Runelords 12.0 - The Misgivings

After a night in jail, Virgil, Eamon, Khyrralien and Luna were released on their own bail. Sheriff Hemlock informed them of the terms: they were not allowed to leave Sandpoint or the surrounding land until his investigation of the sanitorium was complete, at which point he would either have insufficient evidence to hold them, or enough to send them to trial. In the meantime, any assistance they could give in the apprehension or destruction of the undead that was preying on the locals would be appreciated, and would be taken into account in their favour in the case. They thanked him for his leniency, and made to leave. Shadliss Vinder was waiting for Virgil in the waiting area, falling asleep sitting up. The other three rolled their eyes and left him to tend to her. Shadliss didn't want Virgil to leave, but he was adamant about the importance of going; he took her to his hotel room to sleep, as she admitted that she hadn't been able to at her house. He promised to be back soon, waited for her to drift off, and left to go meet the others.
When the other three left the police station, they were almost immediately jumped by Leo VanHorn. Khyrralien took an immediate aggressive stance against him, in his disturbing, indirect way, and Luna practically evaporated she fled so quickly. She went to Quint's house to get his opinion on a strange potion bottle she had found among the debris she had scooped up from the sanitorium workbench. Meanwhile, Eamon ignored Leo's attempts to bait him until he reached the church, and Khyrralien harassed Leo right back until he left them be.
After roughly an hour, the four reconvened at the town gates. They opted to walk to the Misgivings, rather than take horses, but Virgil brought along Romeo, Juliet and Rosaline to act as scouts. It took several hours of walking, and as they traveled it became increasingly obvious that it was going to pour rain. The downpour held off for the morning, however, and they were still dry as they made it to the abandoned property. 
Sending Romeo and the others up front, they quickly reported that there were strange, unnatural birds there, and that the whole place was terribly wrong. Romeo cautioned Virgil against going there, lest he be killed. Virgil thanked them for their advice but resolved to go forwards anyways; he told the three that they did not need to follow him. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, the iron ravens bolted, though as they flew they acknowledged his advice to return to Shadliss, and Romeo replied that he would expect him dead if he didn't see him again by nightfall. On that cheerful note, they approached the dilapidated manor.
There were two front doors that they could see: both old, ornate creations of wood decorated with an emblem featuring foxgloves and thorned vines, ruined by mould and water. As they approached, they could see some crows sitting on the roof. Their feathers looked molting and ragged, and a red light burned in their eyes; they squawked harshly, and their cries were unintelligible to Virgil. Without delay, they went to the nearest door and forced it open.
Inside was a once-grand entryway with stairs leading up to a second floor, and a mounted manticore posed for the attack set in the center. The air was damp and stagnant; everything smelled of decay. No one wanted to waste any time, so they began to investigate, taking care to check each door before opening it. Khyrralien took interest in the manticore, inspecting it closely. As he did, he could feel a terrible burning sensation and the smell of fire in his nostrils, and it was as if the manticore was alive and bearing down on him to strike. A sensation of movement, and Khyr could feel the sharp sting of the creature's stinger in his shoulder. Suddenly, the hallucination ended, and Khyrralien knew that the dead creature had never once moved, though he could still feel the pain in his shoulder. Rubbing it, he jogged to catch up to the others, who had moved into the adjacent room.
A hallway looped around the entry hall, and lead to a ballroom on its opposite side. An old piano sat neglected, and they found the second set of doors that they had seen outside. They opened them up, in an attempt to give themselves another ready escape. Meanwhile, they could swear that they could almost hear the piano playing, though it may have just been their imaginations. Khyrralien approached the piano and dragged his fingers across it. The sound was dischordant, but as he pressed the keys, it seemed to find its tune, and suddenly it was playing by itself. Overcome with the urge to dance, Khyrralien began to waltz across the floor with an invisible partner as the others watched. The fey could see that he held a beautiful woman in his arms, and the two danced to the music. They danced faster and faster, and as they did the woman's face turned dark and terrified, her expression one of someone being throttled. The woman shrieked, piercing Khyrralien to his soul, and vanished. Muttering about how he shouldn't touch things, the group moved to the next room, by now very convinced that the rumours regarding this house being haunted were legitimate.
