Characters
Aria, a paladin struggling with her true nature
Heck, an affable revenant looking for answers
Panthalassa, a necromancer with a missing arm
Garazi, up and coming witch with a bird familiar
Willard Corn and King Beebo, a farmer and his monkey (?)
Events
With the departure of Daytona, and the relative safety afforded by Hemlock Hollow, the party had a bit of downtime to rest, recuperate, and run various errands. Garazi went to Adrian Vergara's house to return his calling card case and ask for a favor. She was surprised that her knock on the door was answered by Ilyona, the girl who had been melded with a tree outside of Borza. Ilyona explained that Adrian had offered her a job as his maid; when Garazi took her aside and asked if Adrian was a good master, the girl appeared genuinely happy with her current employment.
Over tea, Garazi brought up the compendium of death gods and grave spirits that they had found and needed translated. Adrian felt confident he could make a workable translation; Garazi directed him to focus on the entry for the Nightmother and the entry about revenants. She also produced the sheet music for the Hymn of the Nightmother but, being an unmusical sort, Adrian could not make heads or tails of it. As he walked her to the door, Adrian promised to visit her family's farmstead when he had a translation in hand.
Meanwhile, Panthalassa and Aria visited the Ushers to return the two masks they had recovered from the cemetery. This time, they were met at the door by a stoop-backed old woman who seemed blind. As before, they were lead to a parlor--but this one was littered with poorly maintained taxidermy. Panthalassa asked again whether the Fraternitie du Cadavre could have any motive for stealing her arm in particular. This Usher had a theory: if the Fraternitie was intent on creating an avatar of the Nightmother capable of raising the long dead, they would need specific body parts for its construction. Specifically, the woman said that six different arms would be required: the arm of "Everyone's Child," the arm of "The Grandfather" the arm of "The Soldier Boy," the arm of "The Preacher Man," the arm of "The Spinster," and the arm of "The Wretched." Additionally, such a working would require the "heart of The Widow," the "teeth of the Concubine," and the womb of The Mother."
The old woman assumed that Panthalassa's arm was the arm of "Everyone's Child."
Panthalassa was concerned about the sustainability of the Usher's vigil over Madeline, especially since the Usher woman they were talking to kept coughing up things that squirmed in the handkerchief she expectorated into. Panthalassa attempted to link her mind with that of the "sleeping" Madeline Usher; she saw a vision through the other woman's eyes--walking the halls of an ancient school where the instruction was presided over by a devil.
On the night before Halloween, Heck and company had been invited to dinner by Helena Graymalk, the matriarch of the Graymalk clan of witches. They were shown in by Ivara Graymalk, one of Helena's many daughters. Unlike her sisters, Ivara dressed very primly, more like a school marm than a witch. Some members of the group noticed that Ivara seemed to be searching Heck's face for something.
Understanding that Heck's condition as a revenant meant he had significant gaps in his memory, Helena told him that he had once been a powerful warlock in his own right and had been the leader of a coven adept at converting pagans to the worship of the Devil. Heck had met his demise at the hands of Grigori Trask and his witchfinders; Helena suspected that a member of Heck's coven had betrayed him. When asked about revenants, Helena admitted that most revenants returned to the grave once their vengeance had been attained, but also dangled the intriguing notion that some revenants persisted in their second life if they found a reason to continue living.
Additionally, Aria's questions about her status as a creature made of song were answered by Helena as best she could. She conjectured that Aria may want to seek the Needle of Golgotha in the mountains, a structure said to enable communication with the elder gods of the Outer Dark.
Beebo announced that he wanted to go to the Skarnesti Circus. What on Earth could a monkey want at the circus?
During the course of dinner, Helena commended the group on the services they had provided by springing Coraline for Kholograt and saving Lorelei and her sisters from death in Borza. As such, she felt that she owed the group several favors. One of those favors was cashed in immediately: the group asked Helena to scry to the locations of Grigori Trask and Panthalassa's missing arm. Helena asked them what their plans were for Halloween night. Since they seemed to be in search of answers, she offered them a possibility: they could venture into the Forest of Loss, a popular place for suicides where the boundary between the living and the dead was especially thin on Samhain, because many people had reported finding the answers they were in search of in that unhallowed stretch of woods. Helena told them that if they did venture into the Forest of Loss on Halloween they should be wearing masks so that the spirits of the dead would not recognize them as the still living.
