1

Not quite done with the haunted mansion on Bleaklow Moor, before noon had rung from the Cathedral bell, the party set out to return to the Misgivings. The weather still blew cold and overcast, but it didn't rain, and no ghouls accosted them as they arrived at the ill-favored half-ruin. Crows circled in the air above, a dark reminder of what they'd found the last time they entered here.
Foxglove Manor sat like a particularly ugly, fat spider, lurking on the edge of the cliff above the waves far below. The wind seemed to blow colder, around it.
"Still ugly," Bardek said, "what's the plan?"
“As I recall, there were considerable spirits of unrest here,” Amrynn said. “We should see what we can do to cleanse the Misgivings with the abilities at our disposal.”
"There's a manticore in the foyer. There are fungus-spewing portraits in the gallery. Let's start with the foyer. Bardek... maybe you should wait outside the threshold. If it still plays favorites. If we can't figure out what the manticore is, and why it does what it does, then we can try to destroy it. But I think the crux of the house is that fungus in the caverns below. We just fight out way through the house and to it, and see what's left. Maybe putting the house to right will weaken the fungus-shadow to where we can harm it."
Kamala shook her head. "Pile a bunch of tinder around that manticore and hope it catches the whole place on fire." She grunted. "I hate this place worse than anywhere I've ever been, and I've fought on gnoll slave ships and in lightless caverns full of cannibal monsters."
The white haired woman shook her head. "Spirits aren't my area of expertise, but I'll try to keep monsters from eating you while you all do something." She grinned at Bardek and Amrynn and Devin. "I kind of miss the big man at times like this."

2

The door creaked open to the foyer, where the stuffed manticore dominated the room. Nothing moved but dust as they entered, though Bardek thought he caught the scent of burning hair.
Making their way back past it, they came to the gaping hole in the floor, where Iesha had torn the floorboards apart in her rage to reach Aldern. The hideous monkey-head decoration hung there, leathery tasseled tongue dangling. Beyond, colored light hit the dust in the air in beams where it pierced the tattered curtains that hung across the large windows of the dining room.
Unless they wished to jump the gap, their choices seemed to be either the door to their left, or the one to their right.
Shaking her head as they entered the cursed place again, Kamala scanned the room for signs of danger, either magical or mundane. Nothing jumped out at her, so to speak, apart from the ugly monkey-head bellpull, which showed signs of minor magics.
As the party decides the best way through, Amrynn takes a few moments to enhance her vision and study the monkey bell pull.
“Lovely,” Amrynn said with distaste, pointing at the monkey bell pull. “I’ve never seen a Hungry Decapitant before. Magical. The monkey will shriek when anyone yanks the pull. Please don’t.”
Kamala barked out a laugh and shook her head. "A magical, annoying doorbell? Why would anyone want that? Is it a joke?"
“More like an alarm,” Amrynn clarified.
Careful to not tug the pull, Devin stepped forward, eyed the monkey head from the sides and below, put hands on either side of the ugly thing, and attempted to work it free from the wall. “If it’s got a name, it’s probably got some market value. In the sack.” Devin pulled a large sack from one of the side pouches of his backpack and put the monkey head in it. With fortune, the sack would be full of potential valuables before they left this place.
“Ugh, there’s a market for Harpy musk too, dear heart,” Amrynn said as Devin worked with the monkey head. “But it’s not something I want to fuel, let alone encourage.” She stepped away from the salvage process with a sour twist of the mouth. “Maybe someone will pay us to destroy it.”
“Let’s try that door to the north side of the foyer, work our way clockwise around the ground floor.”
“One direction is as good as the other,” Amrynn said, waving a hand for Kamala to lead the way when she was ready.

3

On opening the door Amrynn had indicated, Kamala found that it led to a long, dark hallway, thick with dust and cobwebs. Following Devin's suggestion, she continued to the door directly across from the one she had emerged from, and forced that creaky portal as well.
It opened onto an oak-paneled chamber that must once have been breathaking, but it was a sad sight now - the floorboards were warped with moisture, and the paneling scratched and spotted with mold. As in the foyer, the hearth lay cold and dead. A grand piano, its surface splotchy and keys warped, leaned tiredly in the corner to her right, with another door beyond it.
Kamala looked around the room, her ice blue eyes gleaming in the darkness. "Piano room," she said as she walked inside. "I'm gonna look up the fireplace."
The room appeared unpleasantly abandoned, like a corpse in a ditch. Kamala didn't find anything of note in the hearth or chimney, just cobwebs. No bird had been foolish enough to build a nest in the pipes of the aptly-named Misgivings.
Devin took a moment to examing the curious stuffed monkey head he'd taken down. It was quite well-done, with glass eyes glaring and cheek-tufts brushed out to make a ruff. Even its leathery, dangling tongue with the tassel at the end was well-preserved. Quite an exotic curio. No doubt to the right collector, he could sell it for several hundred gold coins.
Putting it away, he made a round of the room on the creaky, warped floorboards, but nothing new sprang up to his attention. Moving to the piano, he opened the cracked and dust-cloaked lid. Within, it was thick with cobwebs, the harpchords hanging on tenuously in a pitted bed of mold. Opening the hood over the keys, nothing appeared to be hidden, but the ivory keys themselves were slightly jumbled, some of them poking up. The piano really was in horrendous condition for something protected by the walls and roof of a house, even as miskept a house as this.
Kamala looked over at the piano and grimaced. "It's like someone threw a bunch of mushrooms in there. Is that normal?" She looked at Amrynn and the others. "I don't know a thing about funguses, but that doesn't look right."
"No. Any strike on the harp would send it airborne." Devin carefully closed the cover over the misshapen keys and the lid over the fungus-fouled harp. "This just needs to burn once the house does. If a leprous mimic imitated a musical instrument, it'd look like this piano."
"There's nothing of value in here unless we start prying up warped floorboards to search. Next chamber?"
"Finally, someone's on board with burning this place down. Thank you." Kamala grinned at Devin. She nodded at the door just past the piano. "Next door's right there. I'm ready when you are." She glanced at Bardek and Amrynn to gauge their readiness.

