcase Anca is standing in front of and push it aside. The hidden stairwell behind it drops straight into the catacombs.

Take the stairs down to the first fork. There is a locked door here that you cannot open yet, so skip it and take the open passage heading northwest.

Kill the first Undead Nun in the main room and loot her body. Unlike the sisters in the courtyard, the nuns down here stay dead once they fall, so there is no reason to run past them.

Loot prompt appearing over a fallen undead nun in the catacombs — The loot prompt over the first nun you cut down in the catacombs. Image: Rebel Wolves

Push through the metal grate and clear the two nuns waiting in the corridor. Rats scurry around this stretch, and you can feed on them in vampire form if the fights cost you health.

Player moving through a dark catacomb corridor toward a barred gate with the Haste prompt on screen — Haste carries you through the barred gates between corridor fights. Image: Rebel Wolves

Open the next grate to find the bookshelf holding the forbidden texts. Take the Banned Book along with everything else on the shelf before moving on.

Look for the side room with a candle-lit table covered in bloody notes and witchcraft symbols. It glows gold in Focus Mode, and inspecting it sets up the conversation that follows the boss.

Fight your way through the red-lit corridor, where several nuns come at you at once. Back into a doorway rather than letting them surround you in the open.

Interact with the large wooden double doors at the end. That burns a time segment and triggers the cutscene where you find Leonica mid-ritual, knife in hand.

Leonica, She Who Speaks with the Devil: attack patterns

Leonica mixes fast knife swings with ranged sorcery, and she teleports out of melee range constantly. Close the gap and stay on her. Fighting her from a distance just feeds her the spacing her spells want.

Boss fight against Leonica, She Who Speaks with the Devil, inside the candle-lit ritual chamber — The Leonica fight begins in the ritual chamber behind the double doors. Image: Rebel Wolves

Attack	Response
Knife strikes in melee	Block or parry; riposte for heavy damage
Close-range unblockable blast (skull icon)	Dodge backward as she spreads her arms — blocking and parrying do nothing
Blood crows / swarm at range	Dodge to the side, then close the distance
Homing orb	Dodge late; an early dodge lets it track you
Projectile volley	Strafe sideways, or move behind her for a free opening
Teleport at each health notch	She vanishes and spawns ghost nuns — clear them first

Her health bar is split into roughly four segments. Every time you break one, she disappears and summons a group of nuns. Rush the nearest one immediately so you can kill it before the rest close in, and use activation-point abilities freely here rather than saving them.

Player striking a summoned robed nun during the Leonica fight for 558 damage — Summoned nuns appear at each health threshold and must be cleared before Leonica returns. Image: Rebel Wolves

One detail worth remembering under pressure: you cannot feed on the summoned nuns, but you can feed on Leonica. If your health is low, hold the openings after her melee combo and take the bite instead of another sword swing.

Leonica highlighted in red as the player lands a melee attack during the boss fight — Staying in melee range denies Leonica the spacing her ranged spells need. Image: Rebel Wolves

Catacombs loot worth taking

Hold the highlight button as you move so containers and shelves stand out in the dark. The run is short, but a few pickups matter beyond the quest itself.

Item	Where
Banned Book	Bookshelf behind the metal grate — the quest item
The Timeless Beauty	Same bookshelf, alongside the other texts
Silent Type: Protector of the Mask	Picked up along the catacomb route
Glob of Likho’s Light, Dust of Amethyst	Crafting materials found in the corridors
Catacombs Key	Leonica’s corpse after the fight

The Catacombs Key is the reason to walk back. It opens the locked door at that first fork you passed on the way in, so sweep the boss room and then double back before you leave with Anca.

How to confirm the objective completed

Killing Leonica plays a dialogue cutscene, and the quest log switches from “Search for the forbidden books in the catacombs” to Talk to Anca. That log change is the confirmation. Grabbing the Banned Book alone does not close the objective.

If the objective is not advancing, the cause is almost always one of three things.

The bookcase in the library was never pushed aside, so the catacomb entrance is still sealed.
You are looping back toward the entrance instead of pressing northwest — the layout is easy to retrace by accident.
You have the books but haven’t opened the large double doors, so the Leonica fight never triggers.

What happens right after the fight

Anca reads Leonica’s notes and works out that her old friend was trying to lift the curse on the sisters, and that you interrupted the final step. She asks for the notes so she can finish the hex, which is a straight choice — hand them over and the nuns’ spirits are freed, or burn them and the sisters stay cursed. Giving her the notes costs another time segment, and reading the books together adds two more before the quest closes out with 150 XP and leads into Between the Words.

If you never settled with Brencis’s soldiers earlier in the convent, they turn up near the exit to ask about the relic, so keep a little health in reserve on the way out.