As they meandered from room to room, they caught sounds of sobbing and strange feelings of burning, sadness and foreboding. They found an abandoned dining room, set with fine flatware that they were too wary to touch, and a strange, shrunken monkey’s head that hung from the wall near a staircase leading down, which shrieked when the pullcord hanging from it was tugged, like a macabre dinner bell. Four stained glass windows decorated the dining room’s walls: images of a kraken, a roc, a treant and a sphinx, four fabled creatures known for their longevity, all being sucked into a small, black, seven-sided box or cauldron of some sort. 
They came upon a washroom, and a scuttling noise of movement came from within the curtained-off bath. Taking care, Eamon swung his sword and managed to stab true, causing a broken cry to issue forth. Pulling away the curtain, they found a dead rat in the tub. Though it was the bisection from the sword that had obviously done it in, by the looks of the creature it couldn’t have been too long for the world anyways: its body was mangy and covered in sores and lumps and its eyes were clouded and blind, plagued with some sort of horrible disease. Careful to not touch any viscera, Eamon cleaned his sword and they moved on. 
Further along the hall, a sitting room with a fine fireplace was found behind another door, where a chair had been toppled to the ground and a scarf lay askew. When Virgil went to straighten it, he was beset by a vision of a woman, the same person described by Khyrralien earlier: he watched as he choked the life from her as she sat in the chair. Shaking off the powerful feeling of the vision, he placed the scarf neatly on the straightened chair and stepped away. Luna noticed a heavy stone statuette lying in the ashes of the fireplace: a fairy sitting on a log, its wing snapped off and missing. As she replaced it on the mantle, she noticed some blood on its base. Apparently, it had been used as a blunt weapon, though there was no other sign of struggle or misdeed. Unsettled, they carried on. 
With the ground floor investigated, they turned towards the stairs. They surmised that whatever or whomever they were looking for, the Lordship, was most likely in the deepest part of the basement or the tallest part of the house, as Virgil stated was often the case. The decision was made to attempt the upstairs first.
The second floor was empty, much as the ground floor was. Each room had a hint of haunting, and plagued them with visions of murder and fear. The stairs gave the unmistakeable sounds and presence of being followed, and a child’s nursery compelled Eamon, believing himself to be a mother terrified of her husband and his deeds, to grab his daughter and flee. He scooped up Luna without warning and ran towards the exit, while the others, not least of all Luna, yelled at him to explain himself or stop. The angel didn’t stop until he had made it well outside where the first drops of rain had begun to fall, and when he did, both he and Luna fell silent: what had been earlier only a handful of foreboding, haunted crows was now a flock of thousands. They hung heavily on the trees guarding the front path, and their red eyes bored into the pair. Turning and running back to the house, the birds shrieked unholy caws as they took flight and gave chase. Virgil and Khyr, who had been following them, turned on their heels. The four managed to make it inside and slam the door behind them: they were trapped. As they moved deeper inside, they could hear thunder and the encroaching downpour.
Eamon apologized for the lapse of will on his part, and they continued investigating the rooms upstairs. It seemed for the most part an average house, well-built but suffering from neglect, particularly from water damage and mould. There was little of worth and little of note, beyond the horrible visions and feelings that plagued them. A child’s room brought Virgil to his knees, as he had a vision of his parents fighting bitterly in front of him as a young child, who couldn’t understand what was happening or why; a knife on a desk in a study compelled Khyrralien to bring it to his own throat, in a recreation of Travor’s death two decades ago. Another room possessed a stained glass window like those in the dining room, though this one featured a wide variety of strange, seemingly-innocuous and unrelated images that Virgil identified as the common ingredients used as components of necromantic magic. 
