The streets of a suburb he could neither remember nor recognize.
Beggars and cripples crawled on the ground, constantly begging for spare coins. Some were too insistent, trying to grab at his legs. Then he had to use force, delivering not strong but noticeable blows that would fling the beggars aside.
He reached a street where something truly bad was happening. A group of people with blackened faces sat in stupor, flies swarming around them.
He called one of the beggars over, threw him a coin, and asked what was going on. The beggar trembled in horror. He said that the people there were incurably sick and should be driven away with sticks, lest they, God forbid, bring disease upon themselves, already unfortunate and deprived.
"But the worst part isn't that," the beggar rasped, glancing at the Cursed with a crooked eye. "It's that every night the Weeping Widow comes for such sick people in her carriage, accompanied by grim wagons. The most terrible thing is that she collects the sick and the beggars she fancies and takes them forever to her palace. In the palace, people say, she performs terrible inhuman experiments on them, and none ever return."
The palace was a tall building with large dark windows, behind which otherworldly mystical lights sometimes flickered, and with sharp spires on the roof stretching toward the gloomy pre-sunset sky. Around the palace stretched scorched land for miles, littered with countless bones. No gates or doors were visible. Clearly, the Weeping Widow's Palace, by all signs, resembled a gateway to the next region.