09/01/2026: The Ulrich Mansion

The Ulrich Mansion settles with creaks and sighs, the buzzing of insects stifled by its thick walls. 

The party rests on musty straw mattresses in the abandoned guards' quarters, trying to recover strength and arcane energy. Four in the afternoon becomes six becomes dusk.

Pinecone, who took the worst of the ghast's attention at the churchyard burial of Maartin, is finally resting comfortably but still very weak. He noses at Soulfire's hand and settles onto the bed beside her as if he intends never to leave it again.

Across the yard, Boris the manticore lies deep inside the barn, breathing shallow and slow, watched over by Nike and JarJar. He is still too hurt to do more than twitch an ear when they approach him.

Crystal takes first watch in the courtyard of the mansion, a long and fortunately dull two hours, then claims the bed nearest the door.

⚔

Afterward, Soulfire's watch begins uneventfully — an hour of nothing. In the next, as she's dozing more than watching, a light flickers to life in the greenhouse across the courtyard. It bobs, uncertain, like a candle carried by someone who isn't sure they want to be found. Then it steadies in the doorway, and she recognizes the shape behind it.

The Burgomaster's ghost — the same translucent, lamplike figure she met before — inclines his head toward her.

"You've buried Maartin," he says, "next to Marina?"

"Yes," Soulfire says, straightening to shake off sleep.

Standing facing one another in the lonely courtyard, the house creaks around them. The Burgomaster doesn't quite smile, but something in the light shifts, softer. "I feel that at least some of my debt to Maartin and my beautiful daughter Marina has been paid. For that, I am grateful to you." A pause, weighing. "Would you have a reward?"

"Of course. What are you offering?"

"My treasure." He turns, drifting back into the dark of the house. "Follow me."

She does, commanding Pinecone to stay. The wolf whines but obeys. Soulfire tells herself, that she's not going to share this with anyone. After all, she was the only one who through to bury poor Maartin.

The ghost leads her up a short stairway thick with dust, into a room that had once been a library. It still smells faintly of old books and musty rot. He gestures toward the far wall, where a great pipe organ stands untouched by time in a way nothing else in this room has been.

"Beneath the organ is a secret door," he says. "In the cellar below is my treasure. I have not been there in eight hundred years, so I do not know what else waits below. I do not even know if it is still there — but no one has passed through the house to reach it."

Before she can ask anything more — how, why, what else — his light flickers, dims. He appears startled. "Something is coming," he murmurs. "Do you feel that?"

She doesn't. He vanishes abruptly, leaving her alone in a spooky, creepy mansion with a massive organ she has no idea how to move.

Soulfire blinks into the Ethereal, the only place her spell can carry her, and drifts there in silence long enough to lose track of the hour.

⚔

Crystal starts awake at a low growl outside the door. She rolls out of bed at the rustling of — what? Twigs? Tree branches? It's louder outside, in the courtyard. She slips out the door to join Pinecone, whose fur stands on end as a snarl rises from him.

A pair of scarecrows cross into the courtyard, their burlap faces lit faintly from within by ember-light. They find Crystal, glaring at her with burning eyes that betray no intent toward the sorcerer. Crystal readies a Scorching Ray spell, just in case.

"Strangers. Trespassers in Berez," one announces, in a voice like dry stalks rubbing together. "My mistress, Lysaga, invites you to meet her. On the plain of battle. She has become aware of your presence."

"Tell her to meet us here," Crystal demands.

"She will not. You must go to her." The creature's eyes flare at the sorcerer.

Crystal considers this with the calm of someone who has already decided the answer doesn't matter. "Bring her this message. If she does not show up here within one day, we will seek her out ourselves."

"As you wish." The scarecrows bow — an unsettling motion for something with no real spine — and shamble back out into the dark.

Crystal exhales in relief, then turns her attention to Pinecone. Matted blood and partly closed slashes mark the wolf's body.

"Where is Soulfire, boy?"

The wolf cuts his eyes toward the greenhouse built off the southern wall of the mansion's courtyard. Crystal notes the door is unlatched and approaches. Through the grubby glass panes, she can see a set of tracks on the tiled floor of the greenhouse leading to the interior of the mansion.

She follows, Pinecone padding after her.

⚔

Half an hour, maybe. It's hard to tell when the world goes gray and quiet and slightly unreal for Soulfire in the Ethereal. When she finally slips back, Crystal is standing in the room, staring at her with the studied expression of someone who wants to look unimpressed, despite having just watched a person materialize out of thin air.

"Of course," Crystal says. "You were in the Ethereal."

Soulfire makes a snap judgment to tell her companion why she's here. "But, Crystal, if you tell Nike, or Biblo, or anyone else about this—"

"I won't."

"I'll take away your fire-lighting tools."

Crystal feigns shock and produces, with theatrical solemnity, a small notebook. She flips it open to write in a careful hand: Nike — untrustworthy. Biblo — untrustworthy. Zilk — untrustworthy.

Soulfire studies it, grinning. "Okay then. I trust you."

She spills out the story: "I saw a light in the greenhouse on my watch," Soulfire explains, quieter now. "It was the ghost — the Burgomaster. Said it was a reward for burying Maartin, I could have the house's treasure. It's beneath this organ. I was going to move it with Telekinesis, but then he said something was coming and disappeared before I could ask anything else. I blinked into the Ethereal Plane before I found out what."

Crystal's eyes light up in a way that should probably concern everyone. "Do you want to go get some treasure?"

"Yeah."

