Field notes

Our second night in the house: the first real fight, a maid who didn't know she was dead, two children who did, and the first steps into the basement. All times are by the house clock, which was running against us.

The clock

We picked up at seven in the evening with five hours to midnight. The DM rounded it up and called the spare minutes a bonus. Forging armour cost an hour, the healer's kit ten minutes, and chain mail and torches half an hour. Everything else was exploring. When we stopped, in the basement, there was an hour and a quarter left.

The DM also opened by inviting Osric to share anything he'd noticed about the letter from the study. He kept it to himself.

The last door on the second floor

• Plain servants' quarters: two straw beds with itchy wool blankets, two empty footlockers, two chairs. Lily knew it for what it was at once: "I've never been in service, but I definitely know people who have." The closet held nothing but maids' uniforms. The pockets are there.
• Drew got us comparing the keepsakes that pulled us here. Hers is "supposed to unlock huge secrets of the world". Fëanor's stone has "only sentimental value". Sirius's feather is "for good, and bring good to the world". Lily's tooth is "supposed to cure that which cannot otherwise be mended", though Granny Effie said a lot of things. "But she did do a lot of reading."
• Sirius couldn't remember how he came to follow his feather ("I was just interested, I think. Can't quite recall"), and forgot he had it until he was reminded. Drew blames the vinegar wine and is keeping notes on his memory.
• Then an all-hands hour turning the four suits of decorative armour into two sets of scale mail. Sirius and Osric put them on.

The fight on the landing

As Sirius stepped onto the third-floor landing, a suit of armour came off the wall at him and threw him over the banister. He dropped a floor and landed on his back, six points poorer.

• Drew greased the landing and the armour went down. She stayed on the stairs. "Oh, sword boys."
• Lily ran down and helped Sirius up. "I think that one got me in the kidneys, though."
• Fëanor sent three bolts of force at it, "gluten-free and hypoallergenic", and one of them put the first dent in it.
• Sirius leapt the stairwell back up to the landing, missed, and laid hands on himself.
• Osric shoved it flat with his bare hands, then used his Action Surge and rolled a 1 and a natural 20 together. Twenty-one damage. Asked later where he learned to hit like that: "I've been a knight for a couple of weeks now." He's had "a couple of rounds of training and hitting in sandbags", beaten some ruffians unconscious, never killed anyone, and saved the local lord's daughter. "Just the good and honest thing to do." Sirius: "I like this man."
• Lily finished it. She slipped in behind Osric, three foot one of her reaching past him with her awl, and rolled another natural 20: eighteen damage with sneak attack. The magic went out of the armour and it clattered to pieces. The helmet was empty. Sirius: "You're hiding your light under a bushel there, little lady."
• Afterwards Sirius walked into the grease and fell over again. Drew's head appeared over him: "That's grease, buddy."
• The wreck could give up a set of chain mail with half an hour's work. Lily worried later whether she had killed it. Drew: "You didn't kill anything. You just stopped an inanimate object trying to kill us, and you did it really well."

The third floor

• Master bedroom. Dust, burgundy drapes, a four-poster bed, a tattered tiger-skin rug, and a second portrait of Gustav and Elisabeth. The room hadn't been ransacked. It had been emptied, neatly, by time. Fëanor noticed that too: things are missing, but it's all still ordered. A filigree jewellery box, made for far more, held three plain gold rings and a platinum necklace with a topaz pendant. There was a crumpled sheet of paper on the dresser as well, which Osric picked up; it was readable, but nobody read it out.
• Lily warned us, with suspicious precision, that people who try to sell things from noble estates come to a bad end. Sirius said we were visitors of the house and left the jewellery alone. Drew promised Lily "a little chat" about how she knows such things, if we got out alive. That chat has not happened.
• Bathroom. A claw-footed tub (empty), a little iron stove and kettle, and running water from a tap in the wall.
• Storage cupboard. Drew knocked a broom into a club and turned the linen into a healer's kit with five uses, and kept both. "It's what I do. I make stuff."