A stately room on the third floor held nothing more than walls supporting curious mushrooms and mould growths, along with a series of portraits labelled with the subject’s names: a serious-looking man named Vorel Foxglove, his wife Kasandra and their young daughter Lorrey; on the other side of the room, Travor and Cyralie Foxglove, and their three children Aldern, Zeeva and Sendeli. As they looked between the pictures, they appeared to change, the images becoming disfigured and wretched. Vorel’s skin melted away to reveal a skeleton, while his wife’s and daughter’s faces became disfigured with sores and lumps, not unlike the horrid rat they had seen earlier. Travor began to bleed as a huge gash slit his throat, Cyralie’s skin began to blacken and split as she burned, and Aldern became gaunt, monstrous and terrible to look upon. As this happened, the mushrooms on the walls began to swell and contort. Suddenly, they exploded in a cloud of spores, leaving the three men coughing and gasping while Luna merely tightened her scarf slightly and took care to not accidentally inhale out of habit. They cursed as they left the room, reasonably certain they would contract some sort of terrible magical mould-based illness from this, though they noted that as the spores settled, the pictures had returned to their normal states. 
A bedroom down the hall had been, unlike the rest of the building, destroyed: furniture lay smashed and broken, and deep gashes were left in the walls. A painting sat propped up against the wall with its front facing away; they flipped it around to see that it wasn’t ruined like the rest of the room, and was yet another portrait. This picture was labelled as “Aisha”, the name of Aldern’s late wife, and showed the same young woman who was endlessly strangled in the haunted visions that beset them. The three men were each suddenly overcome with a powerful emotion: Virgil felt poignant, terrible loss and sorrow, Khyrralien felt the tender malaise of nostalgic love, and Eamon was filled with rage and fury, not just at the woman in the painting, but at all women. As his rage began to taint his body as it usually did, he reached out to grab Luna, but his threatening gesture was not unnoticed by the others; Virgil quickly Suggested that he lay on the floor, and Eamon dutifully complied with a gusto, throwing himself to the boards. He stayed there until the emotion had passed, and he apologized profusely to Luna for the second time that day. They considered the implications of what they had seen so far in the visions they had been presented with, and were beginning to dread more and more that this Lordship they were seeking was indeed their friend Aldern, possessed by whatever cursed malice permeated this house.
Finally, as they explored the attic, they not only a room that had been recently cleaned and set up for use, nearby to a section of roof that seemed to have been newly repaired, but they also found a woman. She was crouched over and sobbing in a small storage room, muttering about how it was terrible as she stared into a large mirror that sat propped up before her. Her skin was pallid, her neck was purple with dark bruises, and it was easy to see that she was not alive, rather some sort of solid spectre or other undead: she was Aisha Foxglove. No amount of questioning or shaking could break her attention away from the mirror, so they decided to finish looking about before disturbing her further.
In another small room with a broken window overlooking the cliff that the manor sat on, they found a desk and a broken telescope, suggesting that it was once used as an observatory at some point. As Khyrralien fiddled with the instrument’s casing, he suddenly started to feel warm. A burning sensation overcame him, as though he had been set on fire, and with a screech he threw himself out the window into the rain before anyone could stop him. Mercifully, he managed to cling to the roof without slipping over the edge and smashing himself on the cliffside, as Cyralie had done before him. The burning passed, and he was left only with the pain of having crashed onto the roof some distance below. Tossing him a rope, the others pulled Khyr back up to them, while Khyr pouted at the manor’s cruelty to him.
With everything above ground investigated, they returned to the room where the corpse of Aisha sobbed at the mirror. Taking a gamble, they decided to shroud the mirror to see what would happen. When her gaze was broken, she stopped crying suddenly. With a shriek of rage, she shot up to her feet and began to run for the door, screaming out Aldern’s name and shouting that she knew he was here, promising bloody vengeance upon him. They weren’t able to stop her escape into the hall, but as she left Virgil yelled out to try and get the mirror in front of her again, which might stop her. Working together, they managed to get ahead of the fleeing woman, slowed as she was by Luna’s tanglefoot bombs, and put the mirror in her line of sight. As Virgil predicted, when presented with her reflection, she stopped in her tracks and reverted to her previous state, sobbing and lamenting. Virgil explained that this was a revenant: a semi-sentient creature birthed when an innocent is cruelly murdered in a negatively-charged place. A revenant doesn’t possess full-fledged memories or will; instead, it is eternally consumed by alternating self-pity and loathing with itself and its fate, and unstoppable rage and vengeance towards whomever killed them. Eamon considered killing it out of pity, but Virgil stopped him, suggesting that, if Aldern was indeed Lordship and proved to be completely insane, violent and requiring of termination, then she might be weaponized against him, setting the two murderous undead against each other like dogs. Luna frowned and immediately called him out on his tasteless comment and plan to make a couple fight each other to mutual destruction, while Khyrralien giggled and supported him wholeheartedly, setting off his slow transformation to an even more disturbing form as he achieved the depths of an evil alignment. Eamon also disapproved of his heartless, tactless behaviour, but agreed to leave the woman there for the time being.
