Editing Crucible:Castle D'Image (section)

== The Night Of The Great Storm ==

The last known head of the family was [[Blaise D'Image]], a reclusive scholar who inherited the castle near the end of the nineteenth century. By then, the D'Images had declined in wealth and number. Servants left. Relatives died without heirs. Visitors became rare. The castle acquired a reputation for cold rooms, locked doors, strange lights, and voices heard behind walls where no room existed.

Around the turn of the century, Boston was battered by one of the greatest storms in its recorded history. On that night, witnesses reported seeing unnatural lightning strike Castle D'Image again and again. The bolts were described as blue-white, green, violet, and in some accounts black. The thunder did not roll outward from the castle but seemed to come from beneath it.

When dawn came, Castle D'Image was empty.

Blaise D'Image had vanished. So had the remaining household staff. No bodies were found. No signs of ordinary violence were discovered. More disturbingly, the great occult library was gone as well. Thousands of books, scrolls, cabinets, relics, and artifacts had disappeared from locked rooms without leaving so much as torn paper or broken glass behind.

At first, local authorities assumed the surviving D'Images had fled the unheated, leaky, drafty old castle in terror, somehow taking their immense library with them. This explanation satisfied no one, but it was less alarming than the alternatives. The estate was abandoned, the gates rusted shut, and the castle began its long decay.