"On a scale of one to ten," Crystal says, already sizing up the organ, "how burnable does this look?" She gestures toward the organ, a wood-framed monster of dark wood and corroded brass pipework, rising twenty feet to a ceiling that seems too grand for a house this far gone. The rest of the room is a library, damp-smelling, everything in it looking like it would burn beautifully if given half a chance.

"I was just going to move it out of the way," replies Crystal.

Soulfire lays her hands on it — heavy, thousands of pounds heavy, fixed to the floor in a way she can feel but not confirm.

"Burning time?" Crystal asks, hopeful.

"Let's save that for later."

She casts Telekinesis and lifts it. The pipes shriek in protest, some thrusting up hard enough to punch through the ceiling, others snapping clean off and crumpling in a way that is, Crystal notes, very satisfactory. Underneath, flush against the exposed floor, is a trapdoor with an iron ring pull.

Crystal looks back at the wreckage of what was — this morning — a genuinely impressive piece of antique craftsmanship.

"We're the bad guys, aren't we?" she sighs.

"You're just figuring that out now?" The demon bends to pull the ring, but it doesn't budge. Crystal's Acid Splash lays atop the hatch in a puddle, inert.

A Detect Magic spell reveals a spike of strong abjuration magic. It is some sort of warding spell that keeps the hatch closed. Soulfire dispels it, and Crystal's acid begins to sizzle against the trapdoor, eating away at the wood and corroding the ring until it becomes honeycombed with rot.

It gives way all at once — crashing in on itself, tumbling down the stairwell below with a noise like the whole house falling in on itself. They wince at the racket but descend anyway, dragging the organ back into place above them with a last flex of telekinetic arcana to hide the way they came.

Below is not treasure. Below is a musky-smelling hallway that was once a kennel — skeletons of what might have been large dogs rest in piles at the backs of several rusted cages, chained by the neck. "They were left to starve in the dark!" Soulfire hisses indignantly, trying to both shield and comfort the whining Pinecone from the horror.

She crouches by one of the skeletal ribcages for a long moment before she can make herself keep walking. Past the kennel is a door, which opens easily. The smooth brick gives way to raw-cut stone, and a short passage opens into a room that answers nobody's question about treasure: a room ringing a wide summoning circle, stone heads arranged at intervals on the walls and a cauldron of something dark and congealed at its center.

Crystal and Soulfire exchange a look that says, unmistakably, this was not what either of them expected the treasure to look like.

⚔

The night is only just beginning to turn strange.

Zilk, Shifty, Nike and Biblo are woken by the distant sound of something crashing. Finding no one on watch, they pick their way through the greenhouse, following three sets of tracks pressed into dust thick enough to hold them: a dragonborn's stride, something smaller and humanoid, and the wide four-pawed prints of a wolf. The trail leads them into the mansion, straight to the same library. The massive organ at the end is wrecked in a way that makes no sense.

"It looks like something crushed it," Biblo says slowly, looking at the crumpled pipes.

"Old house," Zilk offers. "Maybe it just... fell apart on its own."

The three sets of footprints walk straight up to the ruined organ and vanish beneath it.

Nike doesn't wait for an explanation. She reads the situation the way she reads most situations — with a mace already in hand — and decides the organ, structurally speaking, is the enemy. She swings. It answers her with shattering wood and ivory, a groan of tortured air rushing through bent brass, half musical note, half something closer to a growl, and every strike sends up a fresh cloud of eight-hundred-year-old dust.

⚔

Down in the cult chamber, Soulfire and Crystal freeze at the noise thundering through the floor above them.

"Oh gosh," Soulfire mutters. "What are they doing up there?"

⚔

Above, Biblo joins in without asking questions. He and Nike hammer away at what was once a grand pipe organ.

Zilk, meanwhile, has wandered off with Shifty toward a small table with a dusty vase atop it, tucked into a small alcove at the bottom of the short flight of steps. Is it a stool? He isn't entirely sure, and the only way to know for certain is to sit on it. He plucks the vase up and sits.

The table collapses beneath him. On his lap, from within the toppled vase, something rattles — clink, clink, clink — and when he tips it out, a small brass key drops into his palm.

"Fascinating," he says, turning it over. "Guys, I found a key. What do you think it's for?"

He doesn't get an answer, because that's the moment the floor beneath him decides to have an opinion. A black tentacle, glistening and sucker-lined, coils itself around one of his legs. A second follows around the other. Shifty, hearing the commotion, comes bounding over to help — and instead of striking the tentacle at his throat, stomps directly on Zilk's foot.

"That's not helping," Zilk manages, as a third tentacle slides up under his armor and wraps twice around his neck.

"It's fine, probably," Shifty says, unbothered, and takes another swing that connects with Zilk's face instead of anything remotely tentacle-shaped.

A fourth tentacle pins Zilk's wrist to the floor. Beneath him, the wooden planks of the floor begin to crack — a long fault line spreading from where he sits, running the length of the hallway. Zilk fights the grip with everything he has and loses. The floor gives way all at once, and he and Shifty drop through into the dark together in a spray of splinters and dust.

⚔

The enormous fracturing sound that steals Zilk and Shifty away is hidden in the racket made by Nike and Biblo, deconstructing the pipe organ. As they pause for breath, quiet reasserts itself momentarily in the library, dust settling around them like fine snow.

Below Biblo's feet, he becomes aware of knocking. The barbarian drops to his knees.

"Hello?" he shouts at the thick, musty carpet.

A voice rises up through the floor, muffled but patient, amused and entirely unbothered by the arrival of two uninvited guests.

"Why don't you come down here?" it inquires, conversationally.

And with a scrape of ancient wood dragging across stone, the organ behind them shoves forward on its own, revealing a ragged hole with stairs descending into the dark. The strong stink of acid rises, making their eyes burn.