At the head of the stairs, there was a mouldering rug; if one stared at the pattern the mould formed, it looked almost like a descending spiral staircase. Ignoring the rug, they walked down into the basement, where they found first the kitchens and storehouses, long-ruined. One of the pantries was filled with thousands of chittering, blind, disease-ridden rats like the one they had found upstairs, rummaging over rotten, decade-old remains and the corpses of their own. They shut the door quickly, but they began to crawl out of holes and gaps in the wall, attracted by their smell and sound. They pressed onwards, finding a pair of heavy, rusted metal doors. It took some effort to jam them open, while Virgil used the scroll of Flaming Sphere to destroy the amassing horde of rats. By the time the door had been forced open enough to permit entry, the spell had run out; while many of the rats still lived, they were much more interested in the charred flesh of their fallen than in the adventurers. Beyond the doors was some sort of arcane lab adorned with another stained glass mural: Vorel, magnificently holding aloft half of a book and a chalice filled with green liquid, seemingly taken from the same seven-sided cauldron that had been pictured before. As they looked at it, a vision struck them of Vorel at the pinnacle of success, his years of work about to culminate in the ritual necessary to become a lich, when suddenly Kasandra burst into his study. She had suspected something for a while, and now she stood horrified at what he planned to do. The ritual was already begun and could not be stopped, but Kasandra took one of the focuses, a wooden puzzle box, and smashed it. What was meant to be the phylactery had been destroyed at a critical moment; everything was ruined. The man’s furious, bitter soul moved to the next closest receptacle: the house itself. 
There was little else of note in the room, save for several cage traps each holding a dead rat. They seemed relatively new, and an engraved brand originated them from a store in Medinipur. A door on the far side opened to reveal a spiral staircase, positioned roughly beneath the mouldy rug on the ground floor above. 
As they descended these stairs, Virgil had a vision of Aldern digging, before suddenly being overwhelmed by ghouls and dragged away. He related this to the others, and they considered it as they continued onwards. Perhaps Lordship was Aldern possessed; perhaps it was the disquiet spirit of Vorel, who haunted the manor and the Foxglove family. They would know soon enough.
A tunnel, reaching out in two directions, was at the bottom. They chose one path that appeared to be older, more naturally-hewn than hand-made. They followed it to a pit-like cave, whose entrance could be vaguely seen far above them as they stood at the bottom. Resting nearby was a huge, undead bat-like creature; it paid them no mind, and they chose to do the same: there hadn’t been reports of a bat attacking people, so they decided to let sleeping dogs, or in this case bats, lie. 
Down the other path, they found some abandoned picks covered in aggressive mould. One in particular looked to be of extremely good quality, so Khyrralien decided to take it, getting a lungful of spores for his efforts. Beyond that, they saw a pair of ghouls: gaunt, feral and rotten-looking, they nonetheless seemed relatively new, and had the clothes and appearance of farmers. Deciding to push their luck, the group walked forwards openly, and the two men bristled, threatening to attack. They brazenly introduced themselves as escorts of Luna, who had been invited to this place by the Lordship and who expected her presence. It seemed that the two hall guards might have attacked anyway, but the fact that Luna was already undead gave them pause, and they considered the notion carefully before deciding that they would rather not risk their Lordship’s displeasure. Promising to eat them in due course after the Lordship was finished with them, the ghouls led them further in. 
