The party’s own record of a confession extracted, a crypt burgled of nothing but nails, a dinner party with a fiend on a perch, a song nobody taught anyone, and a letter from the Ravens of Barovia. The nails have a name now. All will be well.
The confession of Milivoj
We resumed exactly where we left off: a hallway full of armed adults and one newly conscious groundskeeper trying to shoulder through us to check on Felix. The children are fine. The bones were not, and neither was his story — you could see the lie sitting on him like a bad coat.
So it came out. Milivoj took the bones of St. Andral. Not for a demon, not for a cult — for the hunters. The two pelt-traders wanted 300 gold to go find Lazlo, Hans, and Franz, which is money no one in Barovia has. And as he left the Blue Water in despair, a stranger stepped out: deep cloak, face never shown, and said he’d overheard, and he could get Milivoj that gold. All he had to do was one small thing. Take the bones from the church, leave them in the Vallakovich crypt in the graveyard, come back the next day. He did. The gold was there. The hunters are out searching for the boys right now, bought and paid for with a church’s protection.
What we know of the buyer: definitely a man, very nice, very clean shoes, and a short black beard — which, as Milivoj helpfully noted, describes about forty percent of the male population. He thought the bones were a trinket. He refused, flatly and repeatedly, to apologize.
This nearly went badly. Sirius took the position — and we quote the liturgy as it was quoted to us — that desecrating a church of the Morninglord carries a clear penalty, that it was “only two hands,” and that the man would still be able to walk. There followed a spirited theological negotiation in a crowded corridor, in which it was pointed out that (a) we are outsiders, (b) the town already thinks assault is illegal, and (c) none of this gets the bones back. The compromise: Milivoj stays at the orphanage under the headmistress’s stern eye, on his sworn word, sentencing deferred until the bones are recovered. Father Lucian has been told everything. His whole verdict, delivered like a tired parent: “He never did listen at the sermons. Oh, Milivoj.”
One more thing from the orphanage, and it matters: we asked who in this land could deal with the locket. The answer — given with visible reluctance — is the abbot, above Krezk. There is a quiet schism in the Morninglord’s church here: Father Lucian, the best of men, with modest power; and the abbot in his mountain abbey, blessed with far more — he heals bodies, he heals minds, and there are stories he has raised the dead — and yet by all accounts a much less nice man, brooding behind his walls, helping no one. Note the word minds. We’ll come back to it.
The crypt and the nails
The Vallakovich crypt door was unlocked. Inside, the family mausoleum turns out to be all show — ornate stone outside, rough-hewn dirt tunnel inside, coffins slotted into alcoves we did not open, because we are not there yet as people (give us ten sessions).
Someone had been in there within the last few days. What they left behind: a handful of long iron nails, and not normal ones. Custom work. Artisan work. Nails made for one specific job by one specific pair of hands — the way you’d look at a sword and know which smith forged it. Drew pocketed the lot. They are, at present, the only physical evidence in Barovia of the man with the nice shoes.
And think on this: the handover happened in the Vallakovich crypt — the Baron’s own family tomb. Either our bone-buyer is connected to that family, or someone very much wants us to think so.
Dinner at Wachterhaus
A manservant, Ernst Larnak, was waiting outside the orphanage with an invitation: Lady Fiona Wachter requested our company for aperitifs and dinner. We ran our errands, freshened up (Sirius bathed; the details are between him and the Morninglord), and went.
The house is the finest in the noble district, staffed, wined, and — mark this — home to a raven on a perch in the entrance hall, watching with intelligent eyes.
Lady Wachter received us as equals, fed us mutton and non-haunted fish with fruit sauce, and got to business with remarkable speed. Her account: the Baron is a weak pretender whose Reformation Centre breaks people; her husband died suddenly ten years ago and she believes the Baron responsible, though she cannot prove it; and three years ago Victor Vallakovich broke her daughter Stella — the betrothal Fiona herself had arranged. Her body is well. It is merely her mind, and it has been merely her mind for three years, in a locked room, seeing no one.
The task: find proof of what Victor did to Stella. With proof, she says, the town turns, and the Baron falls. Payment: 50 gold, her considerable goodwill, and access to a wine cellar that is suddenly one of the more strategically important assets in Vallaki. She was also entirely candid that she wants the Baron and his son not deposed but dead — “they just don’t know it” — and it took sustained diplomatic effort from Sirius to establish that the Baron’s wife, if innocent, might be left standing. We have agreed to seek the proof and to keep our own counsel about the rest.
