The party’s own record of a fire that didn’t exist, a story we wish we hadn’t believed, a mysterious benefactor’s luggage, six crates that were never zombies, a sprint across a burning town, and a priest holding back the dead with nothing but faith. We opened the box early. We are still deciding whether that was heroism.
Correction to the record
Last session’s notes reported the party standing outside Wachterhaus while Lily hid within. This was wrong: we had all followed Sirius in. All of us were at the canapé party, eating the canapés of a woman we are being paid to destroy, while she smiled at us over the heads of fifty adoring citizens. We regret the error. We regret several things.
The fire that wasn’t
Drew’s contribution to the evening: from a hiding spot only a three-foot-one gnome could love, a flawlessly executed bit of stagecraft — an invisible voice near the kitchen shouting “Fire! Fire! Fire!” As plans go, it was genuinely clever, and it lasted exactly as long as it took Haliq the footman to say “Stay calm, everyone” while conspicuously failing to produce any smoke, smell, or fire. Our attempts to fan the panic afterward were so unconvincing that the crowd settled into mere confusion. Sirius asked Lady Wachter if we should be concerned. “My house is very safe,” she said, “in a lot of ways.” Noted, madam. Noted.
Ernst’s story
Sirius sidled up to Ernst — who opened by observing, accurately, that we’d been “flashing the Baron’s writ around” and had frightened the poor bowyer into overpaying for a crossbow. Word travels in this town. Then Sirius asked whether the Baron’s authority extended to inviting Ernst in for questioning, and Ernst told him an anecdote instead.
Two brothers. The younger threw a rotten apple at the Baron during a festival; the elder tried to take the blame; the guards took them both to the Reformation Center. The tea that addles the mind. The room where you are filled with bone-deep terror unless you keep smiling. And when they didn’t break — the no-hopers’ basement, dark, patrolled by creatures, with too little food for a growing boy. The elder brother passed his share through the bars, every day, saying “I believe in you. We will not break.” Above ground, Lady Wachter did what she does best: parties, sympathy, pressure — and one day, a crack of light. Both brothers freed. The elder, who had not eaten in weeks, died.
“You probably can guess I was the younger brother,” said Ernst. “I am going nowhere near the baron. There’s only one devil in Barovia, and you are flashing his writ.”
We looked for the lie and could not find it — only fury. Haliq in the hall, young Madalena: “Each one of us was rescued by the lady.” We record this plainly: the man we have been calling an appendage is a person, his grievance is legitimate, and Lady Wachter’s good works are real to the people she saved. Sirius told him there are undead in this city and that he knows who took the bones, and offered to show him. “You know where we are.”
As we left, the lady herself, raven on shoulder: “No one is beyond redemption. Anyone who comes to their senses can still do business with me. No one has done anything that could not be saved.” That is a door held open, and we all heard it.
The new barmaid and the active Raven
Back at the Blue Water: Ireena is waiting tables. She has got a job. She is quite enjoying pitching in. We have elected not to examine our feelings about the doom-magnet of Barovia cheerfully carrying soup.
Urwin, meanwhile, has sent Danika and the boys out of Vallaki to the winery — “given the things we discussed” — and is now watering the wine fifty percent. The rationing has begun. And at a corner table, waiting for us: a woman with feathers in her hair and the air of someone who stabs things professionally. “I heard you were admiring my plumage,” she said to Lily. “You also snore.”
Muriel Vinshaw. Married into the Martikov clan; describes herself as the active part of the Ravens of Barovia — where Urwin brokers, she stabs. She has been following us since the village of Barovia, back when we were innocently eating pies in a hag’s kitchen. Her partner Falkon flew to the winery to report to the main clan and has not come back. She reckons something is afoul there. And: “You’ve been mucking it up so far, so I’ll lend you my arm.” We accepted with as much dignity as the phrase “mucking it up” allowed, which was none. On the big question she offered one opinion only: there are no good options here, but she leans against the side that keeps kidnapping people off the street.
Plans were laid: the six undead at the Coffin Works first thing in the morning, with Muriel. Also logged for later: Bluto — the man missing at the lake — is a friend of the Wachter sons; helping there might buy goodwill, or at least a drunken evening of maternal gossip.
Izek wants a status report
We came down in the morning to find Izek standing in the taproom, bold as brass. “The baron wants a status report.”
We would like the record to reflect how this went. We told him, truthfully, that we had located six undead in the city. His reply, verbatim: “There are no undead in Vallaki.” But we’ve seen them. “It is impossible.” But what if we bring evidence? “You literally can’t, because it’s impossible.” A twenty-three of pure honest persuasion earned us: “It sounds believable, but it can’t be true.” What he wants — what he was sent to demand — is a piece of paper that says Lady Wachter is working with the devil, as if villains file paperwork. We talked him down from the ledge of his own logic and struck terms: physical proof concerning Lady Wachter, by tomorrow morning. Fëanor’s board and lodging depend on it.
