A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
It was an hour to midnight, and you were deep beneath the house, in the dark where the cult had lived and died.
You found their crypts — four stone coffins for the Durst family, and every one of them empty. When you opened the mother’s, Elisabeth’s, a swarm of biting things poured out of it, and you cut and burned them down — fitting, you thought, that hers was the grave full of vermin. The dead children whispered from the shadows when you asked: not here, this is an evil place. So you carried their little bones onward.
Through twisting corridors you came upon a man hanged from the rafters in his fine portrait-clothes — Gustav Durst — a note still clutched in his dead hand. And as you read it, the wall tore open and a dead woman lurched out, her chest split around a beating black heart, screaming at you for intruders. Sirius did not wait to hear her out. Steel and holy fire fell on her, and a firebolt through the heart turned her to dust. In her strongbox: potions, a fine untouched cloak, a yellow spellbook, and tools besides. And then the baby’s crying, which had haunted you all this time, abruptly stopped.
Behind another hidden door stood a statue of a gaunt, pale man in a black cloak, a wolf beneath his hand and a grey crystal orb in his grasp. You took the orb and left him standing. The earth split and gave up four ghouls — but Fëanor lifted his holy symbol, and the things that fear the light broke and fled, and you destroyed them where they cowered. For a man who insists he does not pray, he is becoming a fearsome priest.
Then, lower still, you heard them: He is ancient. He is the land.
You passed thirteen alcoves of foul relics — a sun stained with blood, a crown of black vines, a white feather, a knot of amber resin — the makings of a ritual that, Fëanor saw with a chill, was already complete. And in the last chamber, over black water, an altar waited beneath hanging chains, a bundle of tiny bones at its heart, and thirteen faceless figures chanting from the gallery above: One must die. One must die.
The house had asked you, from the very first night, to bring its beast a gift. Now you understood the price of one. The altar wanted a living thing — any living thing — and Lancelot stood at your heel. You refused. Rather than feed it, Osric raised his sword and brought it down on the altar stone.
The cultists shrieked — Come, demon, we awaken thee! — and midnight struck.
Out of the refuse rose a mountain of dead flesh, a hundred limbs and faces writhing together, and from the gallery the apparitions hurled visions of horror into your minds. It was an ugly, desperate fight — until Fëanor saw the crystal heart buried at its core. You tore the flesh away to bare it, dragged each other back from the edge, and Osric drove his blade through the heart and shattered it. The mound fell still. The thirteen screamed once and were gone, and the weight that had pressed on you all night lifted clean away.
You walked out the front door into parted mist — onto a strange wood and a long, empty road. You buried Rose, Thorn, and the maid in good ground at last, and the three of them came once more to thank you: You have defeated a great evil — though a greater evil still remains. May the Morning Lord protect you, and may you stay out of the sight of the devil, Strahd.
Then they were gone, the mists rolled shut, and the house behind you simply ceased to be.
You made a fire and slept. And when morning came it came grey and sunless, under clouds thicker than any you’d known, the woods around you far too quiet. You are stronger now — the land itself seemed to notice you survive. But you are nowhere you know, the road runs only deeper into the trees, and somewhere out there in this cursed country a devil with a name is waiting.
You are far from home. Whatever this place is, you are in it now.