Nia tries talking to the woman, but is ignored.
Nia frowns and goes back to the doorway. "I don't think this is a haunt, I think it's a woman. She won't listen to me, though. I don't want to touch her if she's already traumatized. What do you want to do? We could leave her, lock the door behind ourselves to make sure she doesn't stab us in the back and come back once we clear the rest of the building."
Garrick asks, "Do we have any magic that would protect Nia? I'd hate to have whatever it is feed on your soul the minute you touch it."
Nia snorts. "So would I."
Nia grunts. "Alright, let me at least move the mirror out of the way so we can talk to her better." She goes back over to the corner. "Miss? I'm going to move the mirror. You're safe, we're not going to hurt you, we just want to be able to talk to you better. Alright? One, two, three. Moving it now." Nia picks up the mirror and moves it out of the way so they can talk to the woman.
As soon as the mirror is moved away, the woman stops crying. She draws a deep breath that rattles disturbingly as she stands up and emits an unearthly shriek that echoes in the small room. The unnatural pallor of her skin and the way the flesh has pulled away from her fingertips, leaving bony claws, suggest something is terribly wrong with her.
Despite the changes death has made to her, she's still recognizable from her portrait: this is Iesha Foxglove. She takes another breath and shouts, "ALDERN! I can smell your fear! You'll be in my arms soon!"
Unless anyone stops her, she shoves past the party and heads back to the stairs.
Nia gestures the others out of the woman's way. "She is a revenant, an undead creature who was unjustly slain and who exists only for revenge on her killer--all other creatures are ignored unless they attack her first. Move out of her way and follow her!"
Garrick winces, then shakes his head, "Honestly, given everything we've seen here, I'm almost tempted to let her take her revenge..... But... no."
"I am not familiar with revenants." Andrezi says, lowering his holy symbol. "I trust she will pass on to her just reward once her vengeance is had?"
Nia gestures at the dead woman. "At least let her lead us to Aldern, we can destroy her then. She can find him no matter where he is, let's follow her then take her down."
Garrick nods, "Aye... and then bring him to justice."
"Okay, then let's go!" Nia hurries to follow Iesha through the house.
Garrick follows Nia (and the Revenant) as quickly as he can.
The party trundles after Iesha, who descends the stairs in a rush. When she reaches the room on the first floor with the spiral mold stain, though, she stops and stares intently at it for a few moments before shrieking again. She kneels and begins to claw and tear at the moldering floorboards, and unless disturbed she'll break through in a minute or so.
Nia looks at the others and shakes her head. "I think we should just let her do what she's doing? From what I've read she's trying to go straight to Aldern."
Garrick nods, "Agreed. Clearly there's something down there - maybe Aldern himself.... and I was actually worried we'd be following her back to Sandpoint."
The revenant tears up floorboards, exposing a space beneath. She leaps down into the hole; when the party gets close enough to see down, the room below looks like part of the house...except for where the floor has been torn up in the center of the room. Piles of broken stone, dirt, and a few ruined pickaxes line the edges of the room; the removed flooring reveals a set of stone spiral stairs, of obviously much older construction than the rest of the basement, winding deep into the bedrock below. A foul stink of rotten meat wafts up on a cold breeze from the darkness.
Garrick suggests, "Rather than leaping into a potentially bad situation, I'd say we hit the stairs."
The party previously had found a stairway down behind a door that's practically next to the hole in the floor. Following it down leads to a kitchen. A large oaken table, its surface covered with moldy stains and rat droppings, sits in the center of this large kitchen. Shelves line the walls, and an oversized fireplace dominates the northeast portion of the room. The shelves in the southwest wall are in a much greater state of disarray, and two one-foot-wide cracks in the wall near the floor lead south into the earth beyond the basement walls.
There are several doors in the room.
Nia points at the disarray on the shelves to the southwest and at the wall to their immediate south. "I think the hole is right here on the other side of this wall and somebody's been doing something over there. This way!"
Hugging the wall to her left, Nia hurries south toward the door at the far southern end of the room and quickly checks to see if it's locked.
The party hustles through the kitchen with Nia in the lead, Vidar and Andrezi the only sources of light in the room. As Garrick thunders down the stairs and into the room, though, a sound can be heard from the cracks in the walls: at first it's a faint susurrus, but the volume steadily increases until it can be resolved as the sliding of tiny bodies against each other.
Nia finds no traps on the door, which is not locked. The party gets through the door and into the narrow hallway beyond just as a carpet of eerily-silent rats comes crawling out of the cracks. The door is sufficiently tight that they can't get through it, though...for the moment.
The hallway leads east a ways, then turns north. After the turn it ends at another door.
"Hopefully they disperse before we have to come back out," Nia says as they slam the door behind themselves. At the end of the hallway she quickly checks to see if the door is locked then goes in.
Nia finds no traps on the door, but realizes during her examination that the painted wood is a veneer over iron. The door is locked.
"Oh, this isn't a wooden door. Interesting. And it's locked. Give me a few seconds." She kneels down, pulls out her tools, and gets to work.
It sounds like the rats are scrabbling at the door behind the party, and it's not clear how long before they get through.
Nia is able to pick the lock in less than a minute. The room revealed looks to have once been some sort of arcane workshop, although it now lies in ruin. A row of soggy books sits on the northern end of a workbench along the western wall. At the other end of the workbench, what looks like three iron birdcages sit, each containing a dead diseased rat. To the east, two stained-glass windows loom–clearly, the room is built into the seaside cliff face. The northern window depicts a thin man with gaunt features drinking a foul-looking brew of green fluid, while the southern one shows the same man but in an advanced state of decay, as if he had been dead for several weeks. His arms raised and head thrown back in triumph, his rotting body turns to smoke and spirals into a seven-sided box.
Having seen his face in a painting, the party recognizes the man as Vorel Foxglove.
Nia gestures at the western wall. "The hole should come out over there. How do we get over there?"
Keeping from getting any further into the workshop than necessary, the party reaches the room that Iesha descended through. It's as previously described.
Nia turns to her companions, putting a finger to her lips to indicate quiet which she then points at herself and down the steps. She then cautiously creeps down the stairs while keeping her eyes peeled for the reason Iesha animated as a vengeful spirit.