Also established, over Izek’s mounting suspicion that we were mocking his arm: he is right-handed. One of us needed to know. We have agreed never to discuss why.
The bard’s luggage
Then Muriel came out of the kitchen carrying a heavy chest, handed over — she said — by the bard, just after we’d gone up the night before, together with a rolled note:
“Hunt well those who hunt.”
Inside, meticulously compartmented, everything pointing straight up and proper: three flasks of holy water, three stakes, a small iron mallet, two potions of healing, a potion of necrotic resistance, a spell scroll of protection from evil and good, a steel mirror, manacles, oil, a crowbar, and three torches. A complete vampire-hunting kit, packed by someone with strong opinions about labels.
We got out the card reading and stared at it together: your destined ally is the hunter of hunters. That does rather feel like this, doesn’t it? We divvied the kit — stakes and holy water spread around, the scroll and the necrotic potion to Sirius, the mallet to go with the stakes, and Osric’s torch collection now stands at twelve. Drew had also spent the night making a bag of holding (the shadow-fiend locket went straight in, which improved everyone’s day) and a silvered shortsword for herself, on the grounds that it would make her feel better.
We still have not managed a proper conversation with the bard. The bard gives inn-room letters. The bard gives vampire-hunting kits. The bard is something, and we intend to find out what.
They were never zombies
The Coffin Works, early morning. Henrik had slept at the Blue Water; his door was unlocked because — full honesty in these notes — we’re the ones who left it that way. Ground floor first, hunting for the paperwork Izek craves: a workshop of half-built coffins, a storeroom of thirty empty ones, a sad little kitchen. Not one delivery note, manifest, or admin-y anything in the whole building. Whoever supplies Henrik does not do receipts.
Sirius opened his sixth sense: still six, still upstairs, unmoved. He read the scroll of protection over himself, drank the necrotic potion, and we went to the stairs — where a pristine, professional, expensive alarm ward that none of us spotted went off like the wrath of god the moment we set foot on the bottom step. So much for surprise.
Upstairs: six crates, each the size of a person curled up. Not the coffins — someone had moved them into crates, unmarked except a small silver sign, and if we’d ever hoped for a shipping label reading “care of Lady Wachter,” the lady is not her first rodeo. Sirius stabbed a crate on principle. Osric slid a lid. And all six burst open at once.
Vampire spawn. Not zombies. We had collectively assumed zombies. Four of them went straight out the windows — glass everywhere, gone into the morning streets — and two stayed to make a point. The point was made mostly on Lily, who had thrown herself in front of the far window to block the escape route and got the full attention of a thing saying “You will not pluck us from the master’s design” as it put its fangs in her neck. We record with clinical calm that Lily went down, that a death’s door was knocked upon, that Osric took a piece out of the thing the size of a dinner plate roaring get off her, jabbed our worst-performing healing potion directly into her mouth like a furious parent with a bottle, and that Sirius reached over mid-melee to pump lay-on-hands into her skull. Lily is fine. Lily is fine.
And Muriel — Muriel said something unprintable about “humanoid bullshit,” shifted into a form with a beak like a boarding pike, and killed both vampires herself, the second one expiring pecked clean through the sternum. We have decided we are delighted she’s on our side and are not thinking about the alternative. Before the end, one of the things answered Sirius’s promise to end it with: “The master cares not for us. ” He told it he was sorry. He meant it.
The race to St. Andral’s
Then we heard the screaming. From the window: a dead guard on each corner. Four spawn loose in a waking city, and a voice going up street by street — “Vampires! Vampires!” — and a guard bellowing that they were heading for the church. Sirius went out the window on golden wings. The rest of us took the stairs. What followed was half an hour we will be sorting out in nightmares for some time, recorded here in fragments:
- A man on the cobbles with his throat opened, a woman screaming help him — Drew (Clover latched to her shoulder like a turret) knelt and closed the wound. He lived.
- A man on a wheelbarrow, pointing: “The outsiders! They let the vampires in!” — and the mob turning to us with despair doing the thinking for them. What stopped it was Sirius: hovering, sword blazing, wings out, announcing that the vampires were let in by the servants of Lady Wachter. The crowd took one look at what was manifestly an angel and parted — “Avatar of the Morning Lord!” We note two things. One: it worked, a twenty-six, magnificent. Two: we just publicly declared against Lady Wachter through the mouth of a glowing celestial, and there is no walking that back.
- The main road blocked by a toppled wagon that turned out to be weighted with bricks. Someone built that barricade on the route to the church. Osric shifted it by main strength, and it cost us minutes we didn’t have.
- A panicked donkey, talked down in its own language, screaming about the cold ones. Even the donkeys know.
- Drew, decked by a stray shovel with a crowd surge coming, tucked and rolled like a woman who has survived cattle. (“I worked on farms.”)
