text: You put your candle down on the floor of the bathroom, grip the sides of the ladder and climb up towards the ceiling. Your legs are feeling wobbly beneath you and you're not sure if it's nerves, exhaustion or a combination of the two. You reach the hatch in the ceiling, and you climb as high as you are able to so that you are bent over with the hatch above you; you place both hands firmly on the far side of the hatch and slowly lift it up until there is about an inch high gap that you can peer through.
  
  As soon as the hatch is lifted, you can hear chanting coming from the attic room and you know you must be in the right place, you know that your sister must be here. Although you can hear what must be the people who have taken your sister, you can't see anything through the gap you've lifted up other than a plain wooden floor and then the beams of the roof sloping back towards you, lit by candlelight which isn't coming from the candle you placed on the bathroom floor below you.
  
  You carefully lower the hatch again and, with some difficulty, turn yourself around on the ladder so that you're facing the opposite way. Once again, you slowly lift the hatch about an inch, the sound of the chanting is clear again and you peer through the gap you have made. This time it is much further until the sloping beams on the opposite side of the house but the floor in between the hatch and the beams is completely empty. You can see some shadows being cast which fall into your view of the floor though, and it's clear that the people up there are positioned to your right.
  
  Once again, you close the hatch, manoeuvre yourself on the ladder until you are facing the direction the shadows were being cast from and you lift up the hatch again.
  
  You can see that the light in the attic is being cast primarily by a variety of thick church candles near the edges of the attic room. In the centre of the room, you can see the lower half of a group of people stood in a circle in black robes. You lift the hatch a little higher and you can see that their faces are covered by the deep hoods on their robes and they are still chanting. You try to make out the words and the word Langdown jumps out at you from what they're saying, which makes some degree of sense as that's where you are after all. Something about it sounds familiar though.
  
  You lower the hatch gentle back down again and climb down the ladder and sit down by the candle on the floor. You get the notebook out of your pocket and leaf through the pages until you find what you're looking for.
  
  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Grthalkpth Langdown wgah'nagl fhtagn
  
  As you go over in your head how the line would be said aloud, you feel the rhythm of the words and you're sure now that this is what the hooded figures are chanting, but you're not sure if this helps you at all, especially as you don't know what it even means.
  
  You go through the notebook again, trying to see if you can find anything else that might be useful in there but you don't find anything and you think to yourself that you already struck gold with it showing you the location of the hidden stairs in the master bedroom. You tuck the notebook back into a pocket in your robes and climb the ladder again.
  
  What do you do now?
  
  > try to sneak into the attic.
  You take a moment to poise yourself before you go to climb the ladder again. That's when you remember that you found a razor when you were in the master bedroom downstairs. You rummage about in your pockets until you find the razor in one of them. You pull the blade out from the handle and remind yourself just how sharp it is when you tried it out downstairs and you decide you might end up hurting yourself more than anyone else if you have the blade out when you're trying to climb a ladder. You practice pulling the blade out a few times to familiarise yourself with the action and make it faster for you to do easily. Once you're happy with that, you put the blade back into the handle again and palm the razor.
  
  You climb the ladder and once again, and this time, you start to lift the hatch from the opposite side to where the hooded figures are standing so that the hatch will hopefully hide your entry to the room a little.
  
  You get really nervous the higher you lift the hatch, especially when you can't see the hooded figures to know if they have seen you or not. When the hatch is almost upright, it starts to slip a little and you panic as you grab it back to stability but you nearly drop the razor. You grab it with your other hand just as it started to fall and you breath a silent sigh of relief. You nearly lost the razor and nearly dropped the hatch cover but you caught both and thankfully the whole thing happened almost silently and the chanting never faltered. Maybe luck is on your side you wonder.
  
  Your adrenaline is really surging through you now and your muscles are begging for you to run, use that adrenaline to get out of there, but you're not leaving without your sister, that's just a truth that you've known since you first read the letter they sent you.
  
  You get both of your feet onto the attic floor, still crouched as low as you can manage and you lower the hatch down, although you leave it only half covering the hole as you need to get out of here quickly once you've got your sister. You move as quietly as you can to the back of the attic, away from the hooded figures, still at a crouch and turn to look over at the circle of what you're sure now are cultists.
  
