Chapter Two: The Hippocampus on the Cracked Lintel

Zangua gets lucky, in a manner of speaking. The first bone he fishes out of the pit is unmistakably the jawbone of an adult human.

There's still nobody but sheep and cows around. Given the wet state of the pit, it's safe to say that it's been a few days, at least, since anything was burned in there.

Can we assume you're telling the rest of the party what you found?

Mordred et al, should I assume you're going to search the ground floor of the house, as long as it seems safe? Or do you want to leave it alone and regroup outside?

The bones have been burned so thoroughly that Felor can't derive much information from their condition.

Shamush looks around. It's an odd bandit raid that leaves healthy sheep and cattle untouched.

Meanwhile, Mordred leads a search of the house. Heading left from the entrance, he passes a sitting room with a loom and a few dressmaker's dummies, a rustic tapestry on the wall that looks as though it may have been made in this very room. There are stairs leading up to the second floor, but he bypasses them to proceed cautiously through the door to the next room.

That room looks to be servants' quarters, six unmade beds and a few boxes full of meager possessions. Beyond that is a corner room full of linens, tools, and firewood; past that is a dining room with one long rectangular table and a smaller round one. The remains of two half-eaten meals sit on the smaller table.

After the dining room is a large kitchen adjoining a large pantry, well-stocked with jars of wine and oil and grain, baskets of onions, sausages hanging from the ceiling. There is a hatch leading to the cellar in the corner of the pantry.

The pantry adjoins another sitting room with another staircase leading up to the second floor; this returns you to the atrium. The door left ajar here takes you to the living room, with a large stone hearth at one end and a tiled bathing pool on the other. Double doors left wide open lead to the courtyard, which contains three small fruit trees, one of which is bearing small brown pears, and a stone birdbath.

A narrow hallway runs from the living room around the courtyard, with several sliding doors exiting into it. A sizeable accumulation of junk, old tools, and boxes have been stowed away in this hallway.

The first floor of the house is, overall, somewhat messy and run-down, but there are no signs of violence and not a living soul to be found.

The hatch leads to a small root cellar. You find nothing remarkable inside.

The stairs from the loom room lead up to a large white room with several shuttered windows, a table bearing several potted plants, now wilted, and a large birdcage. Three songbirds lie dead on the floor of the cage. There are children's toys scattered on the floor: a few dolls, a leather ball, a stick-horse.

A door beside the stairs leads out to a balcony around the courtyard. To your left, two doors lead to large bedrooms, each with its own privy chamber. The first one you enter is well-furnished and decorated with tapestries and painted pots. The bed is unmade and a large trunk has been left open, with several articles of clothing strewn about the floor. The other bedroom is more modestly appointed, with fewer decorative touches.

On the other side of the house, the room from which the other set of stairs would have taken you, you find yet more boxes and trunks and excess furniture, as well as three small wooden shrines set against the wall: one dedicated to Ziu-Pater, another to his consort Erat, and a third shrine filled with a multitude of small clay idols, most likely the shrine to the family's ancestors.

On this third shrine, a single oil lamp is burning.

The door to the right of the stairs in this room leads to a long hallway with five doors on one side. The door at one end leads to a privy chamber. The next three doors are left open, and reveal small, simple bedrooms. The last door is shut.

A couple days, from the looks of it.

They didn't die by violent means, their bodies are intact. But you can't definitively tell any more than that.

Mordred throws open the closed door.

A small person sitting on the bed, wedged up into the corner of the room, reflexively pulls her knees in closer to her chest and lets out a short, high-pitched gasp. But she stays in place, eyes wide, staring at Mordred, breathing with swiftly increasing rapidity. It's a girl in a dirty shift, with short blonde hair and tanned skin, who looks to be no more than four or five years old.

She doesn't say anything, or move. She just keeps staring at you.

Since we never determined exactly who else was searching the house with Mordred, anybody who would like to be in range to try and talk to her can go ahead and do so.