The Color Stay

The Color Stay is the grandest inn in Haudh-Gwenn and charges a copper at the door for the privilege of finding out. It is kept by Voler Bria, a gnome who speaks Cànain and asks more questions of a newcomer than he answers, and the whole building stands under a single permanent illusion that he pays for out of his own pocket.

The Veil

It covers everything inside the walls and nothing beyond them. Guests appear finely dressed whatever they walked in wearing, and a mundane disguise is simply overwritten by it. Doors know their owners. Meals arrive conjured, as room service; hangers in the wardrobe trade one outfit for another; laundry comes back pressed and scented; a bath is drawn and you feel yourself undress and go on appearing clothed until you are in the water. The stables and the yard are untouched, because the working stops at the doorway, and the animals out there are genuinely well kept.

None of it is licensed. The glamour is of a class the Arcane Congress would shut down if it knew, and it demands enormous resources to hold, which accounts for most of the proprietor’s evasiveness. It also sits oddly with what was later learned about him, which is that he holds a seat in that same Congress.

Who can see past the veil has never been settled, and people get behind it by different routes. Katalia, behind the bar, is simply immune to it and does not know why; she sees the world plainly, and she is the one who has picked people out from under disguises nobody else could read. Anyone who disbelieves it sees the truth, and so does anyone in the private rooms and back passages, where it is thinner. Bria can puncture the veil for a chosen viewer, though most cannot hold the puncture open for long; Aldo has held one across visits, with some opacity, which surprised the man who made it. And Venros, who lodged here, may have perceived past it with nobody’s help at all.

Behind It

The true building is coming apart. The floorboards rot, the roof leaks, there is mold, the grand staircase is worn to nothing, and tables stand propped over patches of rope and board. In the grand hall there is a deep hole in the floor that glows in several colors at once, and pulses when Bria channels magic; he voids rubbish into it by mage-hand without ceremony, and an invisible field lies over the gaps so that people walk across without falling. His staff are told the hole is the reason they have a job here, and told not to ask further. What it is was never discovered. Mikhail watched Bria work above it for an afternoon and could not name a single spell he cast.

He goes about behind his own veil naked.

The House’s Business

The Color Stay is Haudh-Gwenn’s one neutral house, which in a city the Grayeras held by the throat was worth more than the linen. The council class buys the place out wholesale on the first or second weekend-day of a month, each guest bringing a guest or two, and they build their connections and pay each other off in front of staff who are paid not to notice. Twelve gold a head buys the veil-disguise on top of the ordinary glamour. A four-room suite is fifty gold the night and will not be split. The inn stabled the party’s horses and mule as a courtesy, having collected them from around the town without being asked.

Campaign Updates

Mikhail first got them through the door by tipping the doorman and giving a name that was not his. Haudh-Gwenn later gifted them a week there on a writ that lapsed before they could spend it; they came back on donated rooms, and later on a pass Aldo forged from memory with a mimicked township seal.

The arrangement that mattered was struck later still. Venros was the mind-mage Beltran had planted to watch the party and his own lieutenants alike, and killing him meant getting into the inn quietly, so the party needed the doors opened to them. Bria’s price was a choice: the name of a supplier, or a public declaration that the Valiant Few were alive and had been sheltering under his roof, with their word to keep the building safe through the fight and one small favor owed after. They took the declaration. Bria left a back door unlocked, silenced his own illusions, and told a serving-woman she could not see them. Venros died upstairs. A well-dressed gentleman who was a plain man under a glamour cleared the paperwork afterward and explained the noise and the corpse as rehearsal for a performance, and the party gained rooms and a bolt-hole. That was the night they first saw the building as it is.

The end of it came to the door. With Venros missing, Beltran Grayeras posted his better men at the front and lesser ones at the back, allowed nobody in or out, and had a purplish daze powder kept on a Color Stay watchman to hold him docile; six silver at the back door bought a merchant and two bodyguards through, double on the way out. Bria’s answer was to arrange a Krelene fire-festival in the street outside, clear his patrons, and set his own inn alight. The blaze was not illusion alone. He said outright that real fire would have to be mixed through the conjured kind, and he lit it to pull every eye in the street and to leave the council and Beltran holding the blame: a false-insurance ruse, meant to make the council fund the lavish remodel he considered himself owed.

Getting Beltran there in person took two more pieces of work. Bria conjured a flawed copy of the cured lieutenant Whent and sent it out to carry Beltran the truth about his mother, and he wrote to Alyphe Grayeras under false pretenses so that Beltran would find her in the building. Katalia carried the letter, came back in by the side door, and was out again before the fighting started.

The reveal happened in the road, and Beltran died there. Bria was left inside with Alyphe when the party walked out. What became of the building, and of the man who owns it, was never written down. He is owed powdered rubies, and one small favor still.