Headmistress's Log (Felix)

HEADMISTRESS’S LOG Resident Dossier New Entrant Form

Residents Name: Felix Polenski

Birth Date: 5th Moon 7th Day, 728

Date of Admittance: 8th Moon 19th Day, 735

Reason for Admittance: No living relatives

Notes: The boy’s parents died in a tragic fire that consumed their home. He appears to have been a witness to their death, but survived with no physical trauma. He does demonstrate minor dissociative behaviors, such as aloofness in both word and deed, that are not surprising after such a tragic incident. Otherwise healthy. Arrived with minimal personal effects, except something small wrapped in a bundle, which he would not release for examination. Assume it to be some memento of his parents, or something he considers a safety charm. Placing him in the last empty bed in the young boys room—the other four should help him acclimate to his new surroundings and emerge from his antisocial behaviors.

Update: 10th Moon 24th Day, 735

I'll admit this is not the follow-up entry I was expecting to log for Felix Polenski. This most harrowing tale has been extracted from the young boy with the help of an outlander, Septa Filagre, an unusual elven woman skilled at working with traumatized children such as this one. She and I spent some time interviewing the young Felix once he had returned to his senses. Septa’s two colleagues (Tezra Rodwsdower and Maxwell Wellington) entertained and mollified the other residents of our home, which was sorely needed after not only the acute fright today, but the ongoing terrible effects for the last few weeks—since Felix’s arrival.

The pertinent material for Felix’s file begins two moons ago, when a purple wagon passed him by as he played outside his family’s home here in the town of Vallaki. The boy admitted to having always had a curious, bordering on mischievous, bent, and he followed those instincts–to the tragedy of many. He crept through the loose back doors of the wagon as it trundled west toward the Evening Gate and once inside, the boy quickly spied an open container holding a shiny object–the now infamous silver locket–purloined it, and fled undetected.

It was at least a few days before Felix chose to both don the locket, and open it at the same time. But he is very clear that in that moment he went from having full agency in his life, to being something of a passenger in his own body. Some entity trapped inside (the phrase “Let Darkness Be Contained Within” in Celestial on the inside face seemed to serve to “lock” the creature in when closed) leapt out from the blackness inside the locket, into the body holding it. Felix does not have a sense of identity for the entity that possessed him—the “demon” we shall call it. He never saw it directly nor was able to converse with it, but we now understand its language is “Abyssal” though it was able to speak in the common tongue through the boy. The demon’s actions with Felix’s body were fully visible to him, and he has been able to recount the invader testing its capabilities in this corporeal form with escalating acts of evil: manufacturing “accidents”, staging harmful pranks, killing stray animals, and so on. This culminated in the incident one moon ago when Felix, under the control of this demon, murdered his own parents by setting them alight and then burning down their home. Left without wardens, he was brought here to the orphanage by the Vallaki guard.

While I do not believe it was the demon’s intent to come to the orphanage, this development appears to have perfectly suited its longer term desires, which Felix intuited from their cohabitation: gain strength from the suffering of others, until it was strong enough to begin a rite to fully assume control of another being by exiling the soul from their body. Felix's unassuming form was useful for initial subterfuge, but was limited in its ability to cause strife and suffering—and the demon was still tethered to the locket. The strapping form of a young man like Milivoj suited it much better for a permanent form. Soon after arriving under our roof, the possessed Felix began instigating subtle chaos around the home. I also believe the very presence of the shadowy demon created a growing gloom over the orphanage, which was amplified through the accumulation of dark runes. Specifically, Felix began surreptitiously carving a phrase in Abyssal into the bedposts of his fellow orphans: “Dark Dreams”. Each time he added one, the demon was able to cause nightmares and suffering in that orphan. From my other interviews, these dreams carried images of biting and scratching creatures, which seemed to feed the creature, and manifested as unholy and unhealing wounds for the children.

Once it had runes set up to victimize all our residents, the demon was confident in its ability to wrest control of Milivoj. Approximately one week ago, Felix carved a large Abyssal glyph under Milivoj’s bed (“Die So I Live”), and placed the locket underneath his mattress like a warped demonic version of the pea in the children’s favorite Baba Belska’s stories. Milivoj, already suffering similar effects to the children, quickly started to succumb to this cursed siphoning, his natural strength no match for the unnatural infection.

Felix's culpability, or rather the culpability of the demon possessing Felix, was not entirely missed by his peers. (I'm afraid to admit that it was mostly missed by the headmistress.) Three of his roommates–Andrej, Krystofer, and Stefan–were surely some of the first to have runes affect them, and the close-knit trio apparently decided they would not tolerate it. Within two weeks of Felix’s arrival, they had vanished. My understanding is that they have run away to the north, but if the other children know more, they remain tight-lipped around their “head witchress”. The even more unfortunate sleuth would be Cedric: Felix now recounts his roommate approached him a week ago and intimated that he had seen Felix up to something “naughty” in their “big brother’s” room. Cedric—admittedly a bit of a bully from my notes in his own dossier—was likely unaware of the danger he manufactured for himself, nor realized the trap being set when Felix asked to meet him at the top of the orphanage turret one evening. (That turret, it should be noted, is closed off and strictly forbidden to all residents, given to its lack of structural integrity. It only recently came to my attention that the young boys had created secret entrances to it from their room and Milivoj’s–the latter entrance facilitating Felix to surreptitiously effect his dark magicks at the demon’s command. Tangenting off a tangent: that secret passage is also the way in which the boys scared the girls into thinking the orphanage was haunted—by making noises through the wall to their room from the closed-off turret.) Cedric may have put up a brief fight when he realized the tables were turned, but would have been no match for the demonically empowered Felix, who threw his blackmailer from the fourth-floor window, killing him.

The tragic death of Cedric for a time was a mystery, as Felix—now the last resident of the young boys room—had eliminated all suspicious peers, and was the only person aware of secret spaces and paths in the turret. Another mystery, only indirectly related to this account of Felix, emerged around Cedric’s body. The deceased boy lay at rest at the back of the orphanage while I investigated his death, but the body disappeared a few days later. This was determined the same morning that we discovered Milivoj catatonic and drifting towards death's door. My conclusion, which unfortunately cannot be verified while the incapacitated Milivoj recovers, is that as both “big brother” and church gravedigger, he felt he had to bury Cedric in Saint Andral’s graveyard. He did so overnight, then collapsed from exhaustion in the final stages of the demon’s siphoning curse. Why Milivoj chose to bury Cedric alone and at night is an open question–but again, not of direct pertinence to the log of Felix's fate.

With the sudden and horrifying revelation of the demonic perpetrator, and its subsequent defeat by Septa and her companions, a literal and figurative pall has been lifted from the orphanage. And with it went the possession of Felix. I unfortunately cannot state that his memory was taken from him as well, and the boy will live out the rest of his days—first here at the orphanage and then wherever life takes him—knowing the death of his parents and another child are his doing. This is only the second time in my two-decade tenure on staff that we have had one of our orphans murder other residents. I pray to the Morning Lord it is the last.

(Post Script: A transcript of this log is being provided, as proof of problems addressed at the orphanage to the charity's patron, Lady Fiona Wachter, with compliments of headmistress and childhood friend, Claudia Belasco.)