4

The dark, windowless room beyond proved to be a simple washroom, with an ancient metal tub against the wall to Kamala's left. A ring of mildew crusted its inner surface, and a strange, furtive scratching came from within it.
After a few moments, something tiny in the tub began to shriek and scramble harder.
Bardek, who'd been feeling under the weather all day, suddenly felt a strong pang of hunger.
Kamala shook her head. "I don't like the sound of that." She looked at the other three. "Anybody else want to go first?"
"All you," Devin volunteered Kamala from the middle of the procession.
Kamala snorted but she didn't look upset. "Good time to use this thing, I think." She pulled out the wand of False Life and passed it over her chest.
Amynn incanted and brought her second sight to bear as the others focused on what was skittering in the bathtub. She suppressed a shiver at the notion and frowned at horror’s facility to tap into the more primal responses of those that wandered into its web. Rarely direct or front facing, the dark things always sought to clamber up your leg while you were toweling off.
Roving her eyes about the piano chamber she sought anything untoward magically and then brought her gaze back to the washroom ahead, attempting to see past the rainbow of colors that radiated from those ahead of her.
Either the flurry of auras ahead of her was too strong, or no magic graced either the parlor, or what she could see of the washroom from behind everyone else.
They all waited as Kamala girded herself with magic for a battle against... what turned out to be a naked, disfigured rat, bulbous with tumors, some having burst its eyes and replaced them. The horrific and pitiful little animal was trapped in the bathtub, but making a valiant effort to escape, trying to scramble up the side closest to them, squealing loudly.
"Ugh," Kamala grunted. "A diseased rat. I'm just going to kill it. Poor thing's probably in pain." She looked to see if anyone had an objection then moved closer to stab at it with a knife-hand blow.
The rat smushed to a crunchy paste under her hand.
Leaving the smear of red in the tub, they pressed on. The next dusty room featured a long couch caked with white sheets of wispy fungus. Eddies of dust skittered along the warped floorboards as if caught up by a slight breeze, yet no wind was noticeable in the air. It seemed as though Devin's dancing lights were the first to brighten the curtained room in ages.
"No wind, so what's moving about the room?" Devin had to ask. The dagger in his hand, fine as it was, would probably not be able to touch something incorporeal. He put it away and drew his well-traveled shortsword instead. Anticipating what might be ahead, Devin closed his eyes, calmed his thoughts until even a slight summoned churn of manifested shadow about him stilled, and then reached out to sharpen his senses for what might be present but unseen.
Kamala shook her head. "Something that wants to eat me, no doubt. But if we came back here to clear the place out, let's clear it all out." She advanced into the room, watching for the inevitable attack. "Come on, beastie. Come and get the defenseless little girl," she sing-songed as she moved.
Kamala pushed into the room, with Devin and the others trailing, but no attack came. There was only the sigh of the wind outside, and the musty smell of dust and forlorn hopes gone sour in the dark-souled building.
The last to reach the door to the room, Amrynn paused as her eye caught the whorls of disturbed dust. It looked almost as if someone was pacing violently back and forth, before the fireplace.
Amrynn had been carefully cataloguing the array of horrendous odors they were encountering, and squashed boil rat was now the reigning champion. It was the residual wrinkling of her nose from that stench which had narrowed her eyes enough to detect the unusual movement near this new chamber’s fireplace.
“Eeeasy now,” Amrynn said quietly. “There’s something angry, or anxious, pacing the length of the hearth. Look at the dust.”
She tracked the near-invisible movements with the smooth swivel of her head so others could focus in on the general whereabouts of the disturbance.
Kamala stopped and turned to the fireplace. "Some kind of ghost?"
"Nothing here is friendly, so let's see if there's actually something there, and deal with it." Devin stepped up adjacent to the path being worn through the dust -- which seemed to always return, or never truly be disturbed -- and held his shortsword flat out cross the path of the 'pacing', waiting for the disturbance on the floor to roughly intersect with his blade, perpendicular across its path at 'mid-chest' level. If there was something there, but invisible, Devin expected his blade would be pushed aside. If there wasn't really something there, the disturbance of the dust might be the extent of the manifestation. As Devin watched, he attempted to ascertain if the disturbance in the dust suggested something bipedal or quadrupedal; if quadrupedal, he'd need to put his blade lower to meet an animal pacing back and forth.
Devin's blade met none of the expected resistance of a being, though the dust continued to be disturbed. But as the closest, only he wasn't startled by the whisper in his ear. "Lorey," a woman's voice touched his ear, and those of Amrynn and Bardek as well - though Kamala had chosen that moment to adjust some of her clinking weapons, which had caught on the moldy drapes, and didn't appear to hear it.
A sense of unease crept over them all, but Devin was the first to act.
Lorey? Devin's mind raced. Lorey... one of the daughters. Lorey Foxglove. The voice... a woman. Lorey? Kasandra? Cyralie? Sendeli? Zeeva? Not Sendeli, not Zeeva; too young for the voice. Not Cyralie -- Cyralie's curse manifested in the stuffed manticore. He'd heard either Lorey or Kasandra, then. Would Lorey's haunt speak her own name? Probably not. The sense of unease settled it.
"It's Kasandra! Elder; Lorey, younger; disease." From the portraits. Not wanting a repeat of the experience of being washed over by nasty phantasmal fungus, Devin could spend only a moment considering a path out of the room. Kamala, in front of a closed door to the dining room. Devin doubted a full charge from him would budge either. Bardek, Amrynn, in the open door to the southwest. Tangle of limbs it'd be, then.
Devin dropped low and darted south then west, putting his momentum into Bardek, doing what he could to get Bardek and Amrynn outside the room's threshold. If he got both of them out while Devin and Kamala were still inside the room when 'it' happened, so be it; at least Bardek and Amrynn would be safer. If he managed to cross the threshold himself, all the better; they could all three then help Kamala.
Devin plowed into Bardek, who fell back into Amrynn, and the two stumbled out of the room - but Devin wasn't quite quick enough to leave with them, and felt a passing chill.
Kamala whipped around at the racket of Bardek getting bowled over, while Amrynn hopped lightly aside, eyes scanning their surroundings for threats. A chill gripped her, as well... and then... nothing.
As the chill washed over him, Devin braced for the worst. When the chill passed, he blinked, relaxed, and quickly regained his feet. He cast about over his shoulder to ascertain the state of Kamala, and the room, confused that both appeared to be unchanged and unscathed.
"Did you feel that? The chill," Devin asked everyone, Kamala first. "You okay?"
With some amazement, Devin noted Bardek's mug was upraised protectively and rightly, unspilled. "Mug must be enchanted," Devin smirked, extending a hand to help bring the priest back to his feet.
"I felt... something. But I'm fine. You seem fine too. Must not have been a very strong ghost." Watching him help Bardek up, Kamala snorted. "There isn't a Caydenite alive who'd let a drop of holy water spill from their sacred vessel. That's a miracle we all just witnessed."
"We're privileged, all." Devin said.
For his part, Bardek simply re-raised his mug in recognition of the jests and respect of his companions, sat up took a sip, and then accepted Devin's hand and made his way to his feet.?
“I felt nothing,” Amrynn said, tilting her head wryly toward Devin. “Manhandling aside.” She stepped back to foster a semblance of order once more in their ranks and incanted briefly. She walked her long fingers over the worst of the disarray, cleaning, straightening and offering general reassurance that they weren’t covered with any ephemeral filth from this mausoleum.
Devin nodded at Kamala's and Amrynn's reports. He'd definitely felt something. "Whatever it was, it was confined to the room." He wasn't certain if he should be relieved that there hadn't been any apparent manifestation, or anxious that there hadn't been any apparent manifestation /yet/. No use worrying about it; they'd deal with it if and when it happened.
Craning her neck into the doorway once more, she scanned the area where she had originally perceived the disturbance. If the spirit was still parading endlessly, she wanted to let the others know as much.
“That so much blight, so much horror, has coalesced here,” she shook her head. “I imagine the moment of its inception was truly…historic. Let’s be about our business. The stories here have no happy endings.”
The dust now lay unmolested, as before they had entered, but for their footsteps. Only Bardek still seemed flushed and sweaty from their non-encounter.
"Is it me, or is it warm in here," Bardek muttered, taking another sip from his mug in an effort to cool his throat, at least,?
“It’s you,” Devin regarded the priest with mild concern. “Supernatural chill of the venue aside, the wind outside and the empty hearths don’t lend themselves to comfort. You’re feeling ill?”
Without getting in Amrynn's way, Devin used his shortsword to push open the curtains obscuring the windows, if only to reassure himself that the party had that means of egress if it became necessary. He made one quick circuit of the room, looking for valuables for the sack. "That door probably leads to the dining room. Let's."
The dull light of the overcast day made the shrouded, mildewy room no more appealing. Finding nothing of obvious value, they re-ordered themselves in their prior single file and trooped on out through the next door.

