Repairing the white phial quest broken?

There is a quest in Windhelm where you have to find a white phial for the alchemist.

This quest is not a problem, after many days, you get a letter from him again to meet him at his shop.

Its this next part that is the problem.

He tells you he wishes to repair the phial, and needs you to collect some ingredients, Getting the Unmelting snow and powdered mammoth tusk was fairly easy, but there is a horrible glitch which has stopped me in my tracks for the third and final ingredient.

Its a Forsworn briar heart, needed to be taken off a certain person, so getting any briar heart will not suffice.

Now the person i need to get it from has been killed already earlier doing the red eagle quests, and if that weren't bad enough, he has no briar heart on his person, yet its still telling me that i must pick one off this person.

This is on the Xbox, so console commands cannot be used, Has anyone come across this also? and if so, have you got around it? does anyone have any info to help.

I have looked on the internet for solutions but there is not much to help.

EDIT: Quest works now.

This glitch seems to have been solved, a recent update must have found a way round this, the briar hearts could be eaten and then once all gone, they were not quest related, finally. and the quest could be completed too, as before he wouldnt accept your ingrediants, however now he does. thanks

3 Answers

The briar hearts in this quest are apparently prone to glitches. I found this thread where people are discussing the various ways in which they were able to break this quest. In some cases, when they got notification that they needed to get that specific briar heart, all the briar hearts they already had became quest items.

I think the best you can do is load an earlier save, or hang on to this quest until Bethesda patches it to work properly. Even so, you might not be able to finish it unless they create some way to reset your progress in it or otherwise fix the quest if it is already in progress.

If you can locate the specific corpse they want you to find, try placing a briar heart in the body, closing it, reopening it, and taking the heart. You can source the spare briar heart from another Foresworn, an item placed in the world, or the randomly-generated ingredients at an alchemist.

A possible workaround from UESP Wiki, "Repairing the Phial - Bugs" article:

If you have initiated the quest to find Red Eagle's sword, the same Forsworn Briarheart might be the target of both quests. It will carry both Red Eagle's sword and a briar heart. However, even if you pick up both, it will only complete the Red Eagle quest. You will need to find a different Forsworn camp to complete the briar heart part of this quest.