- A lost toddler attached to a neck; Osric found the parents in the chaos and handed the child over. Stay in school.
- The crowd tore us in half; Lily went up a wall like a squirrel and steered both halves back together, using the enormous glowing angel as a landmark, which is the one thing he’s inarguably good for.
- The crush near the church, where even fear of Lathander’s chosen couldn’t move packed bodies, and Sirius’s wings gave out mid-loom. We were stuck long enough to watch the black smoke rise.
- A draft horse bolting with a burning wagon — unhooked at a dead run, nineteen of pure fingers.
- And a woman dangling from the third storey of a burning house, talked into letting go by Drew — “It’s going to really hurt, but you won’t die, and I can heal you” — into a burst of Clover’s shield-light an inch from the cobbles. She hit, screamed, stood up, and walked away a legend.
The burning church
St. Andral’s was an inferno when we reached it. A guard staggered out with Yeska alive in his arms — and the words “Father Lucian’s still in there. There’s vampires in there, two of them.”
Inside, through the smoke: Father Lucian, standing on his own altar with the symbol of the sun raised over his head, holding two vampire spawn at bay with nothing but the strength of what he believes. They can’t close on him. They circle and cringe and cannot close. “Friends,” he called to us, “there are undead in the Church of St. Andral. All is lost.”
“They won’t be for long,” said Sirius.
Clover flooded us all with shielding light at the door. Lily — leaning, in her own words, far too hard into “rogue paladin” — sprinted the length of the nave alone and put a knife in the nearest one, whereupon Father Lucian slapped Sanctuary on her over her explicit objections (“You will not hurt a child of the Morning Lord” — you don’t get a vote, apparently). The roof is coming down in pieces; the first fall of rubble knocked the poor Father flat on his own altar. Drew put a firebolt into a vampire’s chest so perfectly it may be the finest single spell of her career. Osric planted himself over Lily, shield out, breaking grapples like a man snapping kindling.
And that is where the record stops: two spawn in the firelight, one of them badly the worse for us, our priest prone behind his raised symbol, the church of the bones burning around all of us together.
Where we stand
- Mid-combat in St. Andral’s, which is on fire. Two spawn engaged; Father Lucian prone but alive; Yeska safe outside; Muriel fighting beside us; Clover’s temporary shielding on everyone. Level 4.
- The count: six spawn were in Henrik’s attic. Two are dust at the Coffin Works (both Muriel’s). Two are in front of us. Two are loose in Vallaki, unaccounted for, in a town with dead guards on the corners, burning buildings, and at least one civilian killed. The festival is in four days.
- The Izek deadline: physical proof against Lady Wachter by tomorrow morning, promised to a man who believes evidence of undead is definitionally impossible. What we hold: unmarked crates with a silver sigil, a terrified coffin maker’s confession, and our own eyes. What we do not hold: a single piece of paper.
- The public story is now set — an angel told a mob the vampires were let in by the servants of Lady Wachter, moments after that same mob had decided it was us. Both stories are now loose in the town. Hers (“the outsiders did it”) had a head start.
- Ernst is a person: Reformation Center survivor, dead brother, saved by the lady, and possessed of the most understandable hatred of the Baron in Vallaki. He knows where to find us. Lady Wachter’s door is open — “anyone who comes to their senses can still do business with me.”
- Muriel Vinshaw is with us. Falkon is missing at the winery; Urwin’s family is headed there; the wine is half water already. The winery is becoming unavoidable.
- The bard left us a complete vampire-hunting kit and five words: hunt well those who hunt. The cards promised us a destined ally — the hunter of hunters. We think we may have just been equipped by ours.
- Still on the board: Fëanor hostage (the vampire outbreak makes “progress” a hard sell or an easy one, depending which story the Baron hears first); Henrik asleep at the Blue Water; the bones presumably still inside warded Wachterhaus — and the church they would re-hallow currently burning; Bluto and the lake as the favor that might open the Wachter sons; the brick barricade nobody has explained.
Questions on our minds
- Did we do the right thing? They were being saved for the festival, when the whole town would be in the streets by law. We uncorked them four days early, on our schedule, with the town not assembled — but people are dead this morning who were alive last night. Would the festival have been worse? We think so. We think so.
- Where are the other two — and where does a vampire spawn hide in Vallaki until nightfall? Whose “master’s design” was this: Lady Wachter’s plan, or the devil’s, with her as the courier?
- Who barricaded the road to the church with a brick-weighted wagon — before the vampires were even loose?
- What do we bring Izek tomorrow morning? The truth was “impossible” yesterday. Is a burned church full of witnesses paper enough?
- Who is the bard? Information brokers didn’t pack that chest. Someone who hunts the hunters did.
- Can St. Andral’s be saved — and if the church burns down, does it even matter who holds the bones anymore?
- Ernst heard Sirius’s invitation. If he comes to see the undead — the undead his lady’s errand let in — which way does a man like that break?