5

As Devin had predicted, the next door led them back into the dining room. Two hearths lay cold and empty on either side of the passage where, beyond the crumpled and discarded fungus-coated rug that had obscured the floor, the broken opening where Iesha had smashed through the floorboards gaped like a black maw surrounded by jagged teeth.
As the last time they had entered, colored light glowed dully from beyond the tall stained-glass windows that obscured what could have been a breathtaking view of the Lost Coast. Each window depicted a monster rising out of smoke pouring from a seven-sided box. From left to right were shown a gnarled tree with an enraged face, an immense hook-beaked bird with sky-blue and gold plumage, a winged centaur-like creature with a lion's lower body and a snarling woman's upper torso, and a deep blue squidlike creature with evil red eyes.
“The line between fury and fear is a whispered breath,” Amrynn sighed. The words came in the hushed tones of ancient idiom. She glided toward the glass artwork and raised one long arm, pointing to the most distant pane.
“Kraken,” she breathed, stopping at a corner of the table’s head. “Asleep in the deep. Risen when called.” The stretch of her arm swung slowly through the silent motes to the next pane.
“Sphinx,” she said. “Time’s solitary guardian. Forever harried.” Her hand traced the smoke downward and then hovered there.
“And this,” she said, gliding forward once more, fingers outstretched toward the runes that encircled the box. “These have meaning.”
"Everything has meaning," Bardek said, philosophically. "It's whether the meaning is discernable and relevant to the observer that makes the difference." He looked around the room, nodding sagely. "In this case, for this observer, at least one of those answers is 'no.'"
Kamala snorted. "I always preferred exercising to studying, people. As long as they're not going to pop out of the glass and try to kill us, I'll focus on the here and now." She looked around the room, grimacing at the hole in the floor. "Anyone think we need to go down into the tunnels again?"
“Can’t think of a compelling need; we explored each path, if I recall.” Devin said.
Amrynn’s hand fell short of the glass box, fingers splaying wide. The delicate weaving of her hand began to wipe away the worst of the grime and decay in an ever increasing circle, revealing the runes in stark contrast to their previous state of neglect.
<“These bear the taste of necromancy,”> she said, without realizing she had slipped into the tongue of dragons. <“Sour and hungry they cry out against life.”>
Her other arm swung up, motioning to the beasts above and also beginning to wipe the glass clear where it passed. The fingers of both hands began to elongate noticeably, and her breath rimed the air lightly as she continued to speak.
<“Even the greatest living hearts fear the final coil. See it in their eyes. See how the smoke pulls them in,”> she said, her voice fervent and rising. <“It cannot continue. It must be stopped!”>
Amrynn’s accounting of the depicted creatures started ticking boxes in Devin’s mind. Pins in a tumbler. “This floor: sentient, gnarled, angry tree-creature; some hook-beaked bird with blue and gold feathers; a sphinx; a kraken. Seven-sided runed box; smoke, drawing in… something… from them, against their will. Instilling fear. Upstairs,” Devin recounted from memory of the study above this room, “some sort of death’s-skull scorpion; a vampire with a dozen pet bats; a deathwing moth; poisonous belladonna; a maiden sitting upon a forest well’s wall with a dog-sized spider descending towards her. Attic, two more windows; dark-haired woman with pale skin wielding a jagged iron staff, Arazni, Harlot Queen of Geb; and a man in regal finery and a crown of ivory and jade, Socorro, the Butcher of Carrion Hill.”
“More components of the necromantic spell,” Devin surmised. The runes, as any recorded knowledge, drew his eyes closer with academic interest.
Amrynn’s arms flashed up and back as she began to keen, and the ragged seven pointed star which emerged from the filth was not lost on anyone who had been with the Heroes long enough to know the trials they had endured. Her fugue culminated as she brought one clawed hand down across the image of the box. Glass exploded out and rained through the daylight in a chaotic rainbow. The second claw followed the first almost immediately, and a swath of remaining spears blasted outward, the metal warping and snapping under the force of her strike.
She stood there and heaved for a moment. Then, just as quickly, she seemed to return to herself, and she rose tall and erect once more. Both hands slowly stroked her hair back on either side of her head, the fingers shrinking back to their mortal size with the gesture. She turned and flicked a sliver of glass from under one nail with her thumb.
“I tire of these feckless fools who deal in powers beyond them,” she said and began moving toward the southern door in anticipation of their continued reconnoitering.
The wind and rain, free now to enter, stirred the moth-eaten curtains and whined in the colorful jaws of glass that remained. Beyond, the gray bay surged white-capped, far below the cliff the Misgivings perched on like a fat, miserable spider.
Taken aback by Amrynn’s destruction of the window, Devin could only conclude she’d recognized the nature of the runes. Despite her warning, he conjectured aloud…
“This house is a spellbook, or the binding of a spell,” Devin inferred. Aldern didn’t depict these elements in the window for décor, nor for reference. “The pieces are infused into the house somehow, maybe during its construction. Like a focus, or a circle.”
“You’ve recognized the spell. What is it?”
“No, I have not,” Amrynn replied with a sigh. She reached out and laid delicate fingers along Devin’s jawline. “But I love that you have such faith in me.” She withdrew her hand, but the frigid memory of those fingers lingered on his cheek. She turned a slow circle, taking in the dining room once more but looking through the walls to the estate entire.
“This house is an abomination, brought into being over time,” she said. “Undoing such malfeasance will take much more than…” she waved a dismissive hand at the stained glass window “…simply scratching at the surface.”
"Going to need a ring of frost resistance someday, or warmth," Devin smirked, nonplussed by the lingering chill in Amrynn's fingers. "Kitchen or parlor, then," Devin nodded to Kamala, indicating the door to the south.
He spared a look to Bardek for Bardek's assessment of his health.
"She could come put those cool hands on my face," Bardek suggested, though there was no sense of seriousness behind the words. Devin could see the cleric was looking a little flushed, but then, he had just been knocked off his feet, juggled a full mug of ale, and gotten back to his feet while wearing a full pack. He had also been drinking. Still, Bardek gave a wave to indicate he was probably fine. Though he did also dip one finger into his mug and trace a quick sigil on his own forehead before moving onward.

