Location from The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir
The Emperor's crumbling palace on the First House — a labyrinth of faded grandeur where eight Houses sent their best and brightest to discover the secret of immortality, and most of them died trying.
Canaan House smells like salt water, old stone, and slow decay. The atrium is the emotional center — a cavernous space where 'everything was beautiful, and all had gone to seed.' Sunlight filters through cracked skylights, illuminating dust motes that drift like the ghosts of better days. The sound is waves against stone, footsteps in empty corridors, and the occasional distant crash of something finally giving way to entropy. The palace is a locked-room mystery in architectural form. Doors are sealed with necromantic locks that can only be opened by specific theorems. Behind them lie laboratories preserving ancient Lyctor knowledge — the research the postulants need to discover the secret of immortality. But Canaan House has another purpose: it is a machine designed to create Lyctors, and the price of admission is a soul. The atmosphere shifts from gothic mystery to outright horror as the body count rises. What begins as an eerie academic retreat becomes a killing ground where trust is a luxury no one can afford.
White stone walls threaded with gold veins, slender towers reaching toward a dying sun, and tiered terraces cascading toward black water. Everything is beautiful and everything is falling apart. Gardens that were once fabulous are now dead tangles of overgrowth. Windows are consumed by vegetation. Interior halls are a maze of locked doors, rotting tapestries, and modern conveniences 'haphazardly pasted atop ancient riches' — electric lights in ten-thousand-year-old sconces, plumbing that works intermittently in bathrooms carved from marble.
Also known as: Canaan House, The First House Palace