A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
The tent smelled of candle smoke and old velvet, and the woman inside it had been waiting for you longer than you have been in Barovia. Madam Eva. “It took you all long enough. Are you ready to learn your fate?” You are here for a reason, she told you — it is no happenstance that the mists took you five, of all people — and then she let the cards say what she would not.
Five cards for five fates. Knowledge of your enemy, far to the west, at high water aglow with the light of the sun, hidden behind the walls of man. Protection in the house of a dragon, where a heart once pure has rotted into hatred — bring light to the house, peace to the heart. Power at the shrine of murdered gods, beginning in an amber palace of darkness. An ally in a hunter of hunters, stalking this land after the mightiest prey of all. And at the very end of it, the devil himself, waiting to be pursued into the depths of darkness — in the tomb of the only man he ever envied.
Then she read each of you alone, and the cards knew things they should not. Osric’s blood marched beneath that banner, and must kneel and answer for it in the house of the fallen dragon. Fëanor’s stone remembers a fire he has never felt, and somewhere the sun still glows in water — stand there at dawn and choose. Drew’s amber holds a secret her blood has carried for generations, its answer sealed deep in the mountains, where knowledge is bought dearly. And Lily heard the cards name the thing you have all been watching grow: something sweet has taken root in you, little one. Starve it. It is not yours.
Only Sirius she turned away. “Your fate has already been read.” The card she pressed into his hand was blank, and he stared at it a long, long time.
“I have read what may be, not what must be. You could still fail. But with this knowledge, you have a chance.”
That night the Vistani fed you, sang to you, and told you true and careless things: that they pass the mists by an ancient bargain with Strahd and simply do not care about the people who can’t; that the one passenger they ever carried through the fog never came out the other side; that Strahd has been exactly what he is for seven hundred years, and if any man alive knows whom he envied, the Vistani do not. In the morning there was bacon — real bacon, from beyond the mists — and there was Lily, caught elbow-deep in Osric’s pack, fighting like a raccoon for a pie. Fëanor’s magic finally showed you the truth you’d been dreading: enchantment wound thick through every pie, and a fainter web of it wrapped around Lily’s head. She cannot even promise to stop. She told you so herself, and it was the most honest thing anyone said all day.
The road gave you a rider — Aragal of the Vistani, bound for Vallaki, where his people are not welcome — who warned you of wolves and crying lights, and asked one kindness: a toy from Blinsky’s shop for his daughter, and twenty gold for your trouble. And the fates gave you something too, woven tight and drawn taut since the reading. The land has noticed you. You are stronger than you were.
Then, at dusk, the windmill. Leaning on its rise like a thing trying to turn its face away, sails in tatters, a henge of old standing stones crouched behind it — and rolling off it, warm and sweet and wrong, the smell of freshly baked pies. Granny came down the road with her little cart before you could even finish scouting. Hello, dearies. You asked about the enchantment. “They are enchanting pies, I will admit. So you got me. It’s good for business.” And then you heard what was making the muffled sounds inside her cart, and it was not pies.
She ran — impossibly, horribly fast — shrieking two names at the mill: Bella! Ophelia! In the cart you found a woman bound in a silver net, begging you not to free her: there is a full moon above those clouds, and the silver is all that keeps her human. The hags already took her partner — a werewolf born, not bitten — inside.
The mill door burst open. Three of them filled it, and one wore Granny’s face, gone warped and purple. “You shouldn’t have poked your nose in, dearies.”
Now Osric holds the doorway with claw-marks in his armor and a private horror still flickering behind his eyes. Lily’s daggers have found flesh, and a thing with an inky void where its gaze should be has warned her it is unwise to attack their best customer. Ireena is screaming from the road for you to run. And Sirius — wine-soft, sun-loving Sirius — stands in the gloom with black raven wings spread from his back and feathers dripping from his eyes like tears.
The hags are barely scratched. The moon is climbing. Nobody is running.
Steel yourselves. We begin mid-swing.