Who: Vallaki’s other noble house. We have dined at its table (S9), fled from its sitting room (S10), and eaten its canapés under its own roof (S11 — all of us, it turns out; see the correction below).
Where: Wachterhaus — the finest house in the noble district. Per the Ravens: warded to the nines — in ten years, their agents have never gotten inside.
Status: As of Session 13: we robbed her. The bones of St. Andral came out of her library through a window, the devil’s letter came out of her bedroom chest, and her sons learned what sleeps in the master bedroom because we aimed them at it. She is scheduled to hang on our testimony — and answered by climbing onto the fountain’s lip at the mandatory festival and giving the counter-sermon of her life, fiend raven riding her shoulder openly, ending on the same three words as the Baron: “They will attest.” Very, very complicated.
Lady Fiona Wachter
Received us like equals, fed us mutton and non-haunted fish, and laid her cards on the table with unsettling speed. Her account: the Baron is a weak pretender whose Reformation Centre breaks people; her husband — a commoner who took her name, “the only man in Barovia unafraid of a Wachter” — died suddenly ten years ago, and she believes the Baron responsible, though she cannot prove it; and three years ago Victor Vallakovich broke her daughter Stella’s mind. She wants the Baron and his son not deposed but dead — “they just don’t know it” — and it took sustained diplomacy to establish that the Baron’s wife, if innocent, might be left standing.
Assorted intelligence from her table, recorded for the file: the Wachters held that house since before Strahd came (“Strahd is a Johnny-come-lately”); she says the devil’s name freely behind her thick walls — and one of us tested it, five times, and the night stayed empty (the name alone summons nothing; it matters who speaks it); Izek has fire powers to go with the demon arm and “will have to be crushed… together”; there are werewolves west toward Krezk who pick off travelers and capture children; and the winery has a name at last — the Wizards of Wine, Martikov-owned, its wagons confirmed late by her own agent. The woman is charisma in a dress, and our insight bounced right off her.
The commission
Find proof of what Victor did to Stella. Payment: 50 gold, her considerable goodwill, and access to a wine cellar that is suddenly one of the more strategically important assets in Vallaki. With proof, she says, the town turns and the Baron falls. We agreed to seek the proof and keep our own counsel. (Update, S10: revoked — “your services are no longer required.” We’re keeping the case anyway; see Victor Vallakovich.)
The raven that was not a raven
Midway through dinner, Sirius quietly opened his divine senses. Lady Wachter herself: clean — no fiend, no undead, an ordinary warm human hand. The raven on the perch in the corridor: a fiend.
There followed the least subtle covert conference in the history of espionage (two grown men, one bathroom, “we are close followers of the Morninglord”), and the worst possible luck: someone was listening at the door, heard the word — and within moments the fiendish presence moved, fast, up the stairs and out of the house. It did not come back.
Pressed gently, Lady Wachter: it is “just a bird.” A gift from “a dear friend,” ten years ago. Asked which friend, she could not recall. “Ravens are plenty in Barovia. They are a sign of goodness. You can trust anyone with a raven.” — which is either perfectly true or the single most alarming sentence spoken at that table.
Her sons supplied the missing chapter later, at the inn: when their father died, their grieving mother wrote to everyone — including the abbey, about raising him from the dead — then disappeared for two weeks, and came back with the raven, and seemed at peace. Sit with that story a moment. We have. (See also: The Ravens of Barovia, who wrote to us that very night about exactly this.)
Lily and the lady (Session 10)
The plan was sensible: a note — we have information about your daughter; meet us at the church, neutral ground — delivered by Lily, hooded, forgettable. Every part of it was sensible except the footman recognizing her on the doorstep (“Lily from earlier! Come in”). So Lily stood alone in the sitting room with Lady Wachter — raven on her shoulder — produced the note, rolled her worst deception of the evening, and watched the temperature drop: “Have you turned on me, Lily?”
Then: a wave of unnatural sleep — shaken off; a sprint for the door; a second wave on the threshold — shaken off, luck riding shotgun; and flat-out flight through dusk with a proper diversionary route home, because Lily has done this dance before in worse cities. The last she saw was the lady in her own doorway, raven at her ear, watching her go. Upset.
Yes: the raven is back. The fiend that fled mid-dinner sat on her shoulder all evening like nothing happened. File under questions that keep us up at night.
The canapé defense
By half past seven the lady had built her answer: an impromptu canapé evening, announced barely an hour after a small hooded messenger fled the premises. Doors flung wide, lamplight, forty or fifty delighted citizens flowing in and out with plates of good food. Understand what this is: a fortification. She has bricked herself in behind the town’s affection, and every wall is a person we refuse to hurt.
