A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
Roger took the wine, and then he took you apart, gently, with a story.
Forty-five years ago his band came through the mists exactly as you did — the wolf-thing at the crossing, the cards, the promised gifts, the destined ally. They traced the gift of knowledge to a glowing pool behind the walls of Krezk. And then, on the road, a creature stepped out of the trees — half raven, half man, beak as long as your arm — and said “Greetings, friend. I come in peace.” They had learned that everything in Barovia lies. They struck first, silver and magic, all at once. And hundreds of ravens screamed in the woods, and from that day the land closed against them like a fist. Doors forewarned. The winery hostile at a distance of miles. Strahd, bored, butchering a street of innocents as incentive; a dusk elf at the castle gates killing every friend Roger had — too early, not enough strength — and sparing one man to carry a message to whoever came next: don’t be boring. Then the devil decimated Krezk and Barovia village for the Mistwalkers’ sins, and spared Vallaki. Roger thinks it was the church that saved this town. You know what has just gone missing from that church.
You compared his battered cards to yours. The first three match. His ally was the raven — the ally his band murdered on the road without ever knowing. Yours is still out there: the hunter of hunters. Pray you recognize them before your swords do.
The Blue Water gave up its other treasures. Danika Martikov — whose family, it turns out, owns the winery in the south, the wine that “keeps this entire bubble afloat” — asked you quietly to look in on a shipment days overdue, and winced, visibly, when the dead raven-man was mentioned. The Wachter boys, deep in their cups, told you their sister Stella was betrothed to the Baron’s son Victor — and that Victor drove her mad, and she sits locked in her room at home, and one day they will have their revenge. And the mustachioed bard said “Strahd” out loud in a crowded taproom — the laws are for the little people — spoke of ancient fey powers usurped and reclaimable, looked straight through your souls, and went to bed with the words “I shall watch you with great interest.” No mere bard.
And one mercy, long earned: in the morning, Lily woke and felt nothing. No hour of madness, no hunger. Six days of iron will, and the hags’ hook broke before she did. She is free.
Then the orphanage.
You went looking for a bone thief and found a victim: Milivoj, the kind-eyed giant who tells orphans stories, a month sickening under what your magic named plainly — a necromantic curse — three days unrousable, healing sliding off him like rain. Three boys missing a week: Lazlo, Hans, Franz. A dead child named Cedric, pushed from a window. And in the padlocked attic, the boy who pushed him — found a month ago unharmed and blood-soaked beside his stabbed parents — whittling with a kitchen knife as the light dimmed around him, who smiled at Sirius and said:
“I’m Mostly Felix.”
The rest of Felix was delighted to explain. It had been working on the muscly specimen downstairs. It was too late to stop it. Milivoj will soon be mine. And when Drew slipped away to have Milivoj tied down, it sighed — do I have to do this early? — and poured out of the boy as black smoke and razor teeth.
Your steel passed through it like rumor. It slid through floors. It wore Drew for thirty terrible seconds — “I’m sorry” — then dropped her among screaming children. It reached into Osric’s chest and drank a quarter of his life, and grew fat on it. It tried to pour itself into Sirius and met warded steel and a sentence it did not expect: “I am an angel, sent to end you unless you repent.” And the light did what silver could not — Fëanor’s radiance tearing it to tatters, Drew’s rebuilt Clover shielding the retreat, the children pouring into the garden — until Sirius’s burning blade shredded it into smoke, and the smoke screamed into the rusted locket, and the lid snapped shut.
It is in your pack now. An X scratched in the lid, Celestial words no one can read, a demon’s anchor and its prison both. It cannot come out — unless someone opens it. Someone opened it this morning. For science.
And then Milivoj woke — curse broken, blinking, terrified — and you crowded around the one man who could finally answer for the empty crypt at St. Andral’s. The bones. No lies. Now.
He stared at you, baffled, and said: “I didn’t touch any bones. What are you talking about?”
The church is still unhallowed. The thief is still out there. The festival is in six days.
Where are the bones?