Vallaki

Where: West along the road, four days from the village — past Tser Pool and the windmill, on the shore of a grey lake.

Status: 🏠 We are here — lodged at The Blue Water Inn as of the evening of our arrival.

First entered: Session 7, at dusk, through the east gate.

The gate (bring patience, not contraband)

Real walls. A wrought-iron gate. Guards with forms. Entry involves a friendly, thorough interrogation — are you now, or have you ever been, agents of the devil? In league with the Vistani? The dusk elves (whatever those are)? Werewolves? — and the registration of every weapon you carry, down to Lily’s broom handle (“you have brought it to our attention, and therefore it must be registered”). The guard who processed us answers to a serial number: 4368. Thank you, 4368.

Ireena’s rank opened the gate: as sister of the Burgomaster of Barovia she was welcomed with condolences for her father, and best wishes passed to her brother Ismark — the town already speaks of him as the new Burgomaster.

The laws (learn them; the stocks are not hypothetical)

• Speaking the devil’s name is a punishable offense. He is “the Devil” here, nothing else.
• Speaking ill of the Baron is a crime — the second crime on the list, above most others. The Baron is “righteous and proper and true and great and all the above and so on and so forth.” So says 4368.
• Festival attendance is MANDATORY. From the flyer, fresh off the presses: THE FESTIVAL OF THE BLAZING SUN — seven days from our arrival. Failure to attend is punishable by punishment. Children required. There has been a mandatory festival every other week for fifteen years.
• In the town square: a gallows-stage, and three citizens in the stocks — one missed a festival (his mother had died; this was not accepted as an excuse), one was drunk once, and one said something unkind about the Baron.

The texture of the place

A guard on every corner. Fresh posters going up over the old posters. Smiles that arrive a half-second late. Every conversation, every transaction, every arrest ends the same way — say it with us: all will be well.

And yet — mark this — people walk these streets after dark without scurrying. That is more than the village could say. The walls are real. What they keep in is a separate question.

The gazetteer of a well town (Roger’s gossip + the taproom, Session 8)

• The districts: the square (gallows standing, stocks always stocked) · the Workyard — paper mill and lumberyard, so that’s where the flyers come from · the Guard district, holding a smithy and the Reformation Centre · the north district for the well-to-do · farm plots (where Roger works) · and a proper shopping district, the only real one in Barovia.
• The Reformation Centre: people go in as themselves and come out wrong — fake smiles, forgotten family members, an endless supply of “all is well.” The Bard’s independent assessment: dark magics, stay out. We intend to comply enthusiastically.
• The old Burgomaster ruled through fear for years and then died suddenly, fifteen years ago — not ill, just dead — and his son took over without visible grief.
• Izek, captain of the guard: a huge man with a monstrous red right arm like something grafted from a demon, and a temperament to match. Do not cross him. Keep off his eyeline.
• The lake to the north is haunted — four years now: a wailing woman, fishermen ensorcelled into walking into the water and drowning in front of their friends. The fishing industry is dead. (Lake’s haunted.)
• The dusk elves — a dying people camped with the Vistani outside the walls, all men, because the devil killed every one of their women.

The government, now that we’ve met it (Session 10)

• The Baron — received us in a back office, retracted a vigilantism charge, deputized us under wax-sealed writs, commissioned us against Lady Wachter, and kept our priest as surety. He is not lying about any of it. Somehow that is worse.
• The Baroness — grinned. The entire audience. See the file.
• Izek — eight feet, an arm the size of a grown man, “The baron wants to see youse.” Now met in the flesh; still best kept off one’s eyeline.
• Victor Vallakovich — the perfect son in the attic, who took half an hour out of our paladin’s head.
• The Reformation Centre is run by “the twins” — “either people come out thinking more appropriately, or they don’t come out at all.” The Baron said this fondly. Also: two of his three household staff have disappeared lately. He mentioned it like a man complaining about the servant problem.

