The Furious Questers and the Case of the Winterborn Wreckage

A Passage from "The Furious Questers and the Case of the Winterborn Wreckage", by Anyorger Yoravy

When I was still but a whelp, I spent my time with a rather unsavory crowd; Tzapoatli, Furestinalaga, Kernnan and the rest. We spent our days running errands for Lord Agrippa, and our evening trespassing where we shouldn't have been. I spent a particularly memorable evening traveling to the Isle of Verity, against my parents' wishes, probably a bit too early to be safe from the hideous ariels that live there. I filled three rune-embroidered bags with tourmalines, and even stumbled across one of the fabled Orbs of Vandemaar. It was exhausting, but I had a great time. When I got home, full of myself and my successes, I went for an evening out with the guys, and we decided to amble towards Winterborn Estate, a place few of us had dared to go near before despite having spent our entire lives in Rune. We snared the dragon wolves guarding the front lawn with ease, and Furestinalaga sapped them to sleep. Life is always good for a group of dedicated rogues.

We made our ways to the portico, and didn't know what to do. We were apprehensive about going in, after the things we'd heard about the place. Tzapoatli's aunt runs the antique shop, and it's funny because she's an antique herself, and always told us stories trying to scare us away from the mansion. We eventually picked the portrait room window, an after crawling in, immediately came face to face with an almost debonair demon, who tried to brain us with a hellfire pool cue and explosive billiard balls. Who'd have ever guessed that demons would be so stylish! We ran from him, and although we got away untouched, Tzapoatli tripped over a concealed barghest, and lost his hearing temporarily, its shriek was so piercing. We ran until we were cornered, and we thought we were going to die.

Luckily for us, I noticed a funny spot on the wall, and discovered a secret passage. My mom always said I'm really likable and misunderstood, and I've always thought that to be evidence of Maradas watching out for me.

Inside the hidden passage, there was a big iron spiral staircase. The alternative was back with the demons and wraiths, so we went up as far as we could, to the third floor, and easily found the hidden exit- it seems that architects typically only bother to make it really hidden on one side. Stumbling out. we met a pumpkin-headed demon. Nothing could have ever prepared us for that; even all of the stories we had heard describing it. They were a bit underexaggerated, so terrible and frightening was he; the demon electrocuted Kernnan with his tuning fork, and Kernnan nearly died. We dragged him out of there before we could get entangled in the fight, and found sanctuary in a theater.

We had a few swirling green potions from Grimaldi, and used them to nurse Kernnan back to the point at which he could walk. We knew he wouldn't survive another fight, especially one against Lord Pumpkin. The path we'd taken to get to the theater was blocked, as we'd run the other way from the demon. We knew nothing about this place, and had nearly been killed by almost everything we'd seen thus far. On our way in, we'd seen a tower jutting off of the second story, as well as one on the third story. We had a grappling hook that Kernnan's uncle had brought back from a trading trip to Xaventry. although we didn't know how to use it. We figured that our only chance of survival both from demons and our parents, was to rappel out of the third story tower, make our way to the second story, and then make our way out of the house as quickly and quietly as possible.

We made our way west, skulking room to room as best we could while maintaining operational silence. We discovered a dark room full of paintings, and as we walked around the perimeter, we found something that scared us even worse than Lord Pumpkin, if such a thing is possible. There, huddling in a corner, was Alpheus Winterborn himself. He was emaciated and frail, and we only recognized him as the heir and not another demon due to the frequent articles about him in the Ye Olde Towne Crier. We expected him to be horrible and cannibalistic, but he just seemed... crazy. We told him that we were sorry for breaking in, and we just wanted to get out; he told us to flee, and that we'd never make it out alive! It wasn't the most heartening response, honestly. We agreed, and told him that we just wanted to get out. He pointed a finger towards the south end of the room, and promptly fainted. It wasn't the best help we could have asked for, but better than the probable alternative.

We carried Kernnan to the other end of the room, and started looking for something useful- a ladder, a secret passage, anything. Tzapoatli found a button, simply marked UP, and pushed it without saying anything. The entire room started shaking, and the rest of us, not knowing about the button, thought the pumpkin-headed demon was coming back for us. Then, a bell rang and the entire western wall slid open, revealing a dumbwaiter. Justifying the newfound avenue for exploration as a plausible escape route, I climbed in, and tasked the others with keeping Kernnan safe if I didn't make it back. I pushed the UP button in the dumbwaiter, and the whole thing exploded into motion as it carried me up the tower. A full minute passed, with the pulley system chugging away, before the doors on the opposite side opened.

It was a dark room, and I didn't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I found. A demon made of stuck-together eyeballs jumped out at me, and tried to bite my face off. I was so surprised, my muscle memory kicked in and I stabbed it in what could have been its face. It fell to the ground, dead, before I even realized what was going on. No time to think, just a second of cardiac arrest and it was dead, in a pool of blood and ocular fluid. It was wearing a titanium belt, which just so happened to fit me.

I put it on, which was quite a fortuitous coincidence, and jumped back into the dumbwaiter. I pressed the DOWN button, the bell rang, the doors closed, and I started back downward. It had only been two or three minutes; not long enough for anything bad to have happened to the guys. Hopefully, Mr. Winterborn would have woken up, and could give us some real help. All of a sudden, SNAP, something jams and the entire dumbwaiter shakes hard enough to almost tip me out the door. I edged my way to the door and stuck my head out the considerable gap, and probably fifty feet below me, I could see the pulley system responsible for moving the dumbwaiter.

It was definitely jammed, and I didn't have anything on me to throw down there to unjam it. The shaft curved to accommodate the weird architectural design of the merged second- and third-story towers, and the housing wasn't even on the third floor, but on the second. One of the others would have to find their way down to the West Tower to unjam it themselves, but I had no way of contacting them, and the doorway into the pulley room had the familiar haze of illusion on it. In the best of times, such a mishap would have been as easy as using a transmission mirror or just shouting for help, but attracting attention here would be exactly the wrong course of action.

I was on my own, and I knew it. I looked around for something, anything to help me out of this predicament, and couldn't see anything. Then, all of a sudden, I spotted the emergency grate that had flown open automatically when the box got stuck, and I had somehow not heard with all of the grating and grinding noises. I was too short to reach it on my own, but luckily had one levitation scroll remaining, after our adventures described in "The Furious Questers and The Mystery of the Gruesome Gargoyles".

I levitated out of the dumbwaiter and on top of it, and, to my surprise, there was an open air duct right there. I climbed up it, and after what seemed forever, found myself at the end of the stainless steel ductwork, at the western edge of the mansion roof. I could see the hedge maze below, Lord Agrippa's stables, the castle, and in the distance, the fiery glow of the Phoenix on Rune Mountain. I backed up a bit, and found a disabled wind-powered ventilator perched on the roof. I managed to climb through it, a fortunate element of the physical nature of youth, and found a massive monster waiting for me.

I knew instantly that while it was nowhere near as powerful as Lord Pumpkin, it was too tough for me to handle by myself...

Anyorger was obviously able to escape but to find out how, you'll have to buy the book. "The Furious Questers and the Case of the Winterborn Wreckage" on sale now in quality literary establishments. -Editor