You bind your weapon, and smash one of the tall windows in the living hall to simulate a recent escape. Beyond the window, you see the grey clouds above and their silent storm; but the ground outside plunges into a dark gloom your eyes have trouble penetrating. If you went that way, would you actually exit - or just get dumped somewhere else in the house? You don't know - but one way or another, it suggests your have passed that way, while you go another. The hall you creep down leans toward a disused ballroom, with parquetry floors now warped and discoloured with time. But you barely have time to take it in from the doorway before instinctively throwing yourself beside it in the hall. Beyond, in the ballroom, is the same spirit; though its mandible has been returned to its proper place on his transparent, morose face. In the moment you glanced him, he is pacing - as if his feet need the floor, or atleast respect it - in some ghostly pantomime of frustration. The wheezing wind seems to be his 'breath' or something like it; it hitches and heaves with the spirits agitation, and grows louder as it approaches the doorway. You compress yourself into the corner beside the door in the hallway; trying to make no noise, and to become as small as possible...

Spoiler: OOC: Unbidden Memories
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Quote Originally Posted by More than ten years ago...
The cell was carved into rock by some nameless, cursed generation of slaves before you; and the work they had done is uneven enough to have profited you in that desperate moment. You recoiled even as your swift moments seem to cause the madman - the werething, if the Norscan rhymes have any truth - to take offense. He scrambled after you as you wedged yourself into a crevice in the cell's corner that may once have been the dream of escape for a predecessor; now, a hope of safety for you. And all this happened in the pitiful gloom of the cell, made discernible only by the murky gloaming of lanterns down the end of the hall where another shift of slaves did their part of the toil that waited for you. Screeching and snuffling, the man crowded against the crack in the stone and blocked what little light remained for you. Plunged into black, you felt cracked nails and fingertips pawing furiously to seize you, giving you no option by to kick wildly back to spurn and delay. Then his grip, iron-tight with insanity, cinched around your ankle and began hauling you out of safety. Your cunning and quickness, and mental fortitude had seen you through trials that had broken so many others; but locked in a cage with a madman, all these virtues felt insufficient. The brute reality of strength asserted itself on you like it had when you were first hoisted from the devastation of your village by the warrior with four eyes.


...And then comes the spirit, not through the wall to seize you at all but through the doorway - and having missed you flattened into that corner, proceeds down the way you came. Attracted to the sound of breaking glass? Something else, down that way? Was it drawn back to the scabbard, or the painting, or...?

Whatever its purpose, it seems to ignore you and go on its way. You might follow it at a cautious distance, now that it has overlooked you, and perhaps gain insight into that purpose... or you might search this now vacated ballroom, with its dilapitated Tilean grandeur, while it is unoccupied by any evil guardian.

Spoiler: OOC:
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If you choose to follow the spirit back the way you came, you can coast on your earlier Move Silently success for a little while longer. If you want to stay and search this room, I'll need a fresh Search roll. +0, since you're doing it quietly.