Nahiri - Declaration in stone

Markov Manor was torn apart, opened up and laid out to view like a dissected animal pinned to a board. Spires, halls, buttresses, and turrets were ripped from their moorings and left to hang at odd angles around the sundered core of the manor building.

***

Stone grinds against stone as massive fragments of architecture wheel slowly around me. It was once a great vault with soaring columns— now it's a floating field of rubble. With hands, faces, bodies protruding from the stone. Dozens and dozens of them, trapped and petrified and encased in the stone.

"What is happening?" someone shouts. I start, pulling back into the shadows and casting my mind around to find the source of the voice. But it grows into a clamor of many voices, dozens of them, and screams, mingled with raw pain and fury, a glimpse of a white face with fierce eyes— I will repay...

And it ends in stony silence. I turn my head, and I'm face to face with a vampire, mouth open and fangs bared. I actually jump before my brain manages to tell my body that the vampire is dead and embedded in the wall.

***

THE MYSTERY OF MARKOV MANOR