Two Hags, Two Wings

The attack inside Queef Tower was not one clean strike. It was a division. In the east wing, the Night Hag pulled I.J. toward the washroom, turning the estate's controlled corridors into a trap. The house that had forced names into Common and stripped away disguises now had a different kind of hidden thing moving through it: something old, cruel, and comfortable using fear as a doorway. Then the rats came. They poured through the east wing in a crawling wave, making the clean halls feel suddenly diseased and alive. Nick, Nymeria, Havyk, and the others were pulled into immediate survival, fighting through the chaos while the hag used the noise and panic to keep everyone reacting instead of understanding. That was only half the assault. In the west, the Fate Hag kept Rice Hands inside the pleasure-vision. His body was still part of the house, but his mind and soul were being dragged somewhere else. The illusion did not need to look like a battlefield. It did its damage by making surrender feel like reward. Rice Hands' mind began to collapse. His personality, his selfhood, and the part of him that could return to the world slipped toward a nether plane while the hag maintained the lie around him. The horror was not only that he was dying. It was that the death was being made private, intimate, and difficult for the others to reach. Then Timberlake reported that Rice Hands' body had appeared in the reception lounge. That news made the split impossible to ignore. The adventurers were no longer chasing one murderer or one monster. They were trying to survive a coordinated hag assault that had scattered them across the estate, weaponized the building, and placed one of their own beyond ordinary rescue. The masquerade had become a house full of emergencies. And every emergency cost time Rice Hands did not have.