Jovik works carefully, with focus and steady fingers, but he can feel that 'thing' at his side. It emanates such a chill, he can feel it biting deep into his fingers as he works at the door. Jovik focuses on his work. This was something he was always good at. For some reason, despite being someone who jumped from trouble to trouble (or fun to fun in his mind), he could always find the focus and patience when it came to real work. Not real work like his father defined it, but real work in the sense of trap springing, or lock picking, or ... well, there were other skills he practiced, but nothing that his mother would have liked to hear about.
He focused, and then he heard the lock click. He didn't even allow himself a smile. The presence at his side was too powerful, too full of hatred, too cold. As he turned the handle and pushed the door forward, he noticed the frost that had formed upon the iron door and the imprint his hand left in the thin layer of ice. His knuckles looked blue.
Jovik stepped back quickly and let the revenant slip through.
She continues to move with certainty and pace, turning left and then forcing open a wooden door on the inside wall and moving inside. You move inside the room after her.
This room looks to have once been some sort of arcane workshop, although little remains but broken glassware, shattered jars of pottery that contain dust and mold, and several rusty instruments and tools.
A row of soggy books sits on the northern end of a workbench along the western wall. At the other end of the workbench, what looks like three iron birdcages sit, each containing a dead diseased rat. To the east, two stained-glass windows loom. The northern window depicts a thin man with gaunt features drinking a foul-looking brew of green fluid, while the southern one shows the same man but in an advanced state of decay, as if he had been dead for several weeks. His arms raised and head thrown back in triumph, his rotting body turns to smoke and spirals into a seven-sided box.
Danth, moving into the room after Kael and Mal, feels a sudden unnatural urge to cross the room and examine the books. The flood of emotion and the compulsion to move across the room towards the books is frightening, but then the fear sinks down and is drowned beneath different emotions. Someone else's emotions.
When he does so, he is flooded with information about Vorel Foxglove, the man who originally built Foxglove Manor. He was a necromancer and was seeking the path to lichdom here in this house. You see glimpses of him poring over ancient texts to learn the rituals, gathering strange and disturbing components for the lich transformation potion, building his phylactery (using the harvested souls of four of the world’s longest-lived creatures: a sphinx, a treant, a kraken, and a roc), finally culminating in a vision of Vorel drinking the lich potion and doubling over in agony.
Suddenly, you realize you are Vorel’s wife, and it is too late – your husband has done some horrible thing and you need to get out of here! But first you need to get upstairs and make sure your daughter Lorey is safe! Hurry, hurry!
OOC: If anyone tries to stop Danth, he needs to make a DC 16 Will save – if he fails, he is going to run back upstairs, although of course that will actually take him back to the room with the hordes of swarming rats!! If Danth succeeds, he snaps out of his vision.
