A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
You were all inside the party, as it turned out — every one of you, eating a hostile noblewoman’s canapés under the eyes of her poppets. Drew’s invisible voice cried fire and nobody ran; the house is very safe, the lady assured you, in a lot of ways. And in a quiet corner, Ernst told Sirius a story: two brothers, a rotten apple, the Reformation Center. The tea that unstitches the mind. The room where you smile or you suffer. A dark basement where an elder brother passed his food through the bars, week after week, saying we will not break — and the lady above, throwing parties like this one, prying at the doors until they opened. They came out. The elder brother, empty, did not survive it. There is only one devil in Barovia, said the man you were told to think of as an appendage, and you are flashing his writ. You looked for the lie and found only grief. And as you left, the lady’s voice followed you out like perfume: no one is beyond redemption. Anyone who comes to their senses can still do business with me.
At the Blue Water, Ireena was waiting tables, of all things, and a woman with feathers in her hair knew Lily’s name before it was offered. Muriel Vinshaw — married into the ravens, the active sort, trailing you since the pies of Barovia village — has lent you her arm, because you have, in her professional opinion, been mucking it up. Her partner flew to the winery to report and never came back. Urwin has sent his family there. The wine is already half water.
Morning brought Izek to the taproom and a lesson in Vallaki arithmetic: there are no undead in the town, therefore your eyes are liars, therefore evidence is impossible, therefore bring paper. You promised him physical proof of the Lady’s hand by tomorrow morning. Fëanor is the collateral on that promise.
And then the kitchen door, and a heavy chest, and five words from the bard you have never quite managed to speak to: hunt well those who hunt. Holy water. Stakes. A mirror, a mallet, everything squared and labeled. The cards promised you a destined ally — the hunter of hunters. Somebody out there has decided to arm you.
So you went to the Coffin Works to finish it. No paperwork anywhere in that building — only a pristine alarm ward on the stairs that screamed you upstairs into a room of six crates. Not coffins anymore. Crates. And when the lids came off, they were never zombies at all.
Vampire spawn. Six. Four went through the windows into the waking streets before you could blink. Two stayed, and one of them put its fangs in Lily’s throat — you will not pluck us from the master’s design — and dropped her to the floorboards before Osric carved it half apart and forced a potion between her teeth, before Sirius poured light into her skull, before Muriel became something with a beak like a boarding pike and pecked both monsters into dust. The master cares not for us, one said. It wasn’t wrong.
Then the screaming started. Dead guards on the corners. Smoke over the rooftops. A mob that decided, for one terrible minute, that the outsiders did this — until an angel with a burning sword hung over their heads and told them the truth as you believe it: these things were let in by the servants of Lady Wachter. They parted like water. You spent half an hour buying the town back one soul at a time — a torn throat closed, a donkey talked down, a child handed home, a woman coaxed off a burning windowsill into an inch of miracle — while a brick-weighted barricade you cannot explain sat squarely across the road to the church.
St. Andral’s is an inferno. Yeska came out alive in a guard’s arms. Father Lucian did not come out at all — because he is standing on his own altar with the sun held over his head, and two vampires are circling a faith they cannot cross, and the roof is falling in pieces, and he called to you through the smoke that all is lost.
They won’t be for long, said Sirius.
Blades out. The church is burning. Roll initiative — we finish this one where we left it.