The Castle - Floor 4

Frac investigates the room using detect magic.

Wide-eyed and with trembling hands, Anton sits next to the reading table.

"This cannot be…", he mumbled softly, as tears began to roll down his youthful face.

He needed only read the first couple of sentences to realize, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the letter he had written to Lydia, the trapper’s daughter. Beautiful as a blooming spring flower, she had been a couple of years younger than Anton. Her father had been a good friend of his own; it went beyond good neighbourliness, though: like his parents, the trapper had been a member of their diabolical, doomsday cult.

The trapper had been central to the breaching of the Third Seal, Anton’s parents had told him. Used to skinning game to sell their fur, he had had an unsettling familiarity with killing. For the seal he had needed nobler game, however, and he had sacrificed his own wife, Lydia’s mother.

The girl had not been told. "To preserve her purity of heart", Anton’s mother had told him, with a sickening smile that made the boy wonder if Lydia too, was meant for later sacrifice.

Years later, when he had been given over to the Madeeran priests — yet another orphan of the Rackshalt uprising—, he thought often of the girl. Her father had escaped the fighting, he had been told.

Over multiple sleepless nights, he had written this very same letter, full of passion and guilt, full of longing and dread. He struggled with his inner demons, wondering whether he sought to rekindle his connection with Lydia out of the desire to find her and ask her to share his life or if, in the end, he sought her purity of heart to sacrifice over an altar to the Dark Thing, in one of the many episodes where he spoke in different tongues and sought strange objects in cemeteries, while covered in blood he did not recall drawing.

He had torn the letter and burned it, lest the dark temptation that rotted his heart may be given leave to wreak more misery in the world. He had burned it, hadn’t he? And yet the words were there, in front of him, in his own hand-writing.

"What is the quickest way to get to Clarence? He is in desperate need of healing." Varos will look out the window to see if he can see Clarence,

Can Frac touch the painting? He tells the group that it ripples with supernatural powers.

Roll

Anton tried to compose himself swiftly, though he failed at it. He stood up, folded the letter and slid it into his robes. Despite the shock of his experience, he felt invigorated by the rediscovery of this link to the past in this darkest of places. He observed his remaining companions, all active in different manners and obviously unaffected. They had had the courtesy of allowing to wallow for a few moments in this odd mix of loss and bliss. He noticed the goblin wizard touching the præternaturally vivid portrait of the Count, while Varos — always the pragmatist — thought of their fallen companion below, and the urgent need to heal him.

"I don't know how to get there, but I agree we must go soon. There is the matter of the blade... it rested, what was it?" he scowled as he tried to recall the apparition's words "Yes, a place of great heights, where the stone itself beats with life. That would be up, and Clarence down."