Doru †

Who

Father Donavich's son, eighteen or nineteen to look at.

Where

The crypt beneath the village church.

Status

Destroyed. He did not fall; he turned to dust.

First met

Session 4. Ended: Session 5.

Before we met him

Ismark told us about him on the morning of the funeral, and only when pressed: "There is something at the church." Doru "was one of the bright ones… He was taken by Strahd. He came back. He is not how he once was." His father believed the boy had escaped from the castle, and kept him locked in the crypt so that he could keep hold of himself.

In the crypt

Fëanor saw him first, clinging to the ceiling by his fingertips, and his magic named him undead. "I'm sorry, I'm so hungry," Doru said, and dropped on Sirius, whose shield took the teeth. Sirius tried reason: "I'm hungry as well. Do you think we can work this through?" Osric shoved him flat and would not strike: "Your father's told us not to cause you harm. Please, stop."

He was stronger and faster than any boy has a right to be. He twisted across the ceiling for the hatch, and Lily ran up the wall of the stairs and pinned him there. Sirius's blade came down with the Morninglord's full weight behind it, a crushing blow, and still he stood, crouched and shaking in Lily's grip: "Blood. I need your blood. Anyone's blood. I'm so hungry."

What he told his father

When he stood down, Lily set the tone: "Don't make his father watch us give up trying to help him before we've even tried." So we bound his wrists, gently, with Lily's rope and Drew's steady hands, lashed him to a pillar, and brought his father down.

Doru told him everything. "The devil, he caught me. I was out. He took me. He drank from me and made me drink from him, and now he gave me instructions. I felt as those instructions were given, each one became a fetter on my mind. It became the truth I must do." He had been told to come home and that he was "free to feed on any who I wished." And then: "I do not think I am in the Morninglord's light anymore. Please, Father, I think these people speak true."

His father turned away weeping, said "Do what you must," and fled up the stairs.

We asked Doru whether this was the life he wanted. "No, no. This is not me." But he had been given one more order: "Strahd instructed me I could not, through action or inaction, cause myself to become destroyed. I cannot let you do this, no matter what I feel." He began to fight the ropes.

Drew and Lily went up to sit with his father rather than watch. Fëanor began it with a spell, and Sirius winced at how loud and raw it was: "there's obviously some part of him still in there." Then Fëanor, Sirius and Osric finished it together. He did not bleed and he did not fall. He crumbled to dust. "Never happens to good things in the stories, does it?"

Why he still matters

• He is how the devil makes his own. A bite given and a bite taken, and every spoken order after that becomes a law in the mind. Ismark added the rest: Strahd turns people "only occasionally. Mostly people who are loved, just to torment us."
• The dust worries us. Nothing about that ending was natural, and nobody has explained it.
• Can the turned ever be saved, or is destruction the only mercy we will ever have to offer them? We are still carrying that question.