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Even at rest, you can't escape the fires of industry. Your dreams are of a choking darkness and brutal, oppressive heat, a fire that burns in opposition to nature – burning without heat, burning away all purity and goodness. The dream stays with you for a while after you wake, the heat pressing down on you like a heavy blanket. Shaking it off, you sit up in bed and look around as your eyes slowly adjust to the darkness.
You're not the only one who's awake. Across the room, you can just barely make out Clarissa's silhouette through the gloom. Her eyes, blacker still than the shadows around them, find yours, and a deep shiver runs down your spine. In that moment, you wonder if you've really woken up at all, or if this is just another dream.
-
Over breakfast, you keep sneaking glimpses of Clarissa. She looks as if she slept poorly, but she's hardly unique in that regard – everywhere you look, you see bloodshot eyes and dark shadows. Fatigue or no, however, you still have a job to do. You've decided to make the temple itself your base of operations here - it has sufficient provisions to last you for a good long while, although you're desperately hoping that your investigation won't last that long, and there are plenty of spare beds.
“Master Kauffmann seems to be a bit of a scholar,” Harriet announces as you eat, daring to break the silence over the breakfast table, “We were having a look around yesterday. He's got a lot of books and papers here – he was doing research, I think, about the local spirits. Is that what priests normally do, when they're not busy with, um, other priest stuff?”
“Quite so,” Master Brehm tells her, “Of course, not every priest is going to be a natural scholar. But Kauffmann always was – I trained him, you know, although he didn't last very long as an Exorcist. He said, as I recall, that the priesthood was his true calling. We found some interesting material, actually. Persephone?”
Persephone looks up from her breakfast, then sighs at the interruption. “It's not THAT interesting,” she points out, “There used to be spirits of fire here, hidden deep within the mountains, but they disappeared when men settled in the area. That's it.”
“They just disappeared?” you ask, “What happened to them?”
“We don't know!” Harriet adds, her enthusiasm more than making up for Persephone's disinterest, “Or, at least, Master Kauffmann didn't. I think that's part of what he was trying to find out. There was something else though, there were rumours-”
“Baseless rumours,” the pale girl interrupts, “By his own admission, Kauffmann never found any solid evidence. Not even a single actual eyewitness willing to own up to it. If I was a cynical woman, I might think it was all just locals playing a prank on a foolish outsider. But as I'm clearly NOT a cynical woman...”
“Enough,” Master Brehm interrupts, putting an end to the games.
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