Sirius walked in the front door anyway and offered her the truth among witnesses. Her answer, complete: “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Your services are no longer required.”
And across the room, leaning on the wall, watching us the way a man watches a job — Ernst. “It seems your friend took a bit of a fright earlier.” We said she’d only been delivering a message. “I think the message was received loud and clear.”
The canapé party, corrected (Session 11)
For the record: we were all inside. Every one of us had followed Sirius through the front door, and we spent the evening eating a hostile noblewoman’s canapés under the eyes of fifty adoring citizens. Drew’s invisible voice cried “Fire!” from a hiding spot near the kitchen; a footman named Haliq defeated the entire plan by staying calm and pointing at the absence of smoke. The lady, asked if we should be concerned: “My house is very safe — in a lot of ways.”
And as we left, her voice followed us out like perfume: “No one is beyond redemption. Anyone who comes to their senses can still do business with me. No one has done anything that could not be saved.” That is a door held open, and we all heard it. What we do not know is whether it survived the next morning — when the coffins her town says nothing about turned out to hold vampires, and Sirius told a street full of witnesses whose servants let them in.
The hospital (Session 12)
Within hours of the fire, Wachterhaus threw its doors open as a house of medicine — beds in ranks, boiled linen, splints and salves, perhaps a hundred souls through the doors by evening. Saintly. Also, per the medical eye among us: far too many bandages for a woman who didn’t know a disaster was coming. She was provisioned for this catastrophe before it happened. We are apparently the only people in Vallaki who find that interesting rather than reassuring — every burned family she feeds is a wall we cannot shout through. “They say my servants did this. Look at what my servants are doing.” Nobody has said that sentence aloud. The beds say it for her.
And one more house-guest, delivered mid-crisis: Ernst came to the Blue Water and invited Ireena — the Burgomaster’s sister, our charge, the person we told nothing — and she went. (Quests & Threads, top of the ledger.)
The cellar that was lying (Session 12)
We went in under the chaos, hooded among the refugees, and picked the unwatched cellar lock. Behind a pivoting wall: candles, a great black pentagram, a wooden chair at each of its five points — and in one chair, a frail survivor of the Reformation Center’s basement, whose crime had been chuckling at a festival and who would do anything for the lady who saved him. Why was he sitting in a pentagram? “I was brought down here. Just told to sit.” The pentagram? “Decoration?”
He was right, and it killed him anyway. The moment he crossed the threshold — at our urging — the floor birthed skeletons, and they cut him down before any shield could reach him. We never learned his name. We smashed the skeletons to powder. And then Drew examined the pentagram with every advantage we could stack and found the twist that reframes the whole room: it is fake. Lightly scratched. Not one whisper of magic. Set dressing. Somebody built a satanic tableau in Lady Wachter’s cellar, wired it with a real and lethal ward, seated a devoted witness inside — and left it to be found. Proof that collapses the moment anyone competent inspects it, taking the finder’s credibility with it. We have been thinking hard about who was supposed to find that room. The current theory is: us.
What we left in it: a dead man, a heap of bones, a kicked-over chair, and a picked lock. We are aware of what that looks like.
Upstairs (Session 12)
A storeroom (silverware declined; beets liberated). A kitchen turned hospital ward — and on those bedrolls, among the burned, people with vampire wounds, a couple of whom did not look like they were merely wounded. Then the hallway: portraits and mirrors, moaning behind one door, No admittance on every other, and over the stairhead an enormous, beautiful, horrible map of Barovia — wolves, the moon, the goat hill — which Drew memorized what she could of. “This is the highest floor you know about.”
The man who died ten years ago, minutes ago (Session 13)
The master bedroom — “Mama’s room is verboten,” per both sons, separately — held a family portrait (father, mother, two mischievous sons, a baby daughter) and, on the canopy bed, a very still man with two coins on his eyes. Drew’s medical verdict: freshly dead — minutes. Our collected arcana said something far worse: Gentle Repose — the little spell that stops the clock on a corpse, ten days per casting — re-cast, faithfully, every ten days, for a decade. Lord Wachter died about ten years ago. Someone has knelt at that bed roughly every tenth day since. There is one bed in that room, and the other side of it has clearly been slept in.
We have seen a fake pentagram, a skeleton ward, and a fiend on a shoulder, and we are prepared to state that this bedroom is the creepiest thing in that house. (Osric’s motion to take the body as collateral was debated with more seriousness than it deserved, and declined.)
The bone-less box
The closet’s iron chest (high shelf) defended itself: a poison needle put Lily unconscious on the floor before it gave up its contents — coin bearing the devil’s face, a Druid Priestess’ Tome full of ritual diagrams none of us can read, and a letter from He Who Shall Not Be Named to Lady Wachter. An actual letter. From him. To her. It smells of crime, and read carefully it says something stranger than any of us expected: keep the Baron; keep the status quo; do it subtly. Lawfully evil. What the box did not contain was bones.
