The party’s own record of a church that fought back, an ally we did not order and cannot return, six vampires accounted for in full, a man whose name we never learned, a pentagram that was lying, and a house we are still inside. If these notes end abruptly, it is because we have not yet found the way out.
The church fights everyone
We resumed where the record stopped: inside a burning St. Andral’s, two vampire spawn circling Father Lucian. It must be said plainly — the building itself had opinions. Black smoke that blinded, a backdraft that threw everyone flat, rubble on every fourth heartbeat, air that poisoned the lungs. Our Dungeon of a church rolled better initiative than most of us. Somewhere in the choking dark, Father Lucian — a man we had assumed was entirely made of faith and cardigan — burned the first vampire to dust with a word of the Morning Lord, then reached under his own altar, produced a mace, and advised the survivors: “Evil creature, get out of my church.”
The doors, and what came through them
Then the back doors exploded and two more vampires landed prone on the flagstones — thrown — and behind them, screaming, wreathed in flame from the great right arm: Izek. He had caught two of the escaped spawn in the streets and delivered them to us bodily, with two town guards at his back.
We record what followed with mixed feelings. The vampires opened the throats of both guards in front of him — “Frederick, no. Not Petru too” — and it turns out the man we have been calling the Baron’s attack dog knew the names of his men. He grabbed a vampire by the head with the burning arm, informed it, “I will destroy you, starting with your teeth,” and in due course hurled it twenty feet into the inferno, where it crisped. Drew, thinking faster than the rest of us, made a public show of wrapping Izek in Clover’s protective light — which promptly saved him from a falling roof. If that buys us one ounce of grace from the scary man, it was the best-spent magic of the day.
The rest of the ledger: Sirius, blind for a round and furious about it, got his sight back just in time to roll a natural twenty and put fifty-seven points of the Morning Lord’s displeasure through a prone vampire, which stopped existing. He then attempted a mid-combat high five with Muriel. She declined. He gave it, in his own words, a red-hot go.
Father Lucian would not leave. We asked. We pushed him. We interposed shields. A vampire announced, “The master wants the priest dead” — a direct order from the devil himself, we note with cold interest — and the Father’s response to being the specific target of Strahd von Zarovich was to wade toward the fight going “This is my church” and bop a vampire with his mace. Sirius, a literal holy defender of priests, had to pass a persuasion check on our own cleric ally to make him stand back. Osric planted himself in the way, pinned the runner in place twice, and took the only vampire bite of the whole fight — the bard’s potion of necrotic resistance ate half of it. That chest keeps paying for itself.
The last vampire died to Osric’s sword while Duncan was fetching food. We rolled for him. He returned to a completed victory and took it with dignity.
The full count, for the record: six spawn came out of Henrik’s crates. Muriel killed two, Father Lucian one, Sirius one, Izek one, Osric one. There are no more vampires in Vallaki. We wish we believed that sentence as we wrote it.
What was saved and what was not
The church could not be saved. Sirius walked back into the collapsing building — blind, at the time — to take the sunburst statuette from the altar, and pressed it into Father Lucian’s hands: “Remember, Father — Lathander lives in our hearts, not in our places.” The Father: “Thank you, my son. But this church, it was a symbol for so many.” Then we asked Izek whether Vallaki has a fire brigade, organized the bucket lines, and spent the morning doing an honest, average job of triage. St. Andral’s is seventy percent gone. Fourteen-odd houses and some shops went with it. People are dead whom we cannot count yet.
And Izek — Izek stood staring into the fire, and when we looked closely we saw a man whose entire world had a crack in it. “The baron promised. The baron promised me. This can’t happen. Evil can’t come into Vallaki.” We tried to tell you, we said. “The vampires I believe,” he said. “But the Lady Wachter?” Then he went to report to the Baron, telling us “do what you must,” which we have chosen to hear as a permission slip with very wide margins.
Two stories are now racing through the town. One: Lady Wachter has opened her home as a hospital, saintly and prepared. Two: an angel of the Morning Lord came down and named her evil. Regarding the second — Sirius spent a genuinely difficult ten minutes proposing we find this angel, on the grounds that it is certainly our ticket out of Barovia. We asked whether he had, perhaps, flown over a crowd recently while glowing. “Absolutely not possible. Agents of the Morninglord are radiant beyond all. One would know if one had seen one.” We have elected to let the theology resolve itself.
The worst news of the day
At the Blue Water, Urwin was in despair — “you were meant to stop this,” “I hate living in Vallaki, I hate living in Barovia” — and honestly, fair. We talked him back up (that was just six vampires; imagine it worse; you are entirely unprotected), took commoner cloaks from the Ravens’ spy stock and a flask of what is now legally ten-percent wine, and then he told us the thing that stopped the room:
Ireena is gone. Ernst came, and invited her, and she went to Wachterhaus. He couldn’t stop her.
The follow-up questions were brief and damning. Had we told her anything? Kept her in any loop at all? We had not. We left the doom-magnet of Barovia waiting tables with no idea who anyone is, and the enemy’s charming survivor walked in and offered her hospitality. Sirius announced he now definitely wished to visit Wachterhaus and “share with them the light of the Morning Lord, and his pleasant words of morning awakening,” which from him constitutes a declaration of war.
