Beneath a Shrouded Sun

The fog followed us out of Baldur’s Gate and never once let go.

We’d spent the night warm and dry at the inn instead of the temple — the barkeep comped our stay, bless him, and I’ll not turn down a soft bed when the Morninglord offers one through a stranger’s kindness. But dawn didn’t come the way it’s supposed to. I looked for the sun the whole first hour on the road and couldn’t find her. Just grey, pressing down on good cobblestone until the cobblestone gave up too, and the road went to mud and ruts under our feet. Five hours of that. Wolves calling somewhere off in the murk, and Borovia nowhere on any map any of us carried. Amanodel took that harder than the rest of us — a place that doesn’t exist on any chart isn’t just strange to a mapmaker, it’s a wrongness she can’t quite let go of, and I could see it working at her the whole ride out. Kolyan Indirovich. Ireena. Names nobody in that tavern would own to knowing, and the way their eyes slid off the questions told me more than their answers did.

Then the gates. Two headless stone guardians, heads sitting in the grass like they’d been set down gently and forgotten. I said a small prayer over them anyway — didn’t seem right to walk past a fallen thing, even a stone one, without a blessing. The gates opened on their own before we ever touched them. Screamed on their hinges like something in pain. And then shut behind us, and that was that. No going back the way we came.

Not far past them, the smell hit — you learn to know that smell, in this work. A man, dead some days, still clutched a letter sealed with two letters: K.I. Paw prints ringed him, big ones — wolf, maybe worse, and quick, at least, whatever else that place has waiting in it. The letter in his hand told a gentler story than his body did: he’d loved someone named Ireena, called her the love of his life, the ink gone soft with the rain. I closed his eyes before we left him. Somebody should have.

We came out of that forest into a village that didn’t feel like a village at all. Slick black cobblestones, houses standing like tombstones in a row, and somewhere out past the dark, someone was crying. Then we found where the crying was coming from — two children, alone in the middle of a dead street. Rose and Thorn, they called themselves. Their baby brother Walther trapped upstairs, they said, and something monstrous shut up down in the basement — and their mama and papa had gone in days before to see to it and just never come back out.

I sat down at their level. Held their hands a minute. I’ve talked to enough scared, hurting people to know real terror from a lie, and darlin’, there wasn’t a false thing in either one of those children’s faces. Whatever else was true about that house, those two babies believed every word of it. That was enough for me. Let’s make your next choice a better one doesn’t mean much if you won’t walk into the dark for someone smaller than you.

So in we went.

The house wore its money well — a coat of arms over the door, a golden windmill on red, portraits of stern aristocrats watching us cross their foyer. A longsword mounted over a black marble hearth, carved vines and satyrs climbing the walls like the house itself couldn’t decide if it wanted to impress you or unsettle you. It managed both. We found a hunter’s den — taxidermied wolves, a stag’s head, furs on the chairs, a cask of wine that Amanodel poured out and found flat and grey-tasting, like drinking through a head cold. Locked cabinets gave up crossbows and bolts. A cloak closet gave up a very fine top hat that Atwaad decided was his now. Small mercies, small joys — I let the boy have his hat.

Upstairs, a portrait stopped Gabriel cold: the same two children, the same weary parents, and a mother’s face turned toward the cradled baby with something that wasn’t love at all. I didn’t like that portrait. I don’t think any of us did.

The house split us up the way houses like that always do. Gabriel and Nyx stayed below to keep working the second floor. Karku went ahead of me up to the third, with Atwaad close behind, and I followed onto a landing gone cold in a way the rest of the house hadn’t been — a draft with teeth in it, oil lamps standing unlit, and a lone suit of black plate armor keeping watch by the stairs.

I should have known better than to trust a house that quiet.

I’d just reached the top of the stairs when it woke. Clank, clank, clank — no voice, no warning, just a blade coming down and catching me before I even had my footing. We fought it in that narrow hall, all elbows and bad footing, and it caught Atwaad hard enough to put him down too. I got to him fast — stabilized him first, hands steady even with my own ears ringing, then laid a proper Cure Wounds on him, calling the light down through my palms the way Sister Elira taught me. Healed him up near enough to whole. He came back up swearing and grinning like he always does. That boy’s too stubborn to stay down for long, and thank Lathander for it.

When the armor finally crashed to the floor, Atwaad went looking for a body worth looting and found nothing at all inside it. Just metal. Just something wearing the shape of a guardian with nobody home.

We kept going. A master bedroom, a wardrobe, a jewelry box, another portrait of the same unhappy family. And the whole time, that third floor sat colder than it had any right to be, like the house was holding its breath around us. Gabriel said what we were all thinking — this wasn’t the story those children told us. Something here didn’t match.

Then we found the cradle.

She came up out of nowhere — a nursemaid, or what was left of one. Thin, terrified-looking, and screaming before any of us could say a word to her. I don’t know what she’d seen in her life or her death to leave her like that, but grief curdled long enough turns into something that doesn’t recognize kindness anymore, only hunger. Gabriel went down fast — hit hard enough that the sound he made when he fell about stopped my own heart. Nyx was on him in a breath, standing over him before turning straight back into the fight himself, hit after hit, stubborn as anything until the rest of us caught up. Between all of us — flame, steel, and finally three good strikes of pure force — that poor spirit went still for good. She dissipated, and whatever ghost-image of a baby she’d been guarding went with her.

There was a beat after — a few seconds that stretched out like an eternity where nobody moved and Gabriel just lay there. I got across the room to him as fast as my legs would carry me, got my hands on him, and stabilized him right there on the floor. His breathing came back steady under my palms before anything else in that room felt steady again.

We hadn’t gotten him back up yet when we found the crib in the room beyond — black shroud, a small bundled shape underneath it.

Blankets. Just blankets.

No baby. Never any baby, maybe — or not one that stayed. Gabriel lay there through all of it, stable but still down, until Amanodel finally reached him and called down a Healing Word that pulled him back to us whole. I don’t ever want to hear that boy’s death rattle again. I don’t know yet what that means for Walther, or for two children still waiting on a dead street for parents who may not be coming back. I don’t know what’s still down in that basement, or what kind of house needs a nursery it never used and a nursemaid who never let go of the space where a child should have been.

What I know is this: we found no bodies to bury tonight, but I don’t think that’s the same as good news. Sometimes the worst thing a house can tell you is that the grief inside it never had anywhere to go.

I’ve been sitting with something else too. Gabriel’s frustrated with us, and he’s not wrong to be. We kept splitting up in that house tonight, and he’s got the sharpest head in this party for reading a room before it turns on you — that’s exactly the kind of caution we needed from the first step in, not after someone’s already down and making death saves. We owe him better than that going forward. Talk it through before we scatter across three floors of a haunted house, not after.

Even so, I wouldn’t trade a single one of them. Amanodel’s got a mapmaker’s patience even when the rest of us are ready to charge in swinging. Atwaad’s too stubborn to stay down, and thank Lathander for it — twice tonight. Nyx moves through a fight like he was born to it, and I’m grateful past words he was standing over Gabriel when it mattered. Karku keeps his own counsel more than most, but he shows up when it counts — that last strike on the spectre was his. Rough as tonight went, I’ll walk into the dark with this family again any night the Morninglord asks it of me.