Assorted intelligence from the table, recorded for the file: she says Strahd’s name freely behind her thick walls — and one of us tested it, saying the name five times at dinner. Nothing came. Whatever summons the devil, it is apparently not just anyone saying his name. She confirmed the flying fiery steed from Roger’s story. The Wachters have held that house since before Strahd came — “Strahd is a Johnny-come-lately” — and her late husband was a commoner who took her name. Izek has fire powers to go with the demon arm, was raised by the Baron after being found with it, and “will have to be crushed… together.” There are werewolves west toward Krezk who pick off travelers and — underline this — capture children. The winery has a name at last: the Wizards of Wine, Martikov-owned, and her own agent confirms the wagons have stopped coming. Her opinion of the Vistani is bigotry and we record it only as a fact about her.
And she asked one more thing: that Ireena, a noblewoman, stop sleeping in a common inn and come live under Wachter protection. We said we’d pass it on. We have not yet decided whether we will recommend it. Read the next section and see why.
The raven that was not a raven
Midway through dinner, Sirius quietly opened his divine senses. Lady Wachter herself: clean — no fiend, no undead, an ordinary warm human hand. The raven on the perch in the corridor: a fiend.
There followed the least subtle covert conference in the history of espionage, in which Sirius and Fëanor excused themselves to the bathroom together — having first informed the table there was something in each other’s teeth, thereby convincing the household of things we will be living down for some time (“We are close followers of the Morninglord”). And while we whispered about the fiend, we rolled the worst possible luck: someone was listening at the door, and heard the word. Within moments the fiendish presence moved — fast, up the stairs, and out of the house. It did not come back all evening.
Lady Wachter, pressed gently on her pet: it is “just a bird.” A gift from “a dear friend,” ten years ago. Asked which friend, she could not recall. “Ravens are plenty in Barovia. They are a sign of goodness. You can trust anyone with a raven.” — which is either perfectly true or the single most alarming sentence spoken at that table, and we genuinely cannot tell; the woman is charisma in a dress.
Her sons supplied the missing chapter later, at the inn: when their father died, their grieving mother wrote to everyone — including the abbey, about raising him from the dead — then disappeared for two weeks, and came back with the raven, and seemed at peace. Sit with that story a moment. We have.
We argued the whole walk home about what it means. One theory: she’s innocent and the thing is Strahd’s spy, now flown to report us. Another: she is exactly as bad as she wants the Baron to look, fiend and all. And hanging over the whole debate, Roger’s voice: the last party to kill a raven on instinct doomed themselves and two villages. Sirius has made his position clear — his faith does not permit a known fiend to simply go about its business — but has agreed, with visible effort, that we needn’t do it in a rich woman’s dining room. Next raven we meet gets the divine sense first.
The song beneath the lake
Back at the Blue Water, we found Ireena on stage, flushed and delighted, singing with the band — apparently for the first time in her life with actual accompaniment, her brother never having allowed it.
The song is the thing. She says she dreamed it — “I’ve had it in my head forever.” It tells of two who walked together, “one wore the morning golden, and one wore the night blue.” The dark one went begging to a whisper in the stone and came back down the mountain with a hunger for its own; he drank his brother’s wine; he hung his cloak across the sun and nailed it to the sky, and the valley has had no summer since. And then a second voice: a widow, a girl beneath the lake, hunted through harvest and through snow by a man she somehow knows — “a raven on the shoulder of the shadow of a man” — and the refrain that none of us have stopped hearing: “They’ll snip it, and they’ll spin it, and I’ll wake another girl.”
Ireena — who does not know where she learned it, who dreamed it, who is the girl every dark thing in this valley keeps reaching for — sang that, jumped off the stage, and asked if we’d had a nice day. We said we’d had a day.
Bluto is missing
The Wachter twins, Karl and Nikolai, flagged us down with a job of their own: their drinking companion Bluto — older, dour, bearded, fond of the bottle, and the man the lake ghost “takes great interest in” — went north to the haunted lake a couple of days ago, talking about “righting a wrong.” He hasn’t come back. They’ll get Mama to pay 70–80 gold to see him safe. The lake is three hours’ walk each way — a day trip, past (or around) the Vistani camp.
A dour man, singled out by a drowning ghost, walking alone to her lake to right a wrong. That errand has a shape we do not like at all.
Also noted at the inn, with quiet alarm: the wine is being rationed. Urwin watered our round. The Wizards of Wine problem is no longer someone else’s.
The note from the Ravens of Barovia
We came upstairs to find a note lying flat in the middle of our bedroom floor. The door had been locked. The windows were secured. Danika saw no one.