Known establishments

• The Blue Water Inn — warmth, wolf steak (wine now rationed), our beds — and, it turns out, an information hub of The Ravens of Barovia. Also Roger, The Bard, and our landlady.
• St. Andral’s Church — the finest building in town, with an empty secret under the altar — an emptiness that, we now know, used to shield the whole city.
• St. Andral’s Orphanage — recently de-demoned; currently housing one confessed, confined, unrepentant gravedigger (Milivoj).
• Wachterhaus — the finest house in the noble district. We have dined there, fled from there, and been fired by there, in that order. See The House of Wachter — the perch is occupied again.
• The Workyard smith — not the shopping-district smith (who, per Lady Wachter, is the Baron’s man). Friendly, talks hammers with Drew, sharpens anything for silver, and identifies coffin nails on sight.
• The Coffin Works — Henrik’s shop, production district. As of Session 11: burst windows, two piles of dust, no paperwork anywhere, and the town’s newest crime scene. The six things we were not discussing in public discussed themselves.
• Celegal’s Bowyer — next door to the Coffin Works: a chatty grey-skinned, long-eared elf a very long way from home. Bows, bolts, gossip, and fair prices (he paid 30 gold for a heavy crossbow nobody was using). Vallaki’s only ammunition counter.
• Blinsky’s toy shop — as yet unvisited; we owe Aragal a toy from it, at 20 gold over cost.
• The Vistani camp sits outside the east gate — Vallaki admits no Vistani. We waved. The toy isn’t bought yet.

The morning of the vampires (Session 11)

The question below — what happens if six coffins open into a mandatory festival crowd? — got its answer by subtraction: we opened them first, four days early, with the town not assembled. They were vampire spawn. Four reached the streets. What Vallaki looks like as the record stands: dead guards on the corners, at least one civilian killed, fires burning, St. Andral’s an inferno with us and two vampires inside it, two more spawn loose and unaccounted for — and a town choosing, street by street, between two stories: “the outsiders let them in” versus the word of a hovering angel with a burning sword: “the servants of Lady Wachter.” Also unexplained: a brick-weighted barricade across the church road, built before any of it started.

The day of the fire (Session 12)

The ledger of Vallaki’s worst day in living memory, as we counted it: all six vampire spawn destroyed (the last four in the burning church, two of them delivered bodily through the doors by Izek, of all people on earth) · St. Andral’s seventy percent gone, fourteen-odd houses and shops with it, dead uncounted · a midday firefight the whole town fought together, bucket lines and all, to an honest, average verdict · and by afternoon, two stories racing through the streets: Lady Wachter’s hospital — thrown open, saintly, and provisioned suspiciously in advance — versus the angel of the Morning Lord who named her. Her story has beds. Ours has a celestial who refuses to know he exists.

The festival is in three days, on a wounded town, and the government has yet to say a word about any of it.

The rewrite, and the festival (Session 13 — where the record stands)

The state said its word, by crier, at the wrong hour of the evening: “There are no vampires in Vallaki. There have never been vampires in Vallaki.” The attack was seditious agitators in very obvious masks. And in answer to the insult: the Festival of the Blazing Sun, brought forward to the very next midday. Attendance mandatory for every soul in Vallaki, whatever their circumstances. Bring your sick. Bring your grieving. All will be well. Also in the package: Henrik arrested to the Reformation Center, and Lady Wachter to hang — on our testimony.

So here the town stands, all of it, by law, in torrential rain: children dressed as flowers, a ten-foot wicker sun on a scaffold (ball: currently empty), the stretcher-borne wounded carried into the crowd by Wachter medics, one meal a week in every stomach, a burned quarter still steaming — and two rulers giving dueling sermons that both ended on us. “They will attest.” / “They will attest. They will back me up.” Every soaked, bereaved, furious soul in Vallaki is turning to look at five outsiders. That is where the record stops.

Open questions

• What happens if six coffins open into a mandatory festival crowd? We made sure we’ll never know. People are dead who were alive that morning — but the whole town was not in the streets. We think we did the right thing. We think so.
• The bones: who does a coffin maker answer to? Answered, recovered, and RETURNED — the chain ran Milivoj → crypt → Henrik → Ernst → Lady Wachter’s library → home to the sub-altar. The ground answered. See St. Andral’s Church.
• Vallaki was the one place spared in the bad times — because of the church. The bones are back and the sanctuary held a wave of holy warmth. Whether the whole city’s shield is up again — we felt it roll past the ruin, for what that’s worth — is the town’s most important unanswered question, and nobody in charge believes the question exists.
• What does the state say tomorrow? It says nothing happened. There have never been vampires in Vallaki. We have watched a government reply to fangs with stationery, and we understand the town better now.
• Whom do we attest for? The hanging is scheduled on our word. The evidence we can produce damns her; the letter that complicates everything is in the Baron’s coat; the crowd hates everyone. There are no good choices.
• Who is guarding the bones while every soul in Vallaki — by law — stands in this square?

The full record: S7 · S8 · S9 · S10 · S11 · S12 · S13 field notes.