Where: The west of Vallaki, near the orphanage.
Status: Standing, beautiful, and — as of six days before our arrival — hollow. Keep reading. Then keep the secret.
First entered: Session 7, the evening we arrived, with Ireena.
The place
The finest building we have seen in this land: old stone, stained glass, a walled graveyard of family mausoleums. Its priest is Father Lucian — gentle, kind, and trusting to a degree we felt obliged to warn him about. His altar boy Yeska is eight, worships visiting adventurers on principle, and has now been taught push-ups by a paladin.
The stories say the devil has not set foot in Vallaki in two hundred years. This church — what lay under it — is widely assumed to be why.
The secret (we are among perhaps five living people who know)
Beneath the altar is a hidden crypt, and in it were kept the bones of St. Andral — the relic that sanctified this ground and kept evil from crossing its threshold. They were stolen six days before we arrived. We searched the crypt with Lucian: nothing but dust. Until they are found, the church is just a building — and the town, which shelters under two centuries of story, has no idea.
The trail so far: only Lucian and Yeska knew of the crypt. Yeska told Milivoj — groundskeeper of church and orphanage, keeper of keys — after Milivoj came asking about church secrets out of the blue, about ten days ago. Four days later the bones were gone. Milivoj is next on our list.
Ireena has not been told. She sat in these pews and called this place safety. We delivered her to a sanctuary that currently sanctifies nothing, and the arithmetic of when and how to tell her is its own quiet horror.
Open questions
- Who sent Milivoj asking — and who has the bones now?
- What, exactly, has been waiting two hundred years for this building to become just a building?
- How long do we have?
The full record: S7 field notes. The quest lives on Quests & Threads.