We will not transcribe it here — it sits in the file — but the substance: it is signed by the Ravens of Barovia, capital R, a collective; it is warmly disposed toward ravens and firmly disposed against bad things wearing raven shapes; it makes clear that Lady Wachter does not enjoy the Ravens’ support; and it addressed, with uncanny precision, the exact crisis of faith Sirius had been having about fiends in feathers all evening. The penmanship is impeccable, which raises its own questions about beaks.
Sirius drafted a reply — opening, naturally, with a compliment on their name — confirming we know the Wachter raven is a demon, thanking them for the counsel, requesting a proper meeting, and mentioning we mean to head to the lake in the next day or so, in case they care to find us. Signed: us. We left it exactly where theirs had lain, and Drew set an alarm ritual over it. The alarm never rang. The night passed quietly — Lily took one more voluntary tied-down test night and woke absolutely fine, which we are treating as the official end of the pie affair.
Henrik’s nails
Morning, five days to the festival. We took the crypt nails to the smith in the Workyard — deliberately not the shopping-district smith, whom Lady Wachter says is in the Baron’s pocket. Drew and the smith had a warm quarter hour about hammers, and then he glanced at our one piece of evidence in this entire mystery and identified it on sight:
“Oh, you’ve got Henrik’s nails.”
Henrik. The coffin maker. He takes great pride in his specialized coffin nails — they curve, in a particular way, as they’re hammered home. His shop is the Coffin Works, in the production district, and he doesn’t open every day, but the smith will pass word. We got our swords sharpened while we were there (Lily’s arsenal is officially an awl and a kitchen knife, and the smith was too polite to ask), tipped two silver, and set out.
Which is where these minutes close: the bones of St. Andral were carried to a crypt by a desperate man, bought by a man with very nice shoes, and the only trail in Vallaki leads to a coffin maker’s door.
Where we stand
- Walking to Henrik’s Coffin Works, nails in pocket, five days to the Festival of the Blazing Sun. Level 4. Lily fully recovered and untied. The locket travels with us, shut.
- The bones: Milivoj confessed — paid 300 gp by a cloaked man (nice clean shoes, short black beard) via a dead-drop at the Vallakovich crypt. The nails found there are Henrik the coffin maker’s signature work. Milivoj is confined to the orphanage on his word; sentencing deferred; Father Lucian knows.
- Jobs: find the bones (trail: Coffin Works); find Bluto at the haunted lake (~70–80 gp, day trip north, told the Ravens we’re going); find proof of what Victor did to Stella for Lady Wachter (50 gp — treat everything about that house as radioactive until the raven question resolves); the Wizards of Wine run west/south (~a week; the inn is now rationing); the hunters are out after Lazlo, Hans, and Franz; Blinsky toy for Aragal; the windmill (Radu, Vasha).
- The locket: per the orphanage, the only one who might deal with it is the abbot above Krezk — immensely blessed, heals body and mind, allegedly raises the dead, reportedly unpleasant. Same walls as the glowing pool. Krezk is now three leads deep: the gift of knowledge, the locket, and possibly Stella’s mind.
- The Ravens of Barovia exist, write letters into locked rooms, dislike Lady Wachter, and know what we say in bathrooms. Correspondence is open. Standing order: divine sense before violence on anything with feathers.
- Ireena: holds Lady Wachter’s invitation to live under her roof — undelivered, pending the fiend question. Sang a dreamed song about a brother who drank his brother’s wine and nailed his cloak across the sun, and a girl beneath the lake remade over and over. She doesn’t know what it means. We are afraid we do.
- Standing rules: all is well; don’t say his name in the streets (though it apparently only matters who says it); don’t get reformed; don’t kill the ravens — especially now they’re pen pals.
Questions on our minds
- Is Henrik the man with the nice shoes — or just the man whose nails he used? Who does a coffin maker answer to, and why did the handover happen in the Baron’s family crypt?
- What is Lady Wachter? Not a fiend, not undead — but she went away grieving for two weeks and came home with a demon on a perch and peace in her heart. Who was the “dear friend” she can’t recall? What did she trade?
- Who are the Ravens of Barovia, how do they get into locked rooms, and will they come to the lake?
- Where did the fiend-raven fly — and who is it reporting to about us?
- Ireena’s song: two brothers, morning-gold and night-blue, a whisper in the stone, a hunger, a stolen sun — and “they’ll snip it, and they’ll spin it, and I’ll wake another girl.” Why is that song in her head?
- What wrong was Bluto trying to right at a lake that drowns men — and is he still alive to be rescued?
- The abbot heals minds and raises the dead in a land where the dead should stay down. What is he, and what will he want for the locket?
- Five days to the festival, and the church is still unhallowed. Can we get the bones back in time?