6

The room beyond the next door proved to be neither kitchen nor parlor, but a library, within which were two chairs before a stone fireplace. One of the chairs lay on its side, a scarf of reds and golds that contrasted with the drab palette of the room draped over its side. A book sat facedown on the floor between the chairs. A stone bookend, carved to look like a praying angel with butterfly wings, lay on its side in the fireplace itself.
Bardek, looking like the cool breeze from outside and the movement from one room to another had left him feeling a bit more refreshed, gazed around the room. "Am I the only one who feels like someone probably died in here?"
Devin brightened with interest at recognizing the room's original purpose, but his face fell with a mixture of frustration and loss at seeing the house's rot had reached even the books left neglected on these shelves. He toyed with the idea of somehow searching or preserving or restoring the books, but upon consideration realized the endeavor would be futile.
"Probably," Devin had to agree, at surveying the tipped chair, the discarded scarf, the scattered book... and maybe the bookend, to complete the story. "Someone reading at the cold hearth, struck by the bookend, collapsing forward. Wonder if someone wielded the bookend, or the house itself threw it."
Devin reached into the hearth with the toe of his boot and prodded the bookend out where he could turn and flip it about to examine its sides and base.
On examination, a splash of dried blood stained the chair closest to the door, and when Devin poked the bookend under his colored lights, it showed more blood, clots of hair, and bits of flesh and bone - and that one wing had been broken off, bringing to mind the ghoul they had seen with a stone wing embedded in its skull like some macabre decoration. The book lying discarded on the floor appeared to be about Varisian history, judging by the title on the spine.
The others, looking around at the many ruined books on the shelves, didn't react quickly enough to the scarf rippling sans breeze strong enough to blow it about - but Devin, with his years of streetwise reflexes, did.
Devin's free hand snapped forward to try to snare the scarf out of the air, roll his wrist and fingers to wrap it once about his hand, and hold it at arm's length as a potentially-venomous serpent caught just behind the head.
"Mind the scarf!" he called in warning about the same time as his shortsword clattered to the floor such that his other hand could join to control the scarf.
The beautiful scarf twisted unnaturally out of the way - as though being held by someone, rather than acting on its own unsentient malice. And then, Aldern was there, whipping the scarf about his neck and pulling it tight, choking him - or rather, her, for Devin knew he was actually Iesha, how could he ever have thought differently? Aldern's face was a grotesque mask of rage as he tried to kill her, his wife, and she was paralyzed with fear! The scarf wound tighter, tighter - she couldn't breathe, she was going to die!
A moment later, the scarf loosened, drifting to the floor in a lifeless pool of bright colors as Devin regained his senses and tried to suck in air to ward away the darkness encroaching on his vision. The ghost of Aldern had vanished... but had left behind a terrible welt on Devin's throat as a reminder of his crime, making it painful to speak or swallow.
Amrynn was at Devin’s side in an instant, sword in hand. She pulled him away from where the scarf lay waiting and held the blade toward it in a warding gesture.
“Are you alright?” she asked in exasperation, her eyes flicking back and forth between him and the scarf. “No, wait, don’t talk.” She kept one hand on the small of his back as reassurance and just waited. “This gods damned house.”
Devin lay on his side on the dusty floor, relieved to suck in precious air and roughly regain his breath. He shuddered, not for being nearly strangled, but for the terror of having experiencing the event through Iesha's eyes and countenance. His brow furrowed as he struggled to regain his own thoughts and orientation to the present; he found his own spark of anger that Iesha's hadn't fought back, and used that as a contrast to assert and distinguish his perspective from hers. Iesha's experience became a discrete thing, contained, less than all-consuming.
His breathing calmed as much as it would and he pushed to sit up. He nodded reassurance and -- between one of the chairs and Amrynn's assistance -- moved to regain his feet and carefully test his balance.
"Aldern..." he rasped, making a light gesture with balled fists as if holding the scarf between them, then raising one palm and spread fingers towards his throat. "Iesha."
What had she -- they, Devin recalled the wing embedded in the skull of the ghoul from the caverns, so there'd been two -- been reading? "Goran... the carpenter..." Devin gestured to his head sharply, recalling the impact, gesturing towards the fractured bookend in the fireplace, signing the stone wing protruding from his skull. Maybe something that could help put the house right?
Devin motioned towards the overturned book on the floor, wanting to pick it up and carefully hold its open place to see to what it had fallen, but not yet fully trusting his steadiness with the spots still flickering at the periphery of his vision.
Too slow to do anything about the scarf, Kamala just shook her head and gestured at the book. "This gods-damned house." She looked at Amrynn. "We need to do more than just break windows, we need to tear this whole place down."
Amrynn had fished her waterskin out for Devin during his explanations and offered it to him. She then took a step toward the book, but seeing Kamala’s intent, the sorcerer motioned for her to continue and said, “Just mind the page count.”
Whispered words slipped from Amrynn, and she cast her own enhanced gaze on the book, looking for anything untoward awaiting them. If the book proved mundane, she intended to spend a few moments studying the scarf as well.
As Kamala's magic lifted the book and turned it over, revealing a chapter half-read about Sandpoint's history with regard to the Varisians who helped found the town, Amrynn's piercing gaze scanned every inch of it... but it stubbornly refused to show any hint of magic. The scarf had a similar bad attitude; though it was undeniably beautiful, despite the act of violence that Aldern had perpetrated with it, and despite its recent attempt on Devin's life in the hands of the ghost of Lord Foxglove, it remained stolidly un-enchanted.
While Amrynn scanned the book, Kamala went over and grabbed the offending scarf. "Let's make sure this thing doesn't hurt anyone else," she said as she put it in her pocket.
Devin, steadier, recovered his dropped shortsword and the small-but-growing sack of valuables from the house. He sheathed his shortsword and offered the open neck of the bag to accept the book, pending completion of Amrynn's and Kamala's evaluations and manipulations of it. He winced once as he swallowed absently, testing, but appeared much back to usual self.
"We collecting moldy books, now?" There was no criticism in Bardek's tone. The priest merely evinced some surprise. It hadn't occurred to him that the thing might be valuable for more that providing an answer to a trivia question. "What was Iesha Foxglove reading just before her husband strangled her?"
“Would you prefer the term fermented?” Amrynn asked.
Devin nodded, in all seriousness, the bag still held ready. He took an absent sweeping glance about the room, and the decayed tatters of all the books on the shelves, lost. The loss of lives in this house was tragic. But, had this room and its contents been intact, Devin would’ve been hard-pressed to readily explore anywhere else for a couple days.
Still, Bardek shrugged. Then he gave Devin a measuring look - or rather, Devin's neck. "You OK?
“No perceived magic on either of those items of Iesha’s,” Amrynn said. “Which further thickens my disdain of the energies in this house.”
She looked at Devin and winced a bit herself. He would rebound quickly enough from the injury it seemed, but those bruises would walk with him for awhile indeed.
Devin nodded reassurance to both; he was little worse for wear than he’d endured from savage colds and influenzas that had also temporarily felt like swallowing knives through a soggy grass shoot. He closed up the sack, carried it casually in his off-hand, drew his shortsword back to ready, and motioned for Kamala to try the door to the west.

7

Kamala opened the door on a cozy-looking drawing room, marred by the unnatural dampness and thick sheets of mold that clung to the curtains closed over the window.
"Mmm, whose turn is it to get mauled by mystery?" Amrynn asked as she scanned the newest iteration of mold. "Mine, if I'm keeping score correctly."
Kamala smiled at Amrynn, her ice blue eyes sparkling like diamonds. "If you don't mind, I think it would be best if I take the first crack at getting mauled? If the big guy were still here I'd say we could split it from room to room, but since he's not why don't we let all the vintage clothes and yucky mold take first crack at this neck?" She turned back and scanned the room, shaking her head at the mold and taking the murderscarf back out of her pocket to boldly tie over her nose and mouth in a likely futile effort to protect herself from mold spores. "I'll try to open the drapes."
The mold-encrusted drapes were yanked aside easily enough, though they left a cloud of ill-smelling fungus dust in the air.
For just a moment, the face of a forlorn woman seemed to be staring at her, reflected in the window. Iesha.
Then, the image was gone. Kamala could only see herself, dimly, in the dirty window reflection.
Devin released the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
"Noble," Devin complimented Amrynn on volunteering to be the next for the house to smack upside the head, coughing once at exercising his voice before continuing in a rasp, "You're not fragile, but Kamala's got you on fortitude, and I have you on twitchiness. You and Bardek staying sharp-eyed then have the acumen to salvage our butts through your disciplines."
The drawing room hadn't manifested whirled knives or wreathed itself in fire or combusted with mold. Devin stepped in for a quick, scrutinous survey for items of value.
"Let's sweep upstairs, and the attic. We know the layouts."
Kamala nodded. "There may be more to find in that torture room or the cells."

