A Red Cap and a Tangled Web

Session Summary: 04/09/2023

Ahhhh, suspects begin to EMERGE! The heroes returned to Baba Dania, the village wise woman, who proved far more forthcoming than on their previous visit once she understood the gravity of what they were investigating. She confirmed what the inn's guest book had already whispered: Gregor Pendergrast, youngest scion of one of Lepidstadt's Five Great Families, had visited Poiana as a boy of roughly ten years old, ten years prior. He had been a playmate of young Lena Mueller's during that visit and had developed what Baba Dania diplomatically described as an OBSESSION. Less diplomatically, he had been an unsettling child who refused to accept that Lena had friends other than him.

Armed with this thread, the heroes followed it to the old Mueller homestead, where Lena and her family had lived before her disappearance. The house had been abandoned for four years and showed signs of prior search and disturbance. One of the protective sigils carved into the doorframe had been deliberately damaged, scratched over with what appeared to be the letter G. Not subtle. Then again, obsession rarely is.

Inside they found a Red Cap, a vicious little fey murderer in the service of the Withering Man, lurking among the dusty rooms. The battle was nasty and confined, the Red Cap fighting with the gleeful savagery of a creature that genuinely enjoys its work. The heroes destroyed it, but its presence raised disturbing questions. Why was a servant of the Withering Man at Lena Mueller's former home? What did this Fey lord want with a murder four years old?

The answer lay in the well. When they examined it, they found BLACK SAND floating on the surface of the water, dark grains swirling in patterns that had no natural explanation. The well and the chapel, Geist informed them, shared the same underground aquifer. The corruption leaking from the damaged Owl Gate was spreading through the very water table beneath their feet, contaminating the land itself. Whatever was bleeding through the gate was not merely supernatural; it was SYSTEMIC. And if it had reached the water, it had reached everything that depended on the water.

They returned to Baba Dania with their findings, and the web of guilt and conspiracy continued to tighten around the name of Gregor Pendergrast, youngest son of a great family and, it was becoming clear, a very disturbed young man indeed!