Β© 2009 by Magus Ronin
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"I can't believe I let myself get talked into this, hell of a way to spend my birthday. Accepting a dare to spend the night alone in a haunted house; come on Salyna, tough to get more clichΓ© horror film than that. And now I'm even talking to myself," Salyna said aloud as she stood in the dark second story room she had just broken into from the balcony.
Breaking in had been a breeze. She had jumped easily onto the second story balcony, and then it was just a simple matter of a quick telekinetic spell to unlock the balcony door. As she entered a large bedroom, she pushed through thick hanging drapes that had been drawn tightly closed in front of the porch window.
Well, whoever lives here, if anyone, really doesn't like the sunlight.
Maybe there is a vampire, or something, living here after all.
She mused mostly to entertain herself, realizing that the heavy drapes were most likely there simply to protect valuable furniture and artwork from damage. Though, that did suggest that this place actually had valuable furniture and artwork to protect.
As the drapes flapped closed behind her the room was plunged into almost complete darkness even to her inhumanly acute vision. The only illumination within the room was the ever-so-faint infrared glow of the heavy drapes slowly radiating away the heat of the day, and their light was far too weak to illuminate anything else in the room.
"Well I guess I should doublecheck to make sure that there's no one else in this house," Salyna said softly as she closed her eyes and concentrated. Weaving simple flows of mana, she extended her senses through the ethers, reaching out to every corner of the house, and sensing for any sign of life or spiritual activity. To her surprise she found no trace of life; had the house actually been abandoned, she would've expected at least a colony or two of mice or even some rats, but there was nothing. She also sensed several odd spiritual emanations, not what one would expect from a spirit. The emanations were definitely something else that she hadn't encountered before; they seemed inanimate for some reason. She decided she would have to investigate those emanations in more detail once she had explored the house thoroughly, but for now she figured she could risk a light. Unslinging her backpack she took out a simple headlamp, wrapping the strap around her head before turning it on. A soft red glow filled the room.
The bedroom was richly appointed with a massive canopy bed in the center. Built into the wall opposite the balcony was a massive stone fireplace, and above the fireplace was a portrait of a beautiful dark-haired man dressed in the style of a 17th-century French nobleman. In fact, now that she thought of it, the entire room was decorated in a style very much reminiscent of the court of the Sun King, though on a less elaborate scale. She wondered how much of the decor was a reproduction and how much authentic. If any of the art was authentic its value would be incredible.
She walked across the thick red and gold brocade rug that covered most of the bedroom floor, and stepped up to the fireplace. Cleanly split logs were set in the fireplace and extra logs had been set in a neat stack on the stone floor beside.
Her attention was called to the golden figurines dancing across the mantelpiece. The scene from classical Greek mythology was a vivid depiction of the thiasus, the ecstatic retinue of Dionysus. Riding atop a great leopard and carrying a staff wreathed in ivy Dionysus lead the procession of golden figures. Following Dionysus, a bare-chested maenad rode atop a great bull garlanded with grapes. More maenads and satyrs followed dancing and playing their pipes, with Great Pan at the center of it all. Next in the procession were men riding atop great horses, and finally bringing up the rear were four women personifying the seasons. For an instant it was as though the scene before her came alive; rich colors, the sweet scent of grapes, the sounds of pipes, ecstatic laughter, and singing filled her senses. Then as fast as it had come the vision vanished.
Salyna shook her head to clear it, her fire-gold hair whipping across her face. As the red light of her headlamp flashed across the painting above the mantelpiece, it reflected off a golden plaque set into the bottom of the frame. Leaning closer she admired the intricate carvings that had been worked into the frame, further depicting the thiasus in exquisite detail. She tried to make out the words inscribed into the gold of the plaque. The plaque was written in French, which was not one of the half-dozen languages her mother had made her learn as a child. She had been forced to study: English of course, but also Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Atlantean, and a strange language her mother called draconic. The best that she could do reading the plaque was to identify what she thought must be two names; Daniel, and Louis. As the figure in the painting did not match the portraits she had seen of King Louis, she figured it was probably this Daniel. Perhaps the portrait had been a gift from the King. The only other word she could decipher was '
apprΓ©ciation
,' whose meaning seemed fairly obvious.
This house was certainly nothing like what Salyna had been led to expect from what her friends had told her. She had expected a rundown abandoned house full of dust and cobwebs, maybe even a damp fetid basement complete with phosphorescent swamp gas. Definitely not this near-museum that looked like its owners could return at any moment.
Salyna decided that she needed to continue her exploration of the house to see what other treasures it offered. She made her way into the upstairs corridor, carefully checking to make sure there were no hidden motion detectors or other security systems. Now that she had seen the full opulence of this house she was doubly on her guard. This place was clearly not abandoned, and though the owner might not be home at the moment they also clearly had the finances for a high-end security system.
As Salyna moved carefully from room to room she was increasingly amazed by what she found. The house was a veritable historic repository. Each room contained artifacts originating from different eras and locations across the globe. The rooms were organized so that each was dedicated to a different region or time: Ancient Greece, Imperial Rome, Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Samaria, India, and China were represented among others. One room in particular had caught her eye; it seemed specifically dedicated to feudal-era Japan. In one corner a complete set of samurai war armor was on display, and next to the armor, mounted on a stand, was a samurai daishΕ, the paired set of katana and wakizashi symbolic of the samurai class. Power emanated from the katana, not terribly strong, but definitely distinct. For a moment Salyna prepared to reach out and take the sword, but then thought better of it and left the chamber.
She descended to the main floor and found a Victorian-era dining room and large adjoining kitchen. The kitchen was un-stocked. She checked both the refrigerator and the pantry, but there was no sign of any food. Even down on the first floor heavy drapes covered all the windows. Finally she found the library; bookshelves lined each wall floor-to-ceiling. Books of philosophy, theology, and the occult seemed to be the most common. There was also one section devoted entirely to prophecies and their interpretations, and another to natural sciences.
