The Beginning

The Beginning

In the Spring of 1813, before the Order of St Aelfric had a name in her vocabulary and before the word cult had entered her nightmares, Marina Garrick was simply a Surrey gentlewoman with a curiosity that outpaced her caution. She went to Brighton with Georgiana Dillwyn — Ant’s daughter Elizabeth at the table, playing her only session — and there, amid the fashionable seaside society of Marine Parade and Captain King’s drawing rooms, she had her first encounter with something that could not be explained away.

It began with a death that polite society refused to discuss. Lord Cosgrove’s head burst apart in the Pavilion Gardens, and Marina saw it happen. Brighton called it apoplexy and returned to its card tables. Marina could not. The trail wound through the drawing rooms of the season to Captain King, the gallant naval officer at the centre of it all, and then to a soirée at King’s London house. A warning note from a dishevelled stranger named Gideon Crow urged her to leave. She stayed. She went upstairs instead, following the gloved Mlle Dumain, and she was still searching when the party below turned violent. The Glossop twins attacked each other. Lady Bagtonbury snapped her own dog’s neck. The Air Loom, the mind-manipulating machine King and Dumain had built to reshape English society, had developed a will of its own and turned on the guests.

Marina and Georgiana went down toward the machine, not away from it. In the basement they found Crow’s body, and King and Dumain fighting their own creation for control. Both women were pulled bodily into the Loom’s psychic interior, fought through corridors lined with its trapped victims, reached the mirrored centre, and destroyed it. The Hamptons survived the night and took the girls home. The Loom & Lucidity investigation left Marina changed, though the full shape of the change had not yet declared itself.

It declared itself at Osney Grange.

Sent to investigate disturbances in a rural parish, Marina uncovered desecrated graves beneath St. Swithney’s Church and a ghoul that had been feeding in the crypt. The investigation ended in catastrophe: Eleanor Mortimer dead, Reverend Henry Mortimer and Dr. Beamish consumed by the creature, and Marina fleeing wounded in the curate’s stolen coach — a gunshot to the shoulder, her mind fracturing under the weight of what she had witnessed. She arrived at The Fox & Hound in Portsmouth half-dead, and it was there that Mrs Margaret Fairchild took her in and Dr Ambrose Hargreaves stitched her shoulder back together.

It was also there that Lady Honoria Lyndhurst found her.

Honoria arrived at the inn with the certainty of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment. She offered Marina a choice — come to London and learn the truth, or walk away — and Marina chose London. The coach journey along the Great Portsmouth Road carried her from one life to another. At Ravenwood House, Lord Percival Harcourt waited in his secret chamber beneath the antiquarian society, surrounded by forbidden texts and candle smoke. He tested her, assessed her, and offered her the Order. At Hartwell House, she was given rooms, a maid (Miss Eleanor Finch), and the first stability she had known since Brighton.

Then Harcourt sent her to Tarryford.

Marina took rooms at The Four Feathers with her maid Miss Finch, under orders to attend the Northlake Ball as a guest and observe. On the Friday afternoon before the ball, the investigators met one another for the first time at Fortham’s Drapers and Haberdashery, trading introductions alongside members of the Asher and Potterton families. Emma Wentworth bought a purple ribbon. The campaign’s full table assembled over a shop counter, and none of them knew yet what waited in the Long Corridor.

The Northlake Ball at Northlake Hall, Autumn 1813, was meant to be Marina’s first mission — observe the village, report on irregularities. Instead, it became the moment the campaign cracked open. Emma Wentworth and Georgiana Wentworth, local sisters from Tarryford. James Bennet, a gentleman poet. Jane Radcliffe, a con artist masquerading as a lady. The Long Corridor was a portal to a dark realm inhabited by Horrors — squat, headless, fur-covered things with fanged mouths on their torsos. The portal took days to open. On the first expedition in, the investigators got out before the creatures reached them, but one Horror escaped overnight and killed sheep. On the second expedition, after Georgiana performed a blood ritual at the altar to close the portal, the Horrors descended. The armed NPC men stopped to shoot and cover the retreat — they died. James Bennet, running for the portal, was overtaken, dismembered, and consumed — the first PC death of the campaign. His death bought the others time. The surviving women walked out together, and the campaign was no longer a solo game.