Quoted By:
Your bare feet are tender and soft things. A lifetime cocooned in socks and sturdy shoes has done nothing to harden them. The moment you step through the threshold and onto debris-lined floors, you immediately feel it. It is like stepping onto a floor with thousands of Lego pieces scattered about. It is a testament to the depths of your grudge and anger against the Wyvern that this is not enough to stymie your icy determination to kill the damn thing.
You'd step barefoot into Hell itself if necessary.
The abandoned manor has dust everywhere. At one point, the owner or heirs of the property attempted to box up belongings to remove but gave up midway. A hammer-wielding Baphomet pokes a slightly frozen cardboard box, causing it to spill out the items inside it. Clothing, books, and some dishes; the abandoned detritus of a family who no longer residing here.
The Wyvern has gone this way: shoji paper doors shoved aside, a trail of deep scratches and gouges on the floor, and tatami mats tell the tale. Your group follows the trail grimly and with tense anticipation. Painted shoji doors block line of sight; it is necessary to move them aside and unblock the view of wasted, ruined rooms.
Each and every one of them shows signs of sudden abandonment. One room has a table with a teacup; the liquid has long since evaporated from it and left behind a stain ringing the white porcelain. There are books lying scattered on the ground in another room, with an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts nearby. The kitchen has black, shriveled vegetables laying on the chopping board next to a rusty, chipped knife. The corridors connecting the rooms are numerous and interminable.
There are so many rooms.
Too many rooms.
"Stop, stop! <span class="mu-i">Huff</span>. It's not because I need a break, you hear... But... There's something wrong. I've been counting our steps the moment we entered this manor. A thousand trots we've done. Why haven't we reached the back?"
What you had suspected has been spoken aloud by another.
"The Wyvern is a blind, dumb beast that relies on sound to find its prey. Meep. It is incapable of trapping us in endless rooms. Something is afoot. AND I DON'T LIKE IT!" With a swift slash of his axe, the Baphomet leader angrily knocks down another shoji paper door to reveal a long corridor that seemed to stretch out to infinity. It is so long that your eyes cannot perceive the end of it.
"Look upward," a colorless sentence from the guide tears out from his reluctant throat.
Upwards, your eyes go up to look. At first, in the pale light of the lamp, you do not understand what you are trying to see. The ceiling panels are made of very old wood that somehow avoided rotting despite the abundance of moisture everywhere. There are brownish smears and shapes on them. The years have reduced them to something akin to watermarks. As your eyes track the strange slashings and spatters of brown, you eventually lock on to what looks like a footprint.
