The House is empty and the House is eternal and the House is hungry.
Old houses--human habitations a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years old--develop their own character. Old houses may, with time, become people.
Ancient houses become monsters.
A house as old as the Prince of Biding's house--a house older than human and orcish civilization--has become a very great monster indeed.
There are no guards about it. There are no fences; its reputation is sufficient protection. The remains of an old-growth forest, alien to the foliage around it, provides a screening wall pierced by a tunnel of woven trees. (The trunks wind around each other in incestuous pairs; the branches, latticed together, have long since grafted each tree to its marriage-partner.)
At the end of the living corridor, the house crouches like a waiting predator. Its doors are also living wood, cunningly interworked and ancient; they are twice as high as a man and half as thick as one. Yet for all their weight, a touch makes the doors swing wide without a sound; without a sound, the house swallows its latest visitors into a long stony throat. The hall is made of a faintly luminescent white-and-ultraviolet marble--elfstone--common to deep elven ruins. Rooms branch from it at strange angles, like the feathery subdividing of a lung. Indented talonmarks line the floors and the walls, emphasized with enamel and gilding--speaking to the strange and precise mind of the house's master, who'd walk the same path every day for the millennia required to wear grooves into solid stone.
A gentle wind blows through the halls, reversing direction now and then as if the house breathes. It brings with it the scent of growing things, and blows stray leaves of written-over parchment before it. Rooms deeper in the house are open to the forest, or gardens, or strange deep pools with stranger creatures in their depths. Wide eyes and eyes blink from birch trunks and shallow waters, enticing and deadly: For once one goes deep enough in the house, the traps begin. Poisoned needles, deadfalls, starving dragons, airless spaces--all await the unwary who cannot read subtle tells in the environment, or see around the walls to notice them lurking.
The concentration of traps grows heaviest at the house's center, where four rooms are arranged along an odd crescent hallway wrapped around a central column--or fifth, much larger, room that must only be accessible through them. Each door is marked with an emblem: book, songbird, Throne, analemma.
3.1.1 The House Beyond the Last Cedared Hill (cw: unreality and horror themes)
Old houses--human habitations a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years old--develop their own character. Old houses may, with time, become people.
Ancient houses become monsters.
A house as old as the Prince of Biding's house--a house older than human and orcish civilization--has become a very great monster indeed.
There are no guards about it. There are no fences; its reputation is sufficient protection. The remains of an old-growth forest, alien to the foliage around it, provides a screening wall pierced by a tunnel of woven trees. (The trunks wind around each other in incestuous pairs; the branches, latticed together, have long since grafted each tree to its marriage-partner.)
At the end of the living corridor, the house crouches like a waiting predator. Its doors are also living wood, cunningly interworked and ancient; they are twice as high as a man and half as thick as one. Yet for all their weight, a touch makes the doors swing wide without a sound; without a sound, the house swallows its latest visitors into a long stony throat. The hall is made of a faintly luminescent white-and-ultraviolet marble--elfstone--common to deep elven ruins. Rooms branch from it at strange angles, like the feathery subdividing of a lung. Indented talonmarks line the floors and the walls, emphasized with enamel and gilding--speaking to the strange and precise mind of the house's master, who'd walk the same path every day for the millennia required to wear grooves into solid stone.
A gentle wind blows through the halls, reversing direction now and then as if the house breathes. It brings with it the scent of growing things, and blows stray leaves of written-over parchment before it. Rooms deeper in the house are open to the forest, or gardens, or strange deep pools with stranger creatures in their depths. Wide eyes and
eyesblink from birch trunks and shallow waters, enticing and deadly: For once one goes deep enough in the house, the traps begin. Poisoned needles, deadfalls, starving dragons, airless spaces--all await the unwary who cannot read subtle tells in the environment, or see around the walls to notice them lurking.The concentration of traps grows heaviest at the house's center, where four rooms are arranged along an odd crescent hallway wrapped around a central column--or fifth, much larger, room that must only be accessible through them. Each door is marked with an emblem: book, songbird, Throne, analemma.