8

They made their way back out into the unwelcoming, dim entrance hall, and Kamala had opened the door to the stair already when the others realize the fur on the stuffed manticore was smouldering - but too late.
In a flash, the creature turned on Bardek, who had just emerged from the ill-smelling drawing room. Cyralie Foxglove's visage leered at him from the monster's face, not the male face it had borne before. The woman's smile, so impish on her portrait in the gallery upstairs, was twisted into an expression of malice, and her red hair writhed like flames around her head. Her scorpion-like tail stabbed at Bardek from over her shoulder, passing through his raised shield and armor as though they weren't even there - but rather than feel the sting of poison, or even the pain of the stinger's penetration, he felt as though he'd been skewered by a hot poker!
A moment later, he burst into flame. Those standing near him couldn't feel any heat from it - but he clearly did, as it blackened his skin and flared in his hair, consuming him with evil hunger.
From the corner of their eyes, those not distracted by being on fire saw that the stuffed manticore stood as it always had, unmoving, dusty... no Cyralie to be seen.
Amrynn was a study in contrast. She recoiled visibly when the fire erupted. Then she leaned in to help immediately but hesitated upon touching Bardek’s charring form. Her aid reflexively came from the power coursing through her, not from mundane risk, and she hissed a few arcane words in response. She smirked in its aftermath though, knowing she needed to be in contact with Bardek to offer him the succor she channeled. So, she leaned in quickly and touched his flaming form with the tip of her pinky finger.
A frozen wasteland washed over his skin in that momentary contact, tundra winds shielding him from the worst of the fire’s continued savagery. She took a step back saying to the others, “I can protect him, but I can’t put him out.”
Though he had no wish to witness Bardek's skin char, with Amrynn already rendering aid, the best Devin could do was stay out of the way. As helpless to assist as they all were in preventing the haunts from doing as they would without retribution or counter, Devin crossed his arms to wait. One thing was for certain; they'd find a path in the future that didn't take them through this foyer each time. Without a way to suppress the haunt, it was a deathtrap.
The pain was, unfortunately, not unfamiliar to Bardek, and though he was unable to keep himself from screaming, he was able to keep his head just long enough to drop immediately to the floor, rolling as best he could with his pack on his back, in an attempt to put out the flames.
"Irori's sweaty sandals!" Kamala turned and ran to try to help put out the flames, pulling out her canteen.
As the cooling winds washed over him, Bardek reveled in the respite from the pain, and his hoarse scream was also swept away in the wind. With a moment free to gather his wits, Bardek got to his feet, staggered over to the manticore, and grabbed its mane with his burning hand, which he held there until the thing was fully engulfed in flames, or clearly wouldn't be.
Then, after a few moments, Bardek lifted his mug over his head, spoke a word, and sighed as cool, pure water flowed from the vessel to drench his body - and the magical flames.
The stuffed manticore did not alight at Bardek's brief touch - even its moldy fur remained unscorched by the flames, just as Amrynn had been untouched by the fire when she placed her hand on Bardek. Safe from their ravages thanks to Amrynn's spell, Bardek felt the flames slowly, reluctantly, sputter and die when he doused himself, and Kamala poured her canteen over him a moment later.
After some efforts at healing, they moved on, Bardek brushing leftover char from his soggy skin and somehow still-shining mithril shirt.
Now that he was no longer facing down the spectre of Cyralie Foxglove, Bardek felt a niggling doubt in his mind. Had it been malice that twisted the woman's ghostly face? With a thought to what Amrynn had said about the figures in the stained glass windows, he was now unsure as to whether or not it might have been fear...?
Ahead of him and Amrynn, Kamala and Devin paused as they turned the corner of the second floor hallway. Painted by Devin's cheery colored lights, the hall somehow managed to make the bright colors seem like whistling past a graveyard.
Now they had their choice of where to go.
Clearly eager to be finished with the hated house, Kamala looked over at Devin and nodded in the direction of the attic stairs. "Straight up to the attic, right?"
Without preference for the upper floor or attic first, the attic seemed as good a place to continue as any, and work their way down. Devin shrugged and nodded.
Kamala nodded back and led the group to the attic stairs. "Did you have time to search that torture room, Bardek, or should we start there?"
"You might need to be a little more specific about which torture room you mean," Amrynn said quietly from her spot in the ascent. She sheathed her sword for the climb and remained otherwise silent. There were too many ethereal perils at hand for her tastes, and she kept her senses as focused as possible to forestall whatever next lay in wait.
Bardek's chuckle was dry. He'd refilled his mug with one of his skins, and it smelled like mead now. He took a small sip.
Kamala grunted. "This whole place is torturing me. Let's start where the lady was looking at herself in the mirror."
The dim, leaky attic was no more welcoming than it had been the first time. However, the cold, drafty room where Iesha's revenant had been held prisoner by her own reflection was now empty of both shrouded dead woman, and the full-length mirror Devin had removed. Rain hit the dingy window pane, in mourning for what had once been.
Bardek looked around the cramped little room, and sighed.
"She didn't die in here," he said, "not if the scarf and such downstairs tell the truth. But whatever turned her into what she became afterwards - that happened in here. How did her body get in here? Why would she have just been left in here?" He shook his head. Then he bowed that head and whispered a prayer for the fallen woman's soul.
"The room across the hall," Bardek said, after a moment, "I don't think we ever went in there."
Kamala flicked her wrist and sent a tiny whirlwind to clean the grime off the window. "Did we look around in here? I didn't come in last time, I don't think. No hidden journal that tells us why she was killed or something?" She looked curiously at the little room but had no answers for Bardek's questions.
The dank armoire held no secrets that Kamala could tell, and the rest of the room was bare. Even without grime on the window, it was a depressing sight.
She nodded at Bardek. "Sure. Let's go."

