Episode 2 · Session II
The House Remembers
The house fights back, a maid steps out of a mirror, and two children in a locked attic ask us for one thing.
An empty suit of armour throws a paladin over the banister, and we find out what we're like as a team. A maid steps out of a mirror, apologising for the dust, and doesn't know she's dead. A crib holds nothing but very old swaddling.
Then the iron key turns in the attic door, and two children who know exactly what they are tell us what their mother did. By the end we are carrying their bones, arguing about what the monster below might accept as a gift, and listening to a baby cry somewhere in the dark.
The recap
Session 2 in about 2 minutes. The full record is in the field notes.
The small chest from the study held spell scrolls, the deed to the house, and a will leaving everything to Rosavalda and Thornboldt. It was seven o'clock, five hours to midnight. Among the plain beds of the servants' quarters we compared the things that had dragged us here: a pendant to unlock great secrets, a tooth to mend what cannot be healed, a feather meant for good, and a stone worth nothing but love. Sirius couldn't quite remember how he came to follow his.
We hammered the decorative armour into two suits of scale mail, and the house answered at once. On the next landing an empty suit of armour threw Sirius over the banister. It was our first real fight as a company, and we won it well. Drew's grease put the thing on its back, Osric hit it with a natural 20, and Lily reached past him with a cobbler's awl, rolled another natural 20 and found the seam. The helmet was empty. Then Sirius walked into the grease. "That's grease, buddy," said Drew.
Upstairs, Lancelot barked at a mirror until a maid stepped out of it, apologising for the dust. "We have guests? I wasn't told about guests." She spoke of the baby of the house with helpless tenderness: "He's not wanted, but he is loved." When Drew passed a broom handle through her to show her she was dead, she fled through the wall and gave away a hidden door. In the nursery Sirius touched the bundle under a black shroud and it collapsed into centuries-old swaddling, with no bones.
The hidden door led to the attic, where the iron key from the study opened a locked room with two small beds and small bones in them. Thorn appeared first, and Sirius walked straight out again. Drew crouched to their height. Rose knew exactly what they were. "We were locked in here. It got very hungry. And then we were no longer hungry." When Osric asked about the baby, she said he was their half-brother, and that Mama had talked of using him, "something about innocence and sacrifice", before carrying him down to the basement. "Bury our bones... Set us free." Drew promised. Their dollhouse, it turned out, marked every secret passage in the house.
The maid met us again beside her own skeleton. "You're right. I'm dead." The mistress had run it all. "Honestly, it's a cult." She asked to be buried too, out of yelling distance of the children, and when Fëanor promised her an afterlife of afternoon tea with no servitude in it, she asked if that was what the Morninglord preached. He said yes.
On the way down we argued about the verse's gift. Drew would rather sacrifice a baby than the dog. Sirius was clear: "I am unable by my vow to parley with a demon, except through steel and righteous fury." We took the secret stair into the dark, Sirius glowing gold with spectral raven wings at his back, and in the cult's quarters Fëanor read their notebook, a list of experiments each marked unsuccessful, and threw it down the well.
We stopped there, an hour and a quarter before midnight, with a baby crying somewhere to the west.