Gregor’s Muses and the Choir of Horrors

Session Summary: 09/17/2023

Ahhhh, the DEPTHS of Gregor's depravity stand revealed! Beyond the peeled-back wall lay a dark pit and a shallow grave, and within that grave were three desiccated women in tattered white dresses, their flesh long past corruption and into the dry dusty stillness of the extremely long dead. Each of them had a musical note carved into the skin of her forehead. Single notes: Do, Re, Mi, rendered in flesh with a precision that spoke of care taken, of time invested, of obsession applied with surgical focus.

They rose when Mutu entered the chamber. They sang. Each produced a single note, a pure and terrible tone that harmonized with the others into a three-note chord of such concentrated wrongness that it pressed against the inside of the skull and resonated with something the heroes' bodies understood as DANGER even before the conscious mind processed the sound. The three-note harmony was a weapon, and the muses wielded it with the mechanical certainty of things that have no agenda beyond the song and no fear of the bodies they no longer properly inhabited.

The battle in that underground chamber was brutal. The confined space worked against the heroes' usual tactics, and the harmonized chord's effect on their nervous systems cost them crucial moments of reaction time. But they fought through it, destroying the muses one by one until the harmony broke and silence reclaimed the pit. In the silence they buried the three women again, because whatever these creatures had become they had been human beings once, with names and families and a future that Gregor had stolen from them.

Deeper into the manor's underground passages they found further evidence of Gregor's years of obsession and carefully maintained depravity. Documents written in his hand connected the damage done to the Owl Gate to specific rituals he had performed. There were letters to Lena Mueller written by a ten-year-old boy during a summer visit that began with childish affection and ended, by the final page, with something that should have been recognized and addressed by every adult who saw it at the time. There were later letters never sent. There were pages that made Charles set his jaw and look at the ceiling for a long moment before trusting himself to speak about what they needed to do next. The picture was complete. The reckoning was close!