The secret room, and who opened it
Behind the moaning door we found Ireena — tending a catatonic girl we now know to be Stella Wachter, and telling us what a saint the lady of the house is. So Drew told her everything. And Ireena, asked why we’d kept her out of every loop, asked only “Why didn’t you tell me before?” — and paid the truth back in full: the supplies come from a secret room off the library. Behind that bookshelf, on a tarpaulin, neatly ordered: the bones of St. Andral. Plus five scrolls. That was the moment Lady Wachter came up her own stairs, saw the haul, and said — quietly, which was worse — “The bones.”
The escape (six rounds, four windows, one baby)
Sirius aimed the boys at the forbidden door (“Is that Papa?”) to buy a corridor; Drew smashed the safe-room window and hauled Ireena and the future through it; Sirius bellowed “BLASPHEMY! She stole the bones of St. Andral!” for the benefit of a house full of commoners and went off the roof; Osric found the openable window; and Lily became a small child so convincingly that Ernst looked at her twice, saw a child, and shoved past her on his way to the crime. The fiend raven — knifed once out of the air — ended the scene perched on Lady Wachter’s shoulder. Their final form. Everyone got out. The bones went home. (St. Andral’s Church has the rest, and it is the best page in this compendium this week.)
The fountain’s lip (Session 13, mid-festival — where the record stands)
The state’s answer came by nightfall: there were never any vampires, the festival is today, attendance mandatory — and Lady Wachter will hang on the strength of our testimony. Her answer came at midday, in torrential rain, from the fountain: the Baron’s sunlight as fake as his smile; “How dare he scorn our dead… They WERE vampires. He could not protect us”; the Reformation Center “twisting the minds of the citizenry”; and — publicly, for the first time — “the Baron’s son abused Stella.” Then she looked at us. “They will attest. They will back me up.”
Ernst
Promoted in the file twice over: from “polite manservant” to “the lady’s shadow” (Session 10, when Henrik named him) — and then, Session 11, from appendage to person, which is worse. He has his own page now: Ernst Larnak. Two brothers, a rotten apple, the Reformation Center; “there’s only one devil in Barovia, and you are flashing his writ.” We looked for the lie and found only fury. The household chorus behind him — Haliq in the hall, young Madalena: “Each one of us was rescued by the lady.” Her good works are real to the people she saved. We record it plainly because it is the most dangerous fact in this file.
Karl & Nikolai
Met at last, upstairs, mid-burglary — and we want this minuted: lovely. Perfectly normal, deeply dim, four-and-a-half-stars-would-drink-with-again nobles, who each separately asked whether we were wizards, and each separately recited the one rule of the house: “Mama’s room is verboten. Never.” Then Sirius opened the forbidden door at them, and Karl’s voice came through it later, forever: “Mama, I think we’ve got some questions for you.” — “Not now, Karl.” — “But it’s disgusting.” — “We will talk about this later.” We are not proud of it. Their drinking companion Bluto is still missing at the haunted lake — a kindness we can still do them, whatever today does to their mother.
Stella, and what was done to her
She has her own page now: Stella Wachter. Seen at last — catatonic, tended by Ireena — and her story is no longer a family secret: her mother said it to the whole town from the fountain. Betrothed to Victor Vallakovich, returned broken; three years in a locked room; and now three samples of the phenomenon — hers, Sirius’s half hour, and Fëanor’s two days.
Open questions
- What is Lady Wachter? Not a fiend, not undead — but she went away grieving and came home with a demon on a perch and peace in her heart. The demon now rides her shoulder in public. Their final form.
- Who re-casts Gentle Repose on Lord Wachter every ten days — and is being raised what the deal with the devil is for?
- Who staged the pentagram, and for whom? Still open — and now the least of her theatre.
- Whose “master’s design” was the coffin plot — hers? Or the devil’s, with her as the courier? The letter we read suggests the devil holds everyone’s leash in that town, hers included.
- What was the sleep that reached for Lily twice — the lady, or the thing on her shoulder?
- Which way does Ernst break — if she hangs? If she wins? If her own sons ask their questions out loud?
- Can the bitten in her kitchen ward turn? The comatose man with two neat neck-holes upstairs did not settle the question.
- What happens at the “later” talk — the one Karl was promised about the thing in Mama’s room?
Appears in: S8 · S9 · S10 · S11 · S12 · S13. See also: Stella Wachter, Ernst Larnak, Ireena Kolyana, Vallaki, The Ravens of Barovia, Henrik the Coffin Maker, Handouts (the letter).