The maid in the mirror

In a bedroom with a full-length mirror, Lancelot wouldn't stop barking at the glass. Fëanor thought his reflection looked like him, "but it doesn't look like me". Lily saw a second face on the other side of the mirror snap round to look at her, and a maid stepped out.

She was polite and flustered, apologised for the mess, and had no idea she was dead. She asked us not to disturb "the young master's rest" in the suite nearby, and told us about the baby from the portrait: "He's not wanted, but he is loved… The mistress, she may not appreciate him, and she may have said some bad things, but… you could not love a child more." Asked the year, she said it was "400 BC". None of us has ever heard of a calendar like that.

Sirius asked if she knew she was a ghost. She took it for a joke. Drew gently swept the broom handle through her, and she fled through the wall, grabbing at a door as she went and giving away a hidden one. Afterwards Sirius admitted the whole thing had shaken him: "She did seem perfectly reasonable and lovely, didn't she? I'm finding my faith somewhat impacted by that." Fëanor: "What if we're the ghosts?"

The nursery

A crib under a hanging black shroud, and in it a small bundle, still and silent. Sirius steeled himself ("The vows, the vows, the vows") and touched it. It collapsed. Whatever had been in there was gone, as if something baby-sized had scuttled away. What was left was swaddling that smelled hundreds of years old, and no bones. The balcony looked out over the garden to the wall of mist.

Behind the hidden door the maid had given away were stairs going up, and the back of the boarded-up door on the landing.

The attic

Rose and Thorn

The iron key from the study opened a locked room at the top of the house: two small beds, toys, a dollhouse and a little chest. Sirius flipped a bedcover ("Please don't attack me in the face. It's my best asset") and found small bones.

Then the children were there. Thorn first: "Don't touch my toys." Sirius walked straight out of the room. Drew crouched to their height, and Rose put herself between Drew and her brother. They are Rosavalda and Thornboldt Durst, Rose and Thorn, and Rose knows exactly what they are.

"Look. We're not silly. I know what we are. We were locked in here. It got very hungry. And then we were no longer hungry."

What Rose told us:

• The monster in the basement is "our family. They did some bad things."
• Mama brought "bad sorts" into the house, who "did some magics" and brought in bad things.
• The baby is their half-brother. Mama was very unhappy about him. Before she locked them in, she talked about "using him", and they screamed and said no. They think she took him into the basement. "She said something about innocence and sacrifice." (It was Osric's question that brought this out.)
• Her request: "Lady adventurer, I would ask you, bury our bones. We need to be released. Just take our bones with you when you leave and bury them. Set us free."

Drew wrapped Thorn's bones with a toy soldier and Rose's with a doll, in separate bundles, while Thorn watched like a hawk. Rose, about her brother: "If you hurt him, I will haunt you till your dying days." Drew thought that was fair. Then she promised: "As long as we don't all die here horribly, I promise that I will bury you somewhere nice." And they were gone.

Rose also told us the dollhouse was built to be accurate, and that it might help. It does. It shows every secret door and passage, and the empty space we'd found on each floor is a hidden spiral staircase running from the attic to the basement. Drew and Fëanor copied it out as a map.

The maid again

In the attic servant's room lay a skeleton in a maid's uniform, and the maid came back, clear-eyed this time. Sirius told her that her eyes looked lovely this evening. "Thank you. You're right. I'm dead." She was still a bit put out with "the one who poked me repeatedly with a broom". Drew: "I didn't poke. I swiped through. Respectfully."

What she told us: the mistress took the baby down to the basement, where the maid was never allowed. "Honestly, it's a cult. I'm pretty sure, literally, it's a cult." The master was very reluctant. It was mostly the mistress.

Drew levelled with her about everything, and she asked us to take her bones too. She'd like to see the children again, but Lily objected to her spending eternity minding them, so Drew will bury her "a little bit away from the kids". The maid: "Out of yelling distance."

She admitted she hadn't gone to church as often as she should, and asked what happens now. Fëanor told her: a nice place, everyone you loved, a lot of afternoon tea, and no servitude. "And this is what the Morning Lord preaches?" That was the first time we heard the name. Fëanor said yes. She said she just wanted to stop being in this horrible house, and vanished. Three bundles of bones now ride on Drew's belt.