Walking into a cavern that opened to the ocean, the currents causing a pool to rush in and out of the chasm, they saw a number of other ghouls busy at digging, enlarging the cave. They glanced towards the adventurers and glared hungrily, but they continued about their work. Luna happened to notice that one of them in particular had a bit of a collapsed skull, and a shard of rock that may have been shaped like a wing stuck out from the wound. They were led to a circular pit, with a slippery, narrow staircase carved into the outside leading down to a door into the rock. The ghouls gestured for them to descend, though they obviously were not about to go themselves, and the group carefully made their way down the slick surface without incident. When they reached the bottom, they faltered for a moment before Luna knocked on the door and introduced herself tentatively. A voice bid them enter, so they opened the door.
Inside was a study, dominated by a large, plush chair pointed away from the door. A desk with various notes and objects stood nearby, and there was a large, grotesque mould growth on the wall that almost resembled a body. A wooden puzzle box lay shattered and strewn about the ground, its pieces ignored. As they entered, a man spoke from the chair, excited for Luna’s arrival. Standing up, the man revealed himself as none other than Aldern Foxglove, though the once-beautiful man was now anything but handsome. He was haggard and gaunt, and his clothes were tattered and stained; his skin had taken on a mottled, rotting cast, he had lost chunks of his hair, and vicious claws and fangs marked him as a flesh-eating undead. A putrid smell hung about him, suggesting that he was more than a wight or ghoul; this was the ghast that they had been seeking, who had killed Katrine and her lover, along with the men in the barn, their bodyguard and who knows how many others. He spoke with a strange cadence and obsession, different than what they remembered of him from when last they met. The four, particularly Luna, begged for an explanation, but Aldern picked up a saw-edged sword that rested on the chair and lunged towards Virgil, intent on their death. Virgil dodged and retaliated with a solid strike of his own blade, and a sudden, dramatic change came over Aldern. He dropped his sword and blanched, becoming timid and apologetic, almost frantic. Clutching at himself, he stuttered that he had been made to do things, awful things, against his will. He claimed to have little memory, and was unsure how he had gotten here or what had happened. Frustrated and at a loss, Luna vented her frustration on the horrible growth of black mould, throwing explosives at it until it burned away. However, Vorel’s spirit, whom they blamed for this current misfortune, was assuredly unfazed by this affront to the parasitic fungal growth.
While the others tried to piece together what exactly was going on, Luna heard a woman’s voice speak to her. It directed her attention towards the desk, and identified itself as coming from a book: half of a book, missing its front cover and an incalculable number of pages, just like the one pictured in the stained glass image of Vorel. A chalice was nearby as well, along with a seven-sided cauldron made of black metal, no more than a foot square; a tiny amount of green liquid sat in its bottom, barely enough to fill a spoon. Luna was conflicted, unable to process the amount of tragedy so recently put to her, and was convinced that there was nothing good that could possibly come from a talking book that only she could hear, that had once directed a man to become a lich. Despite that, she reasoned that a book could never enact anything, only instruct, and so she picked it up. The book thanked her, explaining that Luna could hear her because of the medallion she wore, a product made from the information kept in her pages, to which she invariably had a connection. She would like very much to be taken out of this dank room, and welcomed them to the last relic that had been made from her knowledge: the cauldron and its last remaining brew. Luna looked the pot up and down before realizing what it truly was: a runewell. She relayed this information to Virgil, who became ecstatic and panicked at the same time, lest the tiny amount of liquid not be enough to quell the rage that influenced him. 
Aldern had fallen into quiet remorse, and everyone decided there was little else to do other than to remove Foxglove from the manor, attempt to discern what triggered “the Lordship” and how it could be stopped or cured, and to find a way to break the curse of Vorel’s spirit on the house. Khyrralien and Virgil picked up the runewell, surprisingly heavy for its size, Luna tucked the foreboding book into her bag, and the group led Aldern back up and out of the caverns beneath the manor. The ghouls stared at them, but didn’t dare question anything with the Lordship in their company; as they exited the building into the pouring rain, the crows sat silently, watching the master of the house leave. The five trudged about a mile away from the house, until the sight of it was lost behind the trees and mist, before they stopped to decide what to do next.Category:Rise of the Runelords