Into the Heart of Pendergrast Manor

Session Summary: 10/01/2023

Ahhhh, the manor reveals its FULL extent! Having destroyed the muses and documented Gregor's long history of obsession and connection to the Owl Gate's corruption, the heroes pushed deeper through the underground passages beneath Pendergrast Manor. The architecture here was not the household structure above but something OLDER, something that predated the manor itself, repurposed and extended by generations of Pendergrast resources into a private realm that existed in the space between the ancestral home and whatever Gregor had been building in the Dreamlands.

The chambers they moved through bore the evidence of sustained ritual practice over years: circles drawn and redrawn until the stone itself had absorbed their impressions, implements cleaned and stored with the habitual care of a craftsman who takes pride in his tools regardless of what those tools are used to create. There were notebooks and journals, not Gregor's most intimate writings but working documents, experimental logs, the research of a man applying his considerable intelligence to purposes that required both patience and precision.

They learned the mechanism of the binding circles that had held Voleta and Andreii and the others. They found diagrams that explained not merely how to construct such circles but how to disrupt them, specifically a counter-ritual that required the sacred paints from Flustern Schatte and a correct sequence of actions that would release a captive without triggering the explosion of dark energy that had punished them when they had freed Voleta by improvisation. Knowledge was power, and power was exactly what they would need in the confrontations to come.

There were also materials that connected Gregor clearly and irrefutably to Lena Mueller's death four years prior. He had not acted on impulse or in a moment of terrible passion. He had PLANNED it with the same methodical care that characterized everything else they had found in this place, and he had done it because he needed a specific soul in a specific location for a specific ritual, and Lena had been the most convenient candidate who also satisfied his years of obsessive desire. The heroes understood now that the gate's corruption, the children's comas, the pentagram across Lepidstadt, and Lena's death were all STAGES in a single grand working that Gregor had been conducting for years!