St. Andral's Orphanage

Where

Vallaki, next door to St. Andral's Church, which pays for it with its alms. Kept by Headmistress Claudia, with Milivoj on the grounds.

Status

Free of its demon since Session 8. Felix is back in the attic, just a boy again. Milivoj is confined here on his word. The children are meant to be scratching the runes off their beds.

First visited

Session 8, the morning after Roger's tale, looking for whoever stole the bones.

What we walked into

The eldest girl met us on the step: "Hello. Have you come to help me, boys?" The groundskeeper had been getting ill for a month and worse for three days, and that morning nobody could wake him. The headmistress had gone for a doctor. We said we weren't the doctor. She told the headmistress the doctor had arrived.

Inside was a den of chaos and noise: an old couch, mismatched chairs, chests of worn toys, two small dining tables, three girls at a dollhouse, a boy walking up and down with a toddler on each hip, about twenty children in all, from babies to sixteen. Somebody here has lately discovered the word "cool", and everybody is using it.

What we found instead of a thief

• Milivoj, a huge young man raised in this orphanage, flat out in bed under what felt like a curse. Healing magic slid off him. Fëanor's spell found necromancy on him. The children love him: "He's kind. He talks to us."
• Headmistress Claudia, stern, doing everything with no money ("We do not have the funds") and, understandably, not delighted to find armed strangers in her orphanage. "I swear we are cursed." She told us the rest.
• A dead child. A month ago a new boy, Felix, found beside his stabbed parents in a house in Vallaki, covered in blood and unharmed, came to live here. The children started turning up with bruises. Then he pushed another boy, Cedric, out of a window, and Cedric died. Claudia locked Felix in the attic.
• Three runaways. Lazlo, Hans and Franz ran away just over a week before we came, frightened of Felix, Claudia thinks. Milivoj, sick as he was, "came into some money" and paid two hunters to go and find them. They are still out there.
• A locket. Among Felix's things in Claudia's drawer was a rusted oval locket with an X scratched into the lid, held together by protective magic, with an inscription inside that none of us can read. Drew opened it to see what would happen. Nothing did, at the time.
• Runes on every bed upstairs. A faint necromantic mark scratched into a bedpost on each one, in Infernal. It says "Mine." Scratch one out and its magic fades.
• And in the padlocked attic, where the light from the window dimmed all by itself, a boy whittling with a very large kitchen knife, who introduced himself as Mostly Felix.

The demon

It was happy to talk. It wanted Milivoj's bigger body, and said we had interrupted, but too late. When Drew slipped out to warn Claudia it said "Do I have to do this early?" and came out of Felix as boiling black smoke with claws and too many teeth. It got inside Drew and ran her at Milivoj; she got one look at Sirius as it went, and said "I'm sorry." It put a hand into Osric's chest and took a quarter of his life. Blades barely touched it, silver included. Radiant light ate through it. When it tried to take Sirius, it asked "What the fuck are you?" "I am an angel, sent from the celestial realms to end you unless you repent." "Never." Sirius opened the locket, and when the light had torn the demon to smoke it was drawn in, and he closed the lid.

What Sirius understood, holding it: the locket is what keeps the demon in this world, and it is also its prison. It cannot get out unless someone opens it. Destroy the locket and the demon goes free somewhere else. Nobody opens the lid.

The confession

Milivoj woke up in the middle of all this and denied ever touching any bones. A few minutes later, still in the corridor, with one of us reading him like a book and Sirius explaining the Morninglord's views on theft from churches, he stopped lying. He had taken the bones to pay the hunters their three hundred gold. A cloaked stranger with a short black beard and very nice shoes had overheard him at the Blue Water and offered the money for "one small thing": take the bones from the church, leave them in the Vallakovich crypt, and come back the next day for the gold. He will not apologise. "I had to do it to save those kids."

Sirius wanted to take his hands. The rest of us talked him into deferring the sentence until the bones were back. Milivoj told Claudia himself, "Claudia, I stole the bones from the church," promised her he would not leave ("Yes, ma'am"), and stayed. Father Lucian, told, said: "He never did listen at the sermons."

Claudia also told us who might deal with the locket for good: the abbot above Krezk. See Carry the Locket to the Abbot.

Where things stand

• The bones are home, so the sentence we deferred on Milivoj is due. Nobody has raised it since. He was in the crowd at the festival.
• Felix is in the attic, a boy again, and Claudia says he's all right. We promised the children we would come back for him. See Come Back for Felix.
• The runaways and the two hunters have not come back. See Find the Missing Orphans.
• We still carry the locket.

Open questions

• Who was Felix before, and who killed his parents?
• Who made the locket, and what does the inscription say?
• Will Claudia take Felix back?
• Where are Lazlo, Hans and Franz?