The house of the lady
We went in under the chaos, hooded among a hundred refugees. First observation, from the medical eye: that house holds far more bandages, splints, and salves than any noble stockpiles innocently. She was provisioned for this catastrophe before it happened. Second observation: the cellar door around the corner was locked and unwatched. Two blessings of guidance and one set of definitely-locksmith’s tools later, we were in.
Dirt floor. Four neat cots. And footprints leading to a blank wall — behind which a door pivoted open on a room of candles and a great black pentagram, a wooden chair at each of its five points, and in one chair a frail, starved man with the unmistakable hollow look of the Reformation Center’s basement. His crime, once: he chuckled during a festival. His account of the lady: “She saved me. I owe her my life. I would do anything for her.” Why was he sitting in a pentagram? “I was brought down here. Just told to sit.” The pentagram? “Decoration?”
We tried to get him out. The moment he crossed the threshold, the floor gave birth to skeletons, and before any shield could reach him they cut him down. He died in the dark of the house of the woman he worshipped, and we never learned his name. Sirius has written this one on the inside of his armor: he counts it as failing himself, his faith, and his God. The skeletons we smashed to powder — two natural twenties from Osric, and Muriel, finally free of witnesses, becoming the beak. (“Action: beak.” We heard it. It was glorious.)
Then the twist that reframes the whole cellar: Drew examined the pentagram with every advantage we could stack, and it is fake. Lightly scratched. Not one whisper of magic in it. Set dressing. Somebody built a satanic tableau in Lady Wachter’s cellar, wired the room with a real and lethal ward, and seated a devoted, harmless witness inside it. We came looking for proof and found staged proof — the kind that collapses the moment anyone competent inspects it, taking the credibility of whoever presented it down too. We have been thinking hard about who was supposed to find that room. The current theory is: us. We also note, uncomfortably, what we left behind in it — a dead man, a heap of bones, and a picked lock.
Where the record stops
We did not turn back. Up through a second secret door, a cloakroom, a storeroom (silverware declined — we are not common crooks; a basket of beets liberated for the hungry, which is different), and a kitchen converted to a hospital ward. On those bedrolls, among the burned: people with vampire wounds. A couple of them did not look like they were merely wounded. They looked like they were becoming something. None of us knows whether a spawn’s bite can do that, or whether only the devil’s can. We have added it to the list of things we should have asked Van Rich— the bard.
And then the upstairs hallway: portraits and mirrors crowding the walls with judging looks and dark reflections. Moaning from behind one door. Every other door signed No admittance. And hanging over the stairhead, enormous and beautiful and horrible, a map — wolves, the moon, the hill where the goats are — which Drew is standing in front of right now, cramming into memory line by line, because we are cartographers now, apparently, and time is passing.
That is where these notes end. We are still inside the house.
Where we stand
- Physically inside Wachterhaus, upstairs, mid-infiltration, unrested. Sirius is out of flight, smites, and nearly out of patience; Clover is spent; Drew is down to her last slots; we have gone church-fire → firefight → break-in on no sleep since the vampire morning. Level 4.
- All six vampire spawn are destroyed. The town’s dead are not counted yet. St. Andral’s is gone; the festival is in three days; whatever plan required a hallowed church needs a new church.
- Ireena is somewhere in this house, as Ernst’s guest, knowing nothing, because we told her nothing.
- The bones are NOT in the cellar. The cellar was a stage set: a fake pentagram, a real skeleton ward, and a planted witness who is now dead. Someone designed that room to be found.
- Izek saw everything and is reporting to the Baron. He believes in the vampires now. He does not believe in Lady Wachter’s guilt. The “physical proof by tomorrow morning” clock is still running underneath all of this, and Fëanor is still the collateral.
- Two rumors are at war in the streets: her hospital versus our angel. Her story has beds and bandages, stockpiled suspiciously in advance. Our story has a celestial who doesn’t know he exists.
- Unopened: a moaning door, a corridor of No-admittance signs, at least one floor that is only “the highest floor we know about,” and whatever the map is trying to tell us.
Questions on our minds
- Who was the fake pentagram for? If it was bait for us — planted witnesses, planted devil-room, waiting for outsiders to run into the square shouting satanism — then someone predicted our break-in before we planned it. Does she know we’re inside right now?
- Where are the bones actually kept, if the obvious hiding place is a stage set?
- What do we do about the man we got killed? His body is lying in her cellar next to our lockpicking. That is evidence of our crime, in the house of the person we came to incriminate.
- Can a spawn’s bite turn the wounded? If those patients downstairs are becoming vampires, the hospital is a nursery.
- What is behind the moaning door? And is Ireena behind any of these doors — and as guest, patient, or ingredient?
- What does Izek’s report become when it reaches the Baron? The man who promised evil cannot enter Vallaki must now explain a burned church. Does that break toward truth, or toward finding someone to blame — and are we still the easiest someone?
- The map. Wolves, the moon, the goat hill. Why does Lady Wachter hang a war map of Barovia at the top of her stairs?