A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
You woke on a cobbled road in grey woods, hungry, with nothing in your packs but the leavings of a dead house. You learned quickly that this land will not feed you — you knelt over its plants and mushrooms and recognised none of it, as though the very green of the place were grown for someone else’s mouth. So you walked on, thirsty and unfed, and let the road carry you.
It carried you to a gate. Two headless statues, a crumbling arch, and words cut into old stone: “Welcome to Barovia — the crown jewel in the Strahd empire.” And raised above them, plain as daylight, the sigil from Osric’s banner — the heirloom his uncle swore was noble blood, the thing that drew him into the mist. The gate stood open and unguarded. You stepped through, into a valley shadowed by a vast and spiky castle on its pillar of rock, and went down to the village beneath it.
They did not welcome you. Doors shut. Curtains twitched. The folk of Barovia took one look at your colours and your living faces and fled indoors — all but an old woman with a cart of pies that smelled like heaven and tasted better, who called you “mist walkers” and told you, kindly enough, that when your kind appear, the devil grows interested. Two ravens watched you from the rooftops. Here, you’re told, ravens are lucky.
In the Blood on the Vine the room fell silent, and a single man waved you to his table — Ismark, a day into being burgomaster, a day into burying his father. He knew your dog’s name before you did: Lancelot, Mary’s dog, gone these many weeks. And he told you the shape of your prison without flinching. Strahd is no story. He is a vampire in truth, who drinks the blood of this valley, and the mists are the bars of a cell none of you will leave. Men wander into them for hours, for days, forever.
He asked two things of you, and you gave your word to both. Bury his father. And carry his sister Ireena to safety in Vallaki — for it was Ireena the devil wanted, Ireena he came courting night after night until the old man’s heart gave out under the strain of saying no. You met her: bright, sharp, alive — and in this country, you came to understand, to be full of life is to be marked. Her red hair only sealed it.
You bought what a grim merchant would sell — tents, packs, water skins, the gear of people who mean to keep walking — and you noticed, in the coins he pressed into your hands, a gaunt and familiar face: the same face as the statue beneath the Dursts’ house. The devil’s likeness, passed from palm to palm as money.
That night a frantic woman beat on the door — Mary, begging you to find her lost daughter Gertruda. You gave her back her dog, and promised only to look. She is almost certainly dead, Ismark said, when Mary had gone. Strahd, or the witches in the ruins to the south. You slept on it. And one of you — Lily, who’d eaten the old woman’s pie — slept too deep, into bright tangled dreams that left nothing behind but a hunger that would not let go.
In the morning Ismark would not let his sister near her own father’s grave, and at last admitted why. There is something at the church. The priest, Father Donavich, has a son — Doru — whom the devil took to his castle, and who came back wrong. They keep him chained in the dark beneath the altar.
You carried the coffin the long mile out, past villagers who made an old, half-forgotten sign of the Morning Lord. You dug the grave with the priest’s own hands beside you, and laid the burgomaster down, and watched the broken man weep at the smallest mercy of Fëanor’s light. And then Father Donavich begged you — help my son, and whatever you do, do not kill him — and unlocked the chains, and led you down.
Your light found him clinging to the ceiling like a spider, a boy of perhaps eighteen, and the truth of him struck cold: undead. “I’m sorry,” he said, in a child’s frightened voice. “I’m so hungry.” And then he came down at your throats.
It was a wretched fight, the kind no one wanted. You cursed him and lit him and pinned him; Osric carved him and the wound barely showed; Sirius stood over him and brought down a stroke of holy fire that should have ended anything — and the boy still trembled there, whole, starving. Lily had him grappled to the stone. Drew would not strike at all, and threw herself across the door instead, pleading with all of you to walk away. And above you the trapdoor wrenched open, and Father Donavich stood in the light he’d sworn would stay shut, watching his son writhe and beg at your feet — “Blood. Anyone’s blood. I’m so hungry” — while you said aloud the thing none of you wanted to be true.
His son is a vampire too.
And there it hangs: the boy pinned and pleading, the father in the doorway, your blades drawn and your promise still ringing in your ears. Whatever you do next, you do it watched — by a grieving man, and by a hunger that will not be reasoned with, in the dark beneath a church, in the shadow of a castle full of spikes.