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The Belled Stag
Just inside the walls of Balnamoine, there is a blackened scar on the grass, shaped roughly like the print of a giant's palm and large enough to swallow the foundation of a small castle. Not even the smallest weed will grow on that patch of burned earth; the town's dogs and cats avoid it, and no one has seen so much as a sparrow alight upon it. The neighboring buildings have been abandoned and allowed to fall into rank decay, for no one will live nearby.
The scar marks where an inn called The Belled Stag once stood, near two hundred years ago when Prince Marcellon ruled Coeur d'Ennui as an independent realm. During the turmoil that preceded the unification of Calantyr, Balnamoine saw a great many refugees pass through. No lord controlled the surrounding countryside; bandits and glamodrim preyed on travelers with impunity. Many people vanished as soon as they left the dubious security of Balnamoine's walls and town militia.
Under such circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Lussa and Nurric -- the proprietors of The Belled Stag -- cheated and sometimes murdered travelers who stayed beneath the inn's roof. They ran rigged cardgames and offered bets on loaded dice. They sold information about rich merchants to robber bands; they convinced gullible patrons to hire a footpad or two as "security" on the road, only to be murdered by their own bodyguards once away from witnesses' eyes. Several times, they dispensed with even these petty subterfuges: Nurric simply cut the throats of sleeping guests in their beds, and his sister Lussa stewed their corpses in the inn's great pots. With so much violence on the roads, entire families could disappear with no one the wiser.
On one fatal occasion, however, the siblings chose their target unwisely. A young man, well dressed and gently spoken, came to their inn one evening. He did not seem to be armed, nor was he with friends, and so they counted him an easy victim. Indeed, he put up only a weak fight when Nurric came to cut his throat that night. Lussa served him up as stew to guests the next day, and they split the contents of his purse even as their unknowing patrons were finishing the last bites.
Unknown to them, the young man they'd murdered was the nephew of Mesandroth, later called the Fiendlorn. When the archmage learned of his kin's death he came to The Belled Stag to exact his revenge. It is said that the night sky burned and the earth tore itself open, vomiting up demons. Mesandroth sealed the Belled Stag's doors with walls of ice and bone, and his demons slew all those trapped inside, guests and servants alike. When the slaughter was complete, but for Lussa and Nurric, Mesandroth seized the power released by all those deaths to set a curse upon the siblings and their inn.
When the sun rose, The Belled Stag was gone. Not a single stone was left standing. All that remained to show that it had ever stood was a stink of sulfur and charred flesh, soon carried away on the wind, and the great scar on the earth.
With the next blood moon, however, it returned. As the white moon reddened in the sky, The Belled Stag reappeared on its old foundation, solid and seemingly real. Lussa and Nurric threw open their doors and welcomed guests to their hearth as if the nightmare of Mesandroth's wrath had never been.
Only a few brave souls entered. To those outside, it seemed as if they vanished as soon as they crossed the threshold; they could not be seen inside. Many feared that they were lost forever -- but when the next morning dawned, all but one of the brave fools who had gone into The Belled Stag awoke on the patch of burned earth, cold and stiff but otherwise well. The inn itself had disappeared. Several of its visitors had handfuls of old coins; others found themselves remembering odd scraps of long-forgotten knowledge. None had more than fuzzy memories of what they had done the past night, or what could have befallen the missing man, but all recalled gambling with either Lussa or Nurric long toward dawn.
Since then, The Belled Stag has reappeared every night that the white moon goes red. Local folklore holds that those who venture inside must spend the night gambling with ghosts. Those who win emerge with coins, odd old artifacts, or bits of curious lore; several pieces have been identified as belonging to previous visitors who failed to return. Those who lose are presumed to join the ghosts inside, and their wealth adds to The Belled Stag's ghostly coffers. No one has ever gone in twice and returned to tell the tale.
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