velvet ought to be, though, I discovered. Rather it chaffed against my fingertips, as if dunked in saltwater and dried with a crust, or left out in the sun for the fibers to fry.
But I only had the vaguest moment to absorb the texture of it before the visions rushed me, clamoring into my mind's eye. I saw a fair young woman standing by the concealed window, swathed in a stunning, sullied pale green and ivory gown. She was glancing over her shoulder into the center of the room, and a ripple ran through the curtains right before the vision grew jerky, and the woman shrieked and disappeared into some hard-to-track black velvet maw.
I recoiled, startled by the vision even though I had expected no less. It was still hard to watch, hard to invite in without being properly affected by it. But I recovered, letting my breath center me, and slowly reached to touch those treacherous curtains again. The velvet feel gave way to a taste – what humans tasted like. I swallowed that sickening impression to delve deeper, letting the visions smooth themselves out into a stream in my mind, rather than the bursts that liked to erupt out of the shadows and bombard me, as if trying to ward me back.
The resulting input told rather the same story as the first vision, but this time I let it play out, absorbing the nature of the incidents.
“What are you looking for?” Tanen's voice filtered into the visions, and I withdrew and turned away from the window.
“Just looking,” I replied vaguely, surveying the rest of the room.
I wandered about the edges, visiting the other windows. Each set of curtains warned of similar temperaments. When victims got too close to the windows, they got swallowed. No one ever saw anything but a ripple, either before or after a strangled yelp or scream, and then someone would be missing from their company.
I drifted into another room from there, quietly exploring the ground level of the mansion. Tanen wandered after me, resigning himself to silent exploration in my wake, not interrupting my obvious muse.
There was a fireplace in the next room, and while my interest was piqued by the strange symbols drawn in the ashes that lay there, what really caught my eye was the hollow that yawned where the back of the fireplace should have been. In all respects, it looked like a hallway.
The young slave woman appeared in the doorway behind us, seeing the direction of my interest.
“Is that–” I began.
“A hallway,” she confirmed.
“Where does it lead...?”
“No one knows. No one goes down that corridor, Monvay. It developed over a period of time; each time a fire was lit, it burned away a little more of the stone in the back, there, leaving more and more of an alcove.”
Intrigued, I stepped forward and crossed the hearth in a semi-crouch, where I could get a better look down the corridor and reach the first of its scorched stones. My fingers brushed through the soot, and I saw what the slave woman said to be true. As the alcove was burned into existence, the smoke of the fires began to get whisked backwards instead of upwards, where the tendrils painstakingly carved the rest of this new brick hallway. It had even designed the charred portraits that hung on the walls of the passage. Wondering what was framed in these portraits, I ducked further into the fireplace, careful not to disrupt the symbols in the ashes, and into the maw of the hallway.
“Vant...” Tanen piped up a little guardedly, but I was already in the passage.
It was carved at an odd angle, slanting off from the fireplace, and I treaded down the first bit of its length wondering where it led. But I had come for the portraits, and I stopped at the first to gaze at the figure hosted there. Some regal whiteskin, clothed in luxury. I moved on to the next, and found myself staring at the face of the young woman I'd seen in my first curtain-vision.
All it took was a touch to tell me: these were portraits of the masters of the house. The Baltanes.
Tanen ducked into the shaft after me, not wanting to see me disappear down some dark, mysterious passage by myself, as it was becoming increasingly clear I was prone to wandering.
“Who are these people?” he asked.
“The Masters,” I replied without looking at him, pattering a little deeper into the passage. He did not ask me