9

The door across the hall opened on a private study, cluttered with exotic curios. Shelves of books - mostly on Shoanti tribal cultures and history, along with numerous maps of mysterious realms and nautical charts - lined the walls of the room, interspersed with objects such as skulls fitted with stubs of candles, tribal fetishes, and decorative scroll cases. An empty birdcage lay near the left hand wall, beside a small desk and a fine leather chair. Statues and sculptures grinned from all corners of the room.
The oddments included several dozen curious fetishes and ferocious masks, but the most impressive pieces was an old painting of a bullfight. It bore a plaque that read 'Throwdown in Swynetown,' and in the painting, the oils brought to life vast crowds jeering and cheering the bullfighter on, the huge bull aurochs towering over him, its cruel forward-jutting horns each the length of a spear. Dozens of bodies lay in the streets - the aurochs had clearly rapaged through them already, and although a score of brightly colored spears jutted from the creature's flanks and back, still it raged on. The artists' name was scrawled in a small corner: Andosalu. It was a name Devin knew - Andosalu was quite a renowned artist in Magnimar.
/Need a bigger bag,/ Devin thought to himself at recognizing the artist's style, and appraising the size of the painting. There were likely other elements in this room worth being salvaged, too.
The moment Kamala set foot in the room, she was drawn to all the items, evidence of a life of adventure. She passed from one thing to another, withdrawn into her thoughts... which were not her own.
Dozens of memories of expeditions, sea voyages, and travels to exotic locales raced through her mind... his mind. For he was Traver Foxglove, and all these fantastical journeys were mere scraps of what he had experienced. One followed the next, faster and more engaging - but increasingly infused with a sense of bitter disappointment and regret, and Traver's increasing awareness that some of these memories... no, all of them now, were of adventures that never were, memories of fantastic discoveries he could have made... had he not chosen to settle down with a shrill harpy of a wife.
While Kamala and Devin looked around, Amrynn and Bardek could swear that they heard... someone reading. That is, the rapid rustle of pages being turned couldn't be denied.
Bardek's head snapped up at the sound of pages turning. "Nope," he said, "not burning again today!" The priest of the Accidental God raised his mug and called forth the power of his god through that symbol. A whiskey-hued golden wave of energy pulsed out from the mug and through the room. He barely waited for the pulse of power to expand from him before Bardek was making for the door.
"My ward still protects y--" Amrynn started to say, shying from the priest's flash of light in the gloom. She gave him a stern look as he retreated.
"The riffling of pages can be heard," Amrynn clarified for all. Then she switched to a different language. Had they even tried direct communication?
<"We would help end your suffering,"> she said to the room in her native tongue, starting to believe that much of what was here was trapped.
Kamala came back to her senses at Bardek's golden blast of power - the loss-tainted memories were already fading. Meanwhile, Bardek had pelted out the door.
Kamala shook herself like she was shedding water. To no one in particular, she said "Oh, wow. Guy was a bitter old loser. That makes a lot of sense." She frowned as Bardek ran off. "Where are you going!?"
Amrynn thought she heard a quiet jumble of... thumping sounds? She wasn't sure if it was in response to her query or not. It might have been Bardek going down the stairs, if he'd run far enough.
“Shhhh,” Amrynn said, quieting those around her. “Whatever’s here might actually be listening.” The thumping hadn’t sounded like footfalls to her. Scanning the curios of the room, she thought it more likely that whatever haunted this chamber had dropped what it was holding.
“We can help you,” she tried again in the common tongue.
<“We will help you,”> she said in the Elven lilt of her homeland.
<“But we need some guidance,”> she tried in Dwarven.
Devin heeded, keeping his peace, trying to remain alert for whatever was going to explode next. With each moment that something terrible didn't happen, he became more tempted to resume his mental appraisal of the room's content.
Kamala shook her head at Amrynn. "If anything I just felt was true, he's not going to like you at all Amrynn."
Amrynn quickly lost patience with the rattling sounds, and motioned for Devin and Kamala to proceed. A bookshelf thumped suddenly, shifting the dusty books on it, but none could decipher the intent behind the haunting, other than that it was dissatisfied with their presence.
Devin surveyed the bookshelf’s contents with a mixture of curiosity, longing, and regret; he’d preserve all of these if he could, but didn’t have the strength or means to transport them, much less a place to keep them safe (nor a desire to maintain such a place himself; the responsibilities of ownership and curation competed with hard-drilled life lessons of freedom and moment's-notice mobility). A wagon came to mind, and some steward willing to house the collection in Sandpoint, perhaps. He sighed aloud.
He brushed fingertips across the displayed spines, reading titles, intending to save two of the books and trying to choose which. Selection made as best he could, two books of better-than-decaying condition ended up in the bag. He then set about the Andosalu painting, removing it from the wall, carefully freeing it from its frame, and considering its size. He removed and added a few of the charts and maps from the walls, stacking them with the painting. He eyed the scroll tubes and wraps, checked a few for size and content, and selected a map-sized leather wrap that would accept his bounty, rolling it together, securing it, and placing it in the bag (whether it stuck out the neck or not).
“Dweomers?” he asked Amrynn about the other contents of the room. “As otherwise, let’s clear that bookcase,” he pointed to the one that had thumped disapprovingly, “and see if there are any panels behind it or concealed areas.”
Neither the books nor the maps appeared to be of particular value; he chose one book each that detailed Shoanti culture ('The Savage Wild: A Treatise on Shoanti Quahs'), and Shoanti history ('The Notations of Sir Aldemus Bockley Upon Native History in Varisia'). A closer inspection of the painting, to his eyes, suggested that the painting could be a forgery by some copycat painter, rather than Andosalu himself.
To Amrynn's discerning eye, there was a touch of magic upon one of the scroll cases - or rather, what lay within. Opening it, among a scattering of maps she found two magical texts, one of which appeared to be a spell to sharpen the edge of a blade - the other of a nature which she couldn't comprehend at a glance, but vowed mentally to discover with a bit of reading.
Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any hidden panels or other secret cubbyholes behind the bookcase.
Kamala looked at the bookshelves, too, wondering about the tales of adventure and derring-do she'd felt Traver Foxglove grow bitter at during her brief encounter with his shade. She refrained from touching anything, though, not wanting to possibly accidentally cause some explosion of mold spores or anger the spirit.
“Such waste,” Amrynn remarked as she navigated the room, collecting whatever her enhanced vision showed her as something of potential worth. She had no taste for appraising the mundane, but the auras of magic were an altogether different matter. “Not just here," she continued. "The whole estate. The whole bloodline. How does such a collective fall so far?”
Amrynn sashayed slowly around the chamber as was her way in a place of study. She stopped at the leather chair. She didn’t sit in it, gods, talk about inviting a horror into one’s life, but she did still ponder the family’s descent as she studied it. She wanted to see the view that the owner would have had, and so she tried to stand behind the chair if it would accommodate her either moving it slightly or slipping in behind it to scan out over its back.
The leather chair had, in fact, been turned toward the wall where the painting had been hanging. Odd, unless Traver Foxglove had enjoyed contemplating that painting over all the other curios he had gathered. But then, who could say if he had?
Devin looked up from his completed work and what he'd selected to see Amrynn sighting over the back of the chair. He raised an eyebrow and turned to look in the same general direction, wondering what had caught her eye that he'd missed on his survey.
The bare red brick of the wall offered no answers.
Noting Kamala's cautious no-touching patience and Bardek's vigil in the hallway, Devin nodded thanks for the brief pause, and the permissive indulgence for the pair of books he'd selected. He knotted the neck of the bag within one fist and brought his dagger back to hand in the other; close quarters. It felt better to have a weapon in hand, useless as it may prove to be versus haunts.
"I'll give Iesha's room a once-over," Devin volunteered, not expecting to find anything in the room across the attic hall that had held the revenant, but not wanting to leave unfound spoils to rot, either.

