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Before there was a town here, and later a city, there was a house, high atop a hill. Harrow House has lingered overlooking the stretch of land that became Marrowmont long before it held its present shape. For that towering edifice, with its soaring façade and sprawling dead gardens, has been many things in the course of its impossibly long life. But always, always, it has been hungry.
Even now, as it dreams – digesting in insensate, heady haze the remnants of a most substantial meal – Harrow House’s appetites know no rest. Within its ever-changing borders, its fluid floorplans, in shifting forms it has fed, and fed, and fed for time out of mind. For what is time to a predator hiding as a house but the creaking of old boards, the slow scuttle of many-legged things in its walls, and the rattling whispers of ghosts wandering its halls.
In waking, Harrow House is careful to hold tight rein of all it has devoured, lest still-digesting prey escape its wooden web. But having devoured the leavings of a celestial entity, power unlike it’s ever tasted, Harrow House has tumbled deep into torpor, dead to the world. Deep enough that its rein on that unfathomable glut of prey grows lax.
And its ghosts go wandering.
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It’s late in the afternoon, sunlight making dancing motes of the dust in the study before which Nyah, Jessica, and Catalina linger. The three de facto heads of the combined covens of Harrow House and The Bell and Candle Book Club careful not to step foot over the threshold. The door held open by Catalina, her hand clenched tight on the doorknob.
For four days the Maw has raged in Marrowmont below. Four days of chaos and devastation, the Maw devouring all it touches. Only the Maidens who founded the city, and a handful of defenders, keeping it at bay. Those defenders including the covens.
They are weary, their numbers stretching thin as sisters grown uncareful with exhaustion fall prey to the Maw’s lashing extradimensional tentacles; or sisters whose magics fail or grow wild fall prey to their own powers, too easy to lose that control in face of otherworldly horrors. The combined covens unsure how long they can continue to hold the line. But here at least has been refuge, has been haven, for flagging souls. One whose position just outside the city proper’s borders makes it a base and home from which to strategize and recuperate. Even if sometimes finding the wandering washrooms in Harrow House is one indignity too many to navigate in a long litany borne with equanimity in the face of a slowly unfolding local apocalypse.
But today, the air in Harrow House has grown chill. Hints of hoary breath visible in the halls, for all that it’s May outside the house’s walls. And that the house normally exists uncomfortably warm year-round.