• A guest bedroom stood made up and ready but barely used.
• Fëanor, afterwards, on the book that changed his mind about religion and aristocracy: "I think there's something better out there for all of us… Fairness." Sirius remembered the day at the temple when Fëanor stormed out over Brother Fawcett's croissants. "They're bourgeois." Sirius wondered whether the bourgeois are a kind of devil. Fëanor thinks so.

Getting ready to go down

• Osric took the chain mail from the animated armour and passed his scale mail to Fëanor. Drew took the leather armour. We made ten torches.
• The gift argument, on the stairs. Fëanor suggested the topaz necklace. Lily pointed out that last time the gift was a young innocent. Drew: "I'd rather sacrifice a baby than the dog." Sirius settled it for himself: "I am unable by my vow to parley with a demon, except through steel and righteous fury." And: "Where I will not make peace, I will make war."
• At the foot of the stair Sirius cast Protection from Evil and Good on himself: a golden shimmer, and spectral golden raven wings behind him.

The basement

The spiral stair ends in a narrow earthen tunnel, branching east and west. From the west, quite distinctly, a baby was crying. Sirius: "Do you want to run towards the obvious screaming baby trap, or should we search around here first? I've definitely read this novel." We went the other way first, and had to call both Sirius and Osric back from wandering off alone.

• Cult quarters. A table, four chairs and four alcoves of mouldy straw. "Mattress is putting it luxuriously."
• The well room. A four-foot well over a flooded cistern, with a bucket on a pulley, and five better alcoves with proper beds and a small chest each:
  • 11 gold and 60 silver. (Sirius refused to open the rest: "I'm not stealing people's filth.")
  • Three moss agates.
  • A black leather eyepatch with a carnelian sewn into it, and a grimy notebook.
  • An ivory hairbrush with silver bristles.
  • A silvered shortsword.
• The notebook listed names, descriptions and experiments, every one marked unsuccessful. A strongly built cleric: an attempt "to sever religious connection with ritual". Failure. Someone called Frederickson: "attempted to sever connection, ended up dead". A rogue: "cut off legs, didn't work." Fëanor threw it down the well. Sploosh.
• The shortsword. Fëanor gave the huge windmill longsword to Sirius at last ("I like the word short") and took the silvered blade, then offered it on to someone who'd make better use of silver, and one of us claimed it.

Where we stand

• In the basement well room with an hour and fifteen minutes to midnight. The baby is still crying to the west.
• Armour: Sirius and Fëanor in scale mail, Osric in chain, Drew in leather.
• New this session: Drew's club and healer's kit, ten torches, 11 gold and 60 silver, three moss agates, the carnelian eyepatch, the ivory hairbrush, the silvered shortsword and the dollhouse map. The rings and the necklace are wherever the most practical of us left them.
• Three bundles of bones to bury: Thorn, Rose, and the maid, at a polite distance.
• The gift is still unsettled. Sirius's vow says no. The dog is not on the table.

Questions on our minds

• What is crying in the western tunnel? It can't be a baby. Can it? Answered, Session 3: it fell silent once the woman in the wall was dead. On the altar below lay a bundle of very small bones.
• Where is the baby, and what did the mistress do with him? Answered, Session 3: see above.
• What happened to the master and mistress? Answered, Session 3: the master hanged himself in the basement. The mistress came out of the wall at us.
• What gift could soothe the beast, and will Sirius let us offer one at all? Answered, Session 3: no gift. We refused, and fought it.
• Will burying the bones really free Rose, Thorn and the maid? Answered, Session 3: yes. They came to thank us, and they were gone.
• What did Osric notice about the letter? Answered, Session 4: the crest on it is the sigil on his banner.
• What were the cult's experiments for? What were they trying to sever?
• Who emptied this house so neatly?
• What was on the crumpled paper from the master bedroom?
• How does Lily know so much about selling stolen jewellery?