10

Devin found Bardek just outside the door, in the hallway between the two rooms. The cleric was looking out the window.
"It's interesting," Bardek said when he heard Devin's feet in the hall, though he didn't turn around immediately, "it's a house that has taken the dreams of each inhabitant, and twisted them into nightmare. But," at this point, he did turn around, and his face was drawn with weariness and sorrow, "did it happen in one fell swoop? No. It's gradual. Everyone here was corrupted over time. So," Bardek raised a finger to indicate the walls around them, "did they have time to hide things? Did they build more secrets into the walls?" He shrugged. "Maybe this place is just a good purifying fire waiting to happen."
Bardek stuck his head in through the doorway again.
"The birdcage," he said, "anything in it?"
"Not the house," Devin nodded, "Vorel." Devin coughed lightly, cleared his throat. "Vorel overwhelmed them all." Vorel was the cancer in the portraits, flashing over to engulf all the others, the room, the house. "Aldern was corrupted into an insane ghast. Killed Iesha along the way. Traver festered regret into hatred, killed his wife, then cut his own throat. Kasandra saw what was happening, panicked, tried to escape with daughter Lorey; failed; rotted away together, maybe got away but still succumbed to the disease. Vorel's reach. And Vorel's still here, in the secret workroom, in the caverns, below the house. Cancerous heart, still a shadow on the fungus wall. And they're all still trapped here by him."
Secrets into the walls. Broken necromantic puzzle box at the wall.
"The house is the box," Devin spoke aloud, as if to test the hypothesis. "The small box was a model, or focus. The house is the big box, like a summoning circle." The shape of the house didn't align to anything magical in nature Devin could recall reading about, but he took Bardek's theory to heart. So was the wall of fungus in the caverns the results of Vorel's success, some sort of dramatic backlash failure, or a side effect echo?
Devin felt the need to take a prybar to some of the walls; remove the plaster and lathe, see if the interior spaces of the walls were mundane construction or wrought with sigils and exotic materials and they were roaming around inside a construct built to a purpose. Surely if that was the case, though, Amrynn's attunement to auras would've lit with the chill. But most spell components don't radiate magic, even if they can be used in its practice. It felt like it fit, but Devin didn't know what to do with it.
Devin stepped into Iesha's attic room and started a cursory search, shivering once and quickening his step like something was chasing him, and through stoic rationalization he had just fought down the urge to run.
Amrynn coughed and stood up, waving away the dust and motes that rose from the chair. She shook her head at the filthiness of it all. She should have been more invested, but the house seemed to actively push away interest.
“The house is the box that’s trapped the monsters?” she paraphrased Devin’s summation. “To what end? Such a prison must serve a purpose. An energy source? Are you suggesting that something else could come along and continue to draw on that power?”
She walked as she talked, one hand undoing the loop that held her narrow staff in place behind her. She brought it to bear with a twirl and used the tip to right the bird cage as best she was able.
The cage had a sad, tiny pile of feathers and bones at the bottom; testament to how quickly the house had been abandoned. Now dust greyed the songbird's feathers, and time had choked its song.
Amrynn stared silently at the tiny prison for a few moments, and a snippet of elven rhyme slipped from her.
<“Bird in the cage, unbidden,
Bird on the tether, unhidden,
Sing to the sky,
Why won’t you fly?
A bird on the wing, unridden.”>
An ancient smile formed on her lips, but it trudged into place with slow, aching strides.
Kamala could sit on top of a pole for an entire night, legs folded and eyes closed in meditation without falling asleep or- more importantly- falling off the pole. So she knew how to be patient. This place, though, just irritated her. It scared her, for sure, but being scared didn't annoy her as much as this gods-be-damned house did. There was just something about it that bothered her, like a sore spot in a tooth she couldn't help touching with her tongue. Or at least she assumed- her teeth were perfect, she'd never had one of those sore tooths the old timers were always complaining about.
She smiled at Amrynn. "Pretty song." Watching Devin leave the room stopped whatever she had been about to follow that up with, though. "Let's not all split up now!" The tall, muscular woman took a few skipping steps to catch up with the others in Iesha's room.
"This is where the ghouls were coming from, right? Whatever energy's here must be what caused or maintains the curse that started this whole epidemic."
Bardek stepped out of the doorway to let Kamala pass by and join Devin. He stayed in the hallway between the two rooms, keeping an eye on Amrynn and the birdcage.
"The whole place is sad. But short of burning it down, which I'm not sure would actually solve the problem, the only real answer is a powerful priest, I think. More powerful than I am, anyway. I'm not even sure it makes sense to be looting the place. It almost feels as though we're just giving it a chance to infect us along with everyone that's ever lived here."
"I think Bardek's right, and we should check inside some of the walls; the exterior walls, in particular. I don't have a prybar, though." Devin said.
Amrynn stepped into the hallway with a creased frown on one side of her mouth. She sighed as the group discussed what was next and if they were done here.
“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” she said. “But there were at least two side passages we bypassed in our haste after Iesha.” She shrugged and added, “In for a pinch, in for a crown.”
As Amrynn stepped out of the room, Bardek stuck his head in behind her, giving the room one last look. His eyes lingered on the sad remains in the birdcage, and he thought of how the bird's death was yet another metaphor for Traver Foxglove's own life. Trapped in a cage, longing to be free, to fly... Bardek's eyes tracked up, towards the ceiling, then across the ceiling and down, to the bare patch of wall that had been behind the large painting. Something... well, nothing in this house was right, but something about that wall...?
Amrynn exhaled a thin breath upward, blowing a few loose strands of hair away from her face. She followed Bardek’s movements and muttered, “I could use a drink.”
She squinted after the priest and said, “We’ve been all over that room, Bardek. What are you--” She stopped mid-sentence though, noticing that he had noticed something. “What? What is it?”
She followed him back into the room and raised her staff high and incanted. The tip of it shone with bright light, pushing back the worst of the gloom.
Between them, their examination of the brick wall - the last thing Bardek had been staring at - paid off. From a distance, the shadow of the brick was a bit more pronounced than those of the other raw bricks. Investigation revealed that said brick was loose, and when they drew it out of the wall, there was a small hollow beyond. Within lay three stacks of gleaming coins - too bright and untarnished to be silver - two vials containing some sort of blackish residue, and a copper key.
"Hmph," Bardek grunted, as Amrynn pulled the brick free. "Not what I expected. What's in the vials?"
Amrynn looked at the brick which had served as the concealing mechanism for this particular secret cache and frowned. Then she glanced sidelong at Bardek.
“You know I hate you a little bit for finding this, right?” she asked. Her tone was laced with humor, but there was definitely an underlying disgust that she had overlooked such a crude implementation.
“Devin!” she called over her shoulder for his attention. “Can you come check this hidden stash for anything threatening?”
She stepped away to let him work, and she hefted the brick, eyes sliding to the nearby window. She dismissed the destructive notion though and tossed the brick onto the seat of the leather chair instead.
"You jest," Devin replied from across the hall. Hidden stash? Devin appeared back in the doorway, adjacent to Bardek, and saw the now-obvious stash with the previously-so-obvious concealing brick removed.
"Damn it," he exhaled, his confidence at how thoroughly they'd searched the ground floor now completely in question again. He finished his thought wryly aloud, "Or the house understood intent and manifested something accessible in an exterior wall to placate us." And the exterior walls were brick, of course, something Devin hadn't considered when he'd suggested breaking into them.
Devin pulled his lights in closer to illuminate the niche and survey it clear.
A brief survey showed no trap or other hazard, so Devin cautiously took the contents of the stash from their resting place. A sniff at the caked corks in the vials was enough to tell him that the contents were spoiled beyond recall.

