The Ashveil Estate

The Ashveil estate stands in the upper Civic Quarter of Aristonia — a stone-faced townhouse set behind an iron fence, with a small, tidy English garden between the street and the door. The family name, Ashveil, is chiseled into the stone above an ornate wooden door, in the manner of the city's noble houses. The knocker is cast as a crudely caricatured dwarven head. It is the home of the widowed noblewoman Maren Ashveil.

Off the main house is the study where her late husband, Dale Ashveil, died: a small, wood-paneled room lined with bookshelves, a desk beneath a window overlooking the garden, and a cold fireplace. Since his death Maren has left the room exactly as it was, forbidding the servants to enter or clean it, and a thin layer of dust lies over everything the constabulary's investigators did not disturb.

The household is kept by a stooped, large-eared manservant named Marshall, who answers to "Marsh."