Where: The west of Vallaki, near the orphanage.
Status: A ruin — two-thirds gone, roofless, fourteen-odd houses and shops burned with it — and a sanctuary again. The bones are home on the sub-altar; the ground answered with a wave of holy warmth; its priest lives; its saint rests. Currently unguarded, because the entire town is at a mandatory festival.
First entered: Session 7, the evening we arrived, with Ireena. Most recently: Session 13 — we slept in the roofless nave, on guard over the bones we brought home.
The place
The finest building we have seen in this land: old stone, stained glass, a walled graveyard of family mausoleums. Its priest is Father Lucian — gentle, kind, and trusting to a degree we felt obliged to warn him about. His altar boy Yeska is eight, worships visiting adventurers on principle, and has now been taught push-ups by a paladin.
The stories say the devil has not set foot in Vallaki in two hundred years. This church — what lay under it — is widely assumed to be why.
The secret (we are among perhaps five living people who know)
Beneath the altar is a hidden crypt, and in it were kept the bones of St. Andral — the relic that sanctified this ground and kept evil from crossing its threshold. They were stolen six days before we arrived. We searched the crypt with Lucian: nothing but dust. Until they are found, the church is just a building — and the town, which shelters under two centuries of story, has no idea.
The trail so far: only Lucian and Yeska knew of the crypt. Yeska told Milivoj — groundskeeper of church and orphanage, keeper of keys — after Milivoj came asking about church secrets out of the blue, about ten days ago. Four days later the bones were gone. Milivoj is next on our list.
Ireena has not been told. She sat in these pews and called this place safety. We delivered her to a sanctuary that currently sanctifies nothing, and the arithmetic of when and how to tell her is its own quiet horror.
What the bones actually did (Session 10, from the Ravens’ records)
Worse than we thought, and we thought it was bad. Per The Ravens of Barovia: the bones and the church together made a hallowing that covered the whole city — while the saint rested in his place, no lesser dead thing could enter Vallaki at all. The devil himself could walk the streets — but never this ground. Take the bones out, and the city’s doors swing open. Six coffins arrived at the Coffin Works the day after the theft. The math does itself.
The priest, and our arrangement (Session 10)
We told Father Lucian the shape of it — Ernst collected the bones; the Wachter raven is a fiend. He took it about as well as a good man can take heresy about the parish’s favorite noblewoman (“She’s Lady Wachter”), and we settled on terms we can live with: he holds his tongue for now, and if we disappear, he takes all of it to the Baron. A dead man’s switch with a kind heart.
The fire (Session 11 — where the record currently stops)
We opened the coffins ourselves, four days early, on our schedule — they were vampire spawn, and four of them reached the streets — and two of them came here, to the building their whole conspiracy was aimed at, and set it alight. St. Andral’s is an inferno. Yeska came out alive in a guard’s arms. Father Lucian is on his own altar with the sun raised over his head, holding two vampires at bay with nothing but faith, the roof coming down in pieces — and we are in there with him, blades out, mid-fight, where the record stops.
A detail that will not stop itching: the main road to the church was blocked by a toppled wagon that turned out to be deliberately weighted with bricks — built, by someone, before the vampires were ever loose.
The last battle of St. Andral’s (Session 12)
The church fought everyone as it died — blinding smoke, backdrafts, rubble on every fourth heartbeat — and it hosted, in its final hour, the strangest alliance Vallaki will never hear about: our party, a wereraven who refused to be one in front of witnesses, a priest with a mace he kept under the altar, and Izek, who threw two vampires through the processional doors and burned one alive with his own arm. One of the creatures spoke a sentence we are still turning over: “The master wants the priest dead.” The master did not get him. All six spawn ended here or at the shop — there are, tonight, no vampires in Vallaki (see, however, the kitchen ward).
The building could not be saved. Sirius walked back into the collapse — blind at the time — for the sunburst statuette, and put it in Father Lucian’s hands: “Lathander lives in our hearts, not in our places.” The Father, holding it: “But this church — it was a symbol for so many.”
Bones first (Session 13 — we won one)
The end of the story, and for once it is good. We came back from Wachterhaus at dusk with the bones in the bag of holding and found Father Lucian on the steps, holding the sunburst statuette like the last one in the world. Together: the altar rolled aside — it moves on greased wheels; his church kept its own secrets to the end — and the bones of St. Andral went home to the sub-altar in the crypt, laid down respectfully, with the Father’s hands on them.
And the ground answered. A wave of holy warmth rolled out through the roofless wreck and past it, like the building exhaling — and for the first time since the fire, this place felt like a sanctuary again. Lucian, with the precision of the truly exhausted: “I’m not gonna say it’s a bit late. But thank you regardless. We needed this.”
We slept there that night — three of us in the roofless nave on Drew’s conjured bedrolls, on guard, under the rain. Write it down: we actually won one.
Open questions
Who sent Milivoj asking — and who has the bones now?Walked to the very end: Milivoj → the crypt → Henrik → Ernst → a secret room off Lady Wachter’s library → home. The chain is closed. We closed it.What has been waiting for this building to become just a building?Vampire spawn. Six. All destroyed.Can a hallowing be raised over a ruin?Yes. We felt it roll past us and keep going. How far it keeps going — whether the city’s shield is truly back up — is the question we’d ask a theologian, if Vallaki had one left who wasn’t herding orphans.- Who guards the bones during a mandatory festival? Nobody, is the answer. Every soul in Vallaki is in the square by law, including us. We asked the Ravens to watch. We keep doing the arithmetic anyway.
- Who barricaded the road with a brick-weighted wagon, before the fire, before the vampires?
- What does a town rebuild first — a roofless church, or the fourteen houses around it — with winter coming and one meal a week?
The full record: S7 · S10 · S11 · S12 · S13 field notes. The quest — complete at last — lives on Quests & Threads.