  > If you found the notes about who was needed for the ritual, click here.
  You think back to the notes you found in the parlour earlier and realise that might be quite important. What did it say again?
  
  Blood of an innocent. Magical blood, family connection.
  
  Find an apprentice, we don't want anyone with any real power here.
  
  Night of the full moon is the most powerful.
  
  They need magical blood as well as the blood of an innocent, which is why they sent you the letter, to get you to come here of your own accord, and it's why they chose your sister as the innocent, to make sure you would come. Now you're in the attic, you're giving them everything they need for their ritual, but you can't get your sister out without being up here.
  
  You haven't learnt how to veil yourself yet, and if you had, you don't think your magic is strong enough to be able to, and you have no way of disguising yourself, so you're just going to have to be very stealthy which you can't see how that's going to be possible, or something else. They need you for whatever ritual they're trying to carry out and they lured you here so they have to be expecting you as well. What you need, is a distraction to allow you to grab your sister whilst their attention is elsewhere. You look around the attic and that's when an idea comes to you.
  
  You silently shuffle along the edge of the attic until you reach one of the large church candles. You carefully pick it up and shuffle over to the beams at the sides of the house. You hold the candle underneath one of the beams.
  
  The beam starts to go black and you hold the candle steadily, eventually you start to see flickers of splinters of wood catching and then dying out. Finally, a cut split away from the beam catches and the fire starts to kindle itself and before long, it has spread to the beam. By the time it has spread to the beam, you are already over on the other side of the attic, watching the cultists, waiting for them to react.
  
  Between the cultists, you can see the back of a curled up girl lying on the floor, bound and gagged and you see now your target. You need to get her out. You pull the blade out from the razor's handle and start to edge down the attic towards the ritual, crouching so as to stay as close to the beams as possible.
  
  One of the cultists finally notices the fire, which has lit up the entire beam on that side of the house now and will soon spread to the others and breaks off the chant with a cry of "Fire!". The other cultists whip their heads around and most of them rush over to the flames.
  
  You take the opportunity that you created and dash in during the chaos, to your sister. You want to take the time to reassure her, to show her that it's you here, that she's being rescued, but you don't have the luxury of that time. You slice deftly through the ropes holding her and yank the gag off her over the top of her head. You scoop her up in your arms before she has a chance to even see who has grabbed her and make a dash for the hatch.
  
  By the time you reach the hatch, several of the beams are already up in flames and the cultists are running around seemingly with no clue on what to do about it. In only takes one of the cultists to focus on you instead of the fire to ruin your plan though, and unfortunately, one of them does.
  
  You reach the hatch, push the door away from it with your foot and, realising that the hole isn't big enough for you to get through whilst carrying your sister, you start to lower her down onto the ladder. That takes precious time and just as she has got her footing and is looking up at you, smiling as she sees who has come for her, your legs are grabbed from behind and you're pulled back from the hatch.
  
  "Run Amelia!" you manage to yell to her and you hope she does as you said.
  
  The cultist who has grabbed you, calls out to the others for help as the two of you grapple, but they have the advantage as you're already on the floor and they took you by surprise. Several of the other cultists come over to hold you down and you see the fire spreading more and more quickly now, as half the roof is now alight and the floor is burning too, almost blocking off the hatch which is the only escape route.
  
  As the cultists get control of you, they drag you to their ritual area and push you heavily onto the floor where they have painted a white symbol on the floor. You can feel the heat of the fire raging overhead now and you know it's only a matter of seconds before they are all trapped up here, including you.
  
  "We have to go!" you yell, struggling as much as you can but the cultists' only reply is in gripping you harder.
  
  You hear the roof start to groan and the cultists holding you all turn to look up at it too. The fire has engulfed the whole roof now and the timber gives way at the end where the fire started, collapsing in and crushing those who were underneath it. Once the roof has started to collapse, it dominos down the whole of the mansion's roof and when a large, flaming beam falls onto you, it smashes into your skull and you could only hope that your sister made it out alive.