11

With Devin having appraised the rest of Traver's curios to be of limited value, Kamala led the party back through the attic to the next door, which opened on the observatory. As it had been the last time they had passed through, the drafty room was mainly notable for the huge stained glass windows, depicting the Harlot Queen of Geb, Arazni (whom Amrynn had identified the last time she'd been here), in a black-and-red gown, holding an iron staff to Kamala's left, and to her right, the upper half of a handsome man in regal finery and a crown of ivory and jade; the lower half or that window had been broken, and patched with canvas. Small scorch marks marred the wood near the broken window. A battered and ruined telescope, once a magnificent piece of equipment, still lay broken beyond repair on its side near the desk and chair in the middle of the room. There were chimneys rising up by the wall beside Kamala. A large trapdoor in the roof had been tied shut with several lengths of rope. Beyond the scant protection of the shingles above, the wind howled soullessly.
Kamala only gave the stained glass window half a glance, her attention mostly reserved for the trap door in the roof. "I wonder what happens if we cut those ropes." Her skin positively gleamed in the refracted light of the window, a shimmery rainbow against her scintillating skin.
"Arazni, Harlot Queen of Geb, and Socorro, the Butcher of Carrion Hill, right?" Devin (still rough-voiced) posed to Amrynn, who'd previously postulated the pane-pictured pernicious personages.
"Scorch marks. Odd," Devin noted, pointing near the broken window. Lamp or oil fire? Something readily combustible or that burst into flame suddenly, given that there wasn't significant char, and then had to be kicked through the window to spare the house. Suggesting someone was present and doing something to cause the flame in the first place. Devin approached the desk to search it.
"Could be something; or someone; who'd been trapped on the roof," Devin mused to Kamala's question. "Maybe Iesha wasn't the only once-person Aldern confined." Though anyone who'd been trapped on the roof would surely have moved to the front of the house and scaled down and been off and away, by now.
Kamala was too busy checking the environment to notice, but in the drafty attic, the others could swear they caught a whiff of the stink of burned flesh.
As Bardek entered the room, he suddenly felt unaccountably hot... and a fear began to kindle in his soul.
"Haunt; charred flesh," Devin cautioned. Which brought to mind grisly premonitions of what the scorch marks and the broken window entailed, and a ponderance of if the immolation and exit were voluntary or adversarial. Being uncertain of whom the haunt would target but relatively certain he didn't want to be the next one to burn -- Bardek hadn't seemed to enjoy it -- Devin slipped out of the room and back into the hallway, stepping a pace or two clear to the south to give others an opportunity to exit as well.
Kamala looked up as Devin exited the room. "What? Fish?"
"I've had enough of this," Bardek muttered. He brought his mug up again, concentrated, and called forth another of those waves of golden-hued energy. Strangely, he didn't step out of the room this time.
The smell, and the feeling of being too hot, subsided with the golden pulse of light. For just a moment, the drafty attic became touched with divine grace, and the beauty of the stained glass gleamed in the light of the heavens.
Then the glow faded, and the attic was merely a drafty, leaky scene of ugliness once more.
"Well," Bardek said, his face clearly showing the restorative effects of feeling his deity's energies flow through him and cleanse the room - even if only temporarily, "whatever it was that happened in here, a friendly drink seems to have calmed things a bit. Is there anything else to search in here, or do we head down to investigate the areas we haven't been into yet?"
"A friendly drink tends to do that." Kamala gestured at the ropes securing the hatch on the ceiling. "Do we need to look up there? I'm perfectly happy just setting this whole place on fire and calling it a day, but you all know that already." The muscular woman looked and sounded relaxed, almost happy at the idea of burning the Misgivings to the ground.
"We're here; let's check the roof," Devin nodded, stepping forward to check the ropes. Just in case the ropes were to keep out more than just stormy weather, he anticipated it'd be best to preserve them for re-use, so set about unbinding them in a way that was expedient but still permitted their re-use to rebind the door to the roof.
"Tie off," Devin suggested, pulling silk rope from his own pack afterwards. "Certain to be treacherous." Whether he was commenting on the slope of the roof, its disrepair, or the average mien of the house, it all was the same. Devin put a loop of the silk rope about his own waist and offered the ends to everyone else to either anchor if they were to stay put while Devin checked the roof, or to tie off as well if they wanted to check it with him.
Bardek accepted the end of the rope from Devin and set about looking for a place to tie it off. He considered the large desk, then shrugged and tied a loop of the rope around his waist, instead. "I'll stay here, be your counterweight, just in case."
Devin nodded gratitude for Bardek's willingness to keep Devin from plummeting off the roof's seaward side and down the cliffs the moment he found a slick section of slope. He stepped over to Bardek and -- pausing with a glance for permission -- refit the rope with a double-wrap around Bardek's waist and braking slip at the front, handing Bardek the loose end and proving a bit of instruction on how to let out line and take up slack as Devin called for it.
Devin double-checked the rope he'd secured about himself, and was satisfied the knot he'd tied off on his left side would take his weight if he suddenly fell against it, but wouldn't bind up so tight that he couldn't break it free with the right manipulation in a crunch.
Kamala had watched with an amused smile as Devin and Bardek prepared to scale a cliff. "I'm just gonna see how far I can get over here," she said as she hooked a thumb at the chimney. "Race you up there." The tall woman turned and started looking for a way up to the ceiling.
Before she could climb into the hearth, a solid thump on Devin's part revealed that the warped wood of the trapdoor was firmly wedged shut.
Amrynn drew a short breath as she studied the hatch from below, waiting for everyone to get relatively clear. She raised a hand and exhaled soft words with frigid edges. The air between her hand and the trapdoor filled with a glittering mist, creeping across the warped wood and into any available cracks.
Then she simply closed her delicate fingers into a fist, and the tendrils of mist squeezed the portal to this wretched hive. Any who chose to study her instead of the portal would not have overlooked the hint of a pleasant sneer at the act.
The wood groaned like a ship in a storm, and before long, a jagged crack split through it, before the freezing mist melted and joined the rain dripping through the hidden holes in the ceiling where the tiles had blown off outside.
"Hm," Amrynn huffed. "I've been working at unraveling the very nature of magic, but it's been slow going, and the side effects have been...dramatic. Step a little further clear please."
Suitably impressed with the focused sundering; fine control was often more difficult than gross effects; Devin abided and stepped a little further from the trapdoor.
Amrynn the trap door with a tilt of her head and brought up both hands this time. Jagged language crept from her again as her will manifested into the crystalline force.
"The key is to not lose control of it," she said and squeezed both hands into fists this time, once more bringing her summoned force to bear on the trap door.
This time, the trapdoor could no longer take the strain. It shattered, the pieces raining down onto the mold-stained floor.
Kamala, covered with soot and cobwebs, poked her head into the hole from above.
"Ha!" Devin smirked at Kamala's nonchalant peering into the room from the rooftop, feeling a bit overprepared with a rope tied off about himself and Bardek's helpful anchoring. "Footings fair and nothing tucked into the corners?" Devin called to her to confirm.
The view of the Lost Coast, Sog's Bay, and the Varisian Gulf, despite the rain and wind. Far, far below, the surf crashed on the deadly rocks at the foot of the cliffs. The trapdoor appeared to have been to view the stars, for there wasn't much else to see on the leaky, dilapidated rooftop.
Kamala laughed, clearly glad for the brief exercise and to technically be out of the house. "It's fine, if a bit steep. I don't see anything you need to worry about." Her head pulled back away from the hole for a minute as she looked out over the view. "It's a hell of a lot nicer up here than it is in there," she shouted down to the people inside.
Devin accepted the rope back from Bardek, unslung his own pack, and stowed the rope back neatly for future use.
"Ready," he announced as he reshouldered his pack. "Loft bedroom? Storerooms? Workroom?" Devin gestured back towards the hall, ready to follow Kamala to clear the rest of the attic.
Kamala dropped back down into the room, sighing as she settled her feet. "It was nice to get outside for a minute, anyway." She shook her head. Looking up and down the hallway, she said "Sure, let's try the loft bedroom. It's right here, we might as well."

12

Kamala and Devin pushed open the creaking door to the sad, dank loft, and entered, while Bardek and Amrynn remained in the gloomy hall.
It appeared to Devin's eye that the room must have belonged to a servant - perhaps a majordomo or butler - but it didn't appear to have been used in years. The ceiling sloped down sharply over the bed to his left, leaving only four feet of headroom by the wall. The low, moldy cot and peeling dresser were the only furnishings.
Beside the hollow echoes of a life of servitude, nothing haunted either of them about the room. Rain pattered against the window, and leaked here and there onto the floor.
Devin made a cursory search of the dresser, not really expecting to find anything of value in this bedroom. In truth, though he found a smattering of trinkets (a comb, a shaving blade and brush, and the like) and moldy clothing, there didn't appear to be anything of real value there.
At conclusion, he admitted, “I don’t see value in searching the storage rooms’ contents. Return to the upper floor?”
A perfunctory glance into the remaining rooms in the attic revealed only several storerooms filled with furniture, sheets and linens, boxes and crates, and other moldy items - and a workroom, with a large number of wooden planks, rope, and other repair supplies. The ceiling above them sagged noticeably, and rain pattered down in several places from the visible sky.
Returning to the second floor, there was only the mournful whistle of wind outside, and the creak of their footsteps as they progressed under Devin's colored lights.
Kamala grunted as she looked around the creaky house. "This is just depressing. Do you all want to go back through all these rooms?"
“No, I don’t,” Devin sighed, realizing the nominal gains – the sack -- weren’t justifying the endeavor. And getting brushed and beat up and engulfed by haunts they couldn’t actually do anything about just felt pugilistic. Until they could put the house to right, down in the caverns below, this was pointless. And they’d already determined they didn’t have the means to do so.
“Three things point to Magnimar. Andosalu’s painting, forgery or not. The portrait of Iesha with Magnimar in the background. And some lead on the Skinsaw Men cult or the Brothers of the Seven and the Sihedron Ritual, and Xanesha; the letter Aldern had.”
“Do we need to visit the workshop in the caverns, see if we can destroy Vorel’s black mold, there, now, or determine what’ll be needed? As otherwise, we can purge the Runewell beneath Sandpoint. With the Sanitarium, I think we’ve cleared out the ghoul nests that would otherwise spread and risk Sandpoint.”
“One is enough for me to leave this haunted pile of refuse,” Amrynn said. “Plus, Caizarlu and Pidget have business in Magnimar as well. I say we depart. This blight isn’t going anywhere. If we can escort those needing to travel to the city, more’s the benefit.”
She glanced around at the oppressive gloom and said, “Gods, a week with Pidget would be a dream compared to this.”
Kamala smiled at the idea of leaving the damned house. "I'm all for leaving, but I'd want to check in with the Sheriff before we go. He had a map of ghoul sightings and I want to make sure we check them all out before we call it done in Sandpoint."
Bardek nodded. "I agree with Kamala. We don't want to come back to a Sandpoint overrun with ghouls."
“Yes, of course, to Sandpoint first,” Amrynn said. “How else would we link up with the prisoner caravan and gather whatever items we wish to fence? I imagine taking along Caizarlu’s tome would serve well against his case too, and gods, if we left without saying anything to Bergi?”
She held up one hand in a stop-right-there gesture and said, “Then you would have a demon on your hands. Plus, someone’s got to keep an eye on Malfeshnekor until we get back.”

13

Outside, as Bardek had expected, a cloud of undead crows waited for them; but his prayer to his god was heard, and again, the dead things dropped like flies, a crunchy layer of ill-smelling foulness to tread as they headed back onto the path to the Lost Coast Road. The Misgivings squatted on the cliff's edge behind them as they left, distant lightning flaring behind the low, dark clouds over the bay with unholy mirth at their departure in the depressing rain.

The Second Cycle