Where: Nowhere, anymore. The mists rolled shut behind us and the house was simply gone.
Explored: Sessions 1–3, top to bottom — attic to altar.
Status: Its evil is defeated (a greater evil, we were warned, stays in Barovia). The Dursts’ victims are at rest.
What it was
A four-storey townhouse standing impossibly alone in the mist, at the top of a staircase that had no business existing. It opened its own front door, slammed it behind us, and bled a verse onto the wall: a beast below, a midnight deadline, a demand for a “gift.”
The house lied — rotten feasts dressed as finery, prop books on fiend-summoning, a nursemaid’s suite over an empty crib — and the house armed us: the windmill shield and longsword Sirius still carries, crossbows and silvered bolts, spell scrolls in a dead man’s chest. It’s hard to ignore that it wanted us strong enough to reach the bottom.
What we found there
- Rose and Thorn, the children in the attic, and the ghost maid — all three carried out and buried, as promised.
- Lancelot, under the harpsichord.
- The cult below: “He is ancient. He is the land” — thirteen alcoves of relics (among them a great white feather and a lump of amber resin, the very sorts of things two of us carry — see Quests & Threads), an altar over black water, and thirteen faceless apparitions chanting “One must die.”
- We would not pay. Osric put his sword through the altar instead, and then through the crystal heart of the corpse-thing midnight sent up. The weight lifted; the mists parted; the house let us go — or died trying to keep us, we’ve never been sure which.
- A painted statue of a gaunt, pale man in a hidden room — the first time we saw that face, though it was months of walking before we knew it.
- The letter signed “In darkness I endure” — see Handouts.
The full record: S1 notes · S2 notes · S3 notes — or listen to Episodes 1–3.