Upon venturing into the Forest of Loss on Halloween night, the group was quickly surrounded by a fog that separated them from the other groups in the woods. When they emerged from the fog, the found themselves cresting a hill overlooking a small village lit by jack o' lanterns and carved gourds. The first building on the path leading into the village was an eatery serving soup and dumplings. From the way the dumplings fell through the faces of the two elderly people "eating" at a table outside--only to plop back into their bowls--the group correctly ascertained that they were now among ghosts. The proprietor of the shack, a woman named Danila, knew that she was deceased, though she cautioned that not everyone in village was aware that they were specters.
She also informed them that the town was caught up in a conflict between two vengeful women--Kestra at the old farmhouse and Sadira of the House of the Maiden. There was a third woman, the Widow, but she had somehow escaped being trapped in the cursed village of Gallhart. According to Danila, all three women were brought to Gallhart by a sorcerer named Valton Blakely. Blakely intended to sacrifice the women and use their body parts to construct an avatar of the Nightmother to--all to resurrect one of Krevborna's tsars. This eerily reflected the supposed goal of the Fraternitie du Cadavre.
The group decided to explore the Widow's house first. They found it dark, but the front door was unlocked. Inside, everything was neat and tidy. There was a family portrait above the fireplace showing a man with dark hair parted in the middle, a tall woman with blonde hair and a beatific smile, and a young boy whose looks favored his mother. In the attic, they found trunks of clothes belonging to the man and the son; presumably, both had died and their things had been put out of sight.
The Widow's cottage was near a pagan shrine, so the group decided to poke around in there as well. The shrine had been vandalized; the altar was purposefully smashed, the ceiling was staved through, and the place had clearly received no visitors for many years.
The party's next stop was the House of the Maiden. The building smelled of incense and was lit by a number of paper lanterns glowing with a macabre green light. The door of the House of the Maiden was answered by a slim woman whose hair was held in place by lacquered hair sticks. There was a series of pigeonholes behind the desk in the entrance room; each pigeonhole held a single cloth doll. Nine of the dolls were turned to face the back of the cabinet--only three faced forward. From this detail, the group correctly guessed that the House of the Maiden was a brothel and that the dolls signified which girls were currently "occupied" and which were currently available.
Abetta, the House of the Maiden's procuress, showed the group into the common room. The most notable "fixture" of the room was a nude woman suspended from the ceiling by fine thin threads. A woman with straight black hair, wearing a gossamer robe decorated with chrysanthemums, was playing a balalaika. This woman was introduced as Sadira. Sadira reiterated the facts of her conflict with Kestra at the farmhouse; the crux of the matter was that Kestra had stolen her teeth, a fact she underlined by removing her dentures. She had no real reply when asked why she and Kestra did not join forces against Blakely, who seemed to be the real cause of their woes. Ultimately, the group agreed to venture into the farmhouse and steal back Sadira's teeth with the reward of "a secret only the dead know" hanging in the balance as their payment.
Kestra's farmhouse was surrounded by a metal fence, the gate of which creaked as they opened it. Similarly, the porch's boards moaned as they traversed them. There was a pitcher, its glass surface dotted with condensation, on a small table by the door. Aria tasted it and confirmed that it contained sweet tea. Garazi sent her familiar into the house to scout around; the bird reported that there was a strange sliding metal door just off the living room.
The group crept in; predictably, the metal door made an awful racket as Heck slid it open. Just then, one of the other doors in the house crashed open and two figures, one a man in stained overalls and a pumpkin obscuring his face and the other a woman in a babydoll dress wearing a goat head mask, came barreling toward them. The man bore a sledgehammer and the woman held a cleaver in one hand and a butcher's knife in the other. The battle that followed was fraught, especially when a third participant--this man clad in Napoleonic uniform and his face painted like a clown--entered through the front door and began firing a pistol and swinging a cutlass. A few members of the party were injured, but ultimately they were able to kill their foes--even after a botched spell from Panthalassa briefly reanimated one of their attackers!
They then searched the house. The room beyond the sliding metal door was an abattoir, complete with human torsos hanging from hooks. They found the personal affects of their three attackers, including four unlabeled glass vials full of unidentifiable liquids. The darkness in the cellar proved impenetrable by the light of their lantern, but they could see two large yellow eyes shining in the shadows. They had found Kestra.
Kestra admitted that she had Sadira's teeth in her possession, but was equally uninterested in the question of why they hadn't joined forces against Blakely. However, Kestra added that she hated Sadira because the woman had stolen her womb--which she wanted back. In fact, she made an offer of her own: if the group got her womb from Sadira, she would give them a secret known only to the dead and tickets to ride the last "iron beast of the Vlaak."
We'll see how they resolve this next time.
