Ashes

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I've now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons' Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out at seanebritten.com

This Week's Inspiration: Smoke Mephit

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Little remained to show there'd ever been a building on the hilltop. Old brickwork revealed the lines of the original foundation, along with mounds and trenches too straight to be natural, but most of the materials must have been cleared away. Kensie tried to hide her disappointment as they reached the top of the slope. She'd been hoping for a mostly intact ruins, gutted by fire and further ravaged by time but with ashy rooms they could explore and maybe a basement full of antique medical equipment to probe. Instead, there were just a few low walls and bits of blackened stone poking out of the grass and weeds.

"This is it?" Sara asked.

"It did burn down," Kensie said, a little defensively. "And that was, like, seventy years ago."

"And all the patients burned up with it?"

"Just the kids, that's the worst part. Well, it's not worse than more people didn't die, but it's pretty messed up that only the kids did. The place was originally built before World War One as some rich guy's mansion but in the 1920s it was sold and became a mental asylum. Then, in the '40s they turned it into a hospital for the treatment of leprosy. I mean, back then I don't think they really treated it. I think they just kept them separate from everyone else."

Kensie rebuilt the hospital in her mind over the old foundations. Picturing a kind of English manor, like from Bridgerton. Imposing brick walls littered with climbing ivy. Flat eaves and narrow windows, possibly with bars across them once the place became a mental asylum and then leper hospice.

"It'd be a beautiful place to-, well, it's a beautiful place," Sara said.

Woodlands bordered the old hospital grounds on three sides but it sat high enough above them that Kensie and Sara could see for miles and miles across the treetops. The track they'd just hiked wound through the trees along the remains of an unpaved service road. On the fourth side were rolling glens, grassy fields threaded with more trees, and in the distance glimpses of farms and the edges of the nearest town.

"It is pretty, and during the day the patients could walk around the grounds. But at night, there was a male dorm, a female dorm, and one for the child patients. The doors would all be locked so they couldn't 'roam around' after dark. Then, one night in 1952 there was a fire, no one knows what caused it but the whole place went up. The doctors and nurses abandoned the patients. The adult men and women managed to break the locks or the windows and get out but the children weren't strong enough, and none of the adults could get to them. So the whole building burned down and about a dozen kids burned with it. It was, like, a big scandal at the time."

Kensie had read the story online while looking for attractions in the area where they'd be camping and hiking. Included were old newspaper stories with black and white photos of how the building originally looked, and the blackened ruins after the fire.

Taking off their heavy backpacks, Kensie and Sara poked around the ruins. The tallest remaining walls could be stepped over easily. The hospital had been a big building and the impressions left by the rooms and hallways looked like some kind of buried maze. Kensie couldn't help feeling disappointed there was so little to find but she took a few pictures all the same. When she looked up from her phone, she noticed a dusky haze gathering on the horizon.