A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
The grandfather clock had tolled, the verse on the wall had made its terms plain, and you had five hours until midnight.
You finished sweeping the floor you stood on. The last unopened door hid only servants’ quarters — straw beds, empty footlockers, a closet of maid outfits — but it was there, among the plain beds, that you finally compared the keepsakes that dragged you all here. A pendant said to unlock the world’s secrets. A tooth said to mend what cannot be healed. A feather meant for good. A stone worth nothing but love. And Sirius, when asked how he came to be here at all, could not remember.
You spent an hour at the forge of necessity, hammering four suits of decorative armour into two of scale mail — and then the house reminded you what it was. As Sirius stepped onto the next landing, a suit of empty armour tore itself from the wall and hurled him over the banister.
What followed was your first real fight as a company, and you won it well. Drew’s grease sent the thing crashing down; Lily hauled Sirius off the floor; Fëanor’s bolts of force dented its shell; Sirius leapt the stairwell gap in a single bound; Osric wrestled it flat and struck it a blow like a falling tree. And it was Lily — three foot one of her, reaching past the knight with a cobbler’s awl — who found the seam and ended it. The helmet rolled open. There was nothing inside. There never had been.
The floor above told a quiet, wrong story. A master bedroom emptied not by thieves but by time, its grand jewellery box holding only a few rings and a topaz pendant — the leavings of a fortune. And a full-length mirror that Lancelot would not stop barking at, where Lily saw a second face on the far side of the glass turn to look at her.
Out of the mirror stepped a maid, apologising for the dust, asking you not to disturb the young master’s rest. She did not know she was dead. She spoke of the unwanted baby with helpless tenderness — not wanted, but loved — and named a year in a calendar none of you have ever heard of. When Drew gently proved the truth to her with a broom handle, she fled shrieking through the wall — and in her panic, betrayed the location of a hidden door.
In the nursery, beneath a black shroud, a baby-sized bundle lay still and silent in the crib. Sirius gathered his courage and drew back the cloth. Empty swaddling. Centuries old. No bones.
The hidden stairs led up, into the attic — and the iron key from the study turned smoothly in a locked attic door. Beyond it: a children’s room. Toys. A dollhouse. Two small beds. Small bones.
They came when you disturbed them — Rose and Thorn Durst, the smiling children from the portrait, dead behind a door locked from the outside. Rose told you the truth her parents’ will would not: “We were locked in here. It got very hungry. And then we were no longer hungry.” She told you the monster below is her family’s own making — her mother and the “bad sorts” she brought into the house. She told you the baby was their half-brother, and that her mother spoke of using him — something about innocence, and sacrifice — before carrying him down to the basement.
She asked one thing: “Bury our bones. Set us free.” They ride on Drew’s belt now, wrapped with a toy soldier and a doll — alongside the bones of the maid, who found you again in the attic, lucid at last. “You’re right. I’m dead,” she said, and told you what she’d never dared say living: the mistress ran it. The master barely resisted. Honestly — it’s a cult.
And the children left you a gift of their own. Their dollhouse is a perfect replica of the house, every secret door and hidden passage neatly labelled — including the spiral stair that runs unseen through the building’s heart, down past the boarded-up door, down past every floor, down into the dark.
So down you went — armoured now, torches lit, Sirius wrapped in golden light with spectral raven wings at his back. The stair ended in a cold earthen tunnel. You found the cult’s quarters: moldy straw beds, a well, small chests of coin and trinkets — and a grimy notebook listing names, experiments, and a single repeated verdict: unsuccessful. Fëanor read it, judged it, and threw it down the well.
And the whole time, echoing from the unexplored passage to the west, one sound that has no business being there:
A baby. Crying.
The clock stands at one hour and fifteen minutes to midnight. The verse asked for a gift. Sirius’s vows demand a sword. And something below is waiting for you to choose.