Field notes

The battle for St. Andral's, a captain whose certainties burned with the church, a noon of buckets and rumours, and a break-in at Wachterhaus that found a pentagram painted for our benefit. David was still away; Fëanor is still the Baron's guest.

The battle of St. Andral's

We picked up in the burning church with two spawn in front of us and Father Lucian on his altar. The burning building fought everyone: black smoke that blinded, windows bursting in backdrafts that knocked people flat, rubble from the roof, poisonous fumes.

• Lily opened with her knives on the worse-hurt spawn. The smoke blinded Drew and Sirius. Drew kept Clover firing anyway, since Clover doesn't need Drew's eyes.
• Lucian finished that spawn with a flash of holy fire. It crumbled to dust. Sirius approved of the radiant.
• Then the back doors burst open. Two more spawn came through them, flung, and landed on their faces. Behind them came Izek, screaming, flame pouring off his great right arm, with two of his guards. He'd hunted down the two loose spawn in the streets and thrown them into the church ahead of him.
• Muriel started to change and then thought better of it with Izek watching. She fought the rest of this as a human, badly. "God, I hate this." Eventually she sat down on a pew.
• The windows blew in and everyone was knocked down except Izek. The spawn got up first and tore out the throats of both guards on the floor. "Frederick, no." Then: "No, Petru too." Izek looked distraught.
• Sirius, his sight back, rolled a natural 20 and smote the spawn at his feet for fifty-seven radiant. Dust. "For Lathander's morning light." He tried to high-five Muriel on the way past. She ignored him.
• Izek, to the spawn: "I don't know what you are, but you'll pay for that." Fire erupted round him in a ring that caught only the vampires.
• Drew stepped forward and made a show of wrapping Clover's protective field round Muriel and Izek, so he'd see who was helping him. A lump of rubble hit Izek later, and her gift soaked it.
• Osric to the priest: "You all right, Father?" Lucian: "Remove these fiends from this holy place, please." Osric: "Righto."
• Lucian had a mace under his altar all along. "Evil creature, get out of this church." He bopped a spawn with it. Boop.
• One spawn told us why they'd come: "The master wants the priest dead." When it tried to disengage, Osric's sentinel swing pinned it in place.
• Sirius spent much of the fight putting his shield between the spawn and a priest who would not stand back. "Hands off this man of the Lord." "I am literally a holy defender of priests." Lucian: "I don't need defending." "This is my church." It took Sirius's best persuasion to get him to stand back and cast from a distance.
• Izek reached out with that arm and caught a spawn by the head, crushing it, and cut at it with the battle axe in his left hand. When it begged, "No, please!", he answered: "I will destroy you, starting with your teeth." Then he whirled and threw it twenty feet into the flames, and it burned to a crisp. It was the one that killed Petru.
• The last spawn broke Osric's guard with a natural 20, grabbed him and bit. The potion of necrotic resistance, still in his veins, halved it. ("Osric tastes some garlic.")
• The church knocked that spawn flat, and Osric put it down for good. (Duncan was away getting food at the time; the table rolled for him.) It was the one that killed Frederick.

That makes all six spawn from Henrik's crates destroyed: two by Muriel yesterday, one each by Lucian, Sirius, Izek and Osric.

Getting out

"Everyone run. This way, everyone." Lucian ran too: "My church." On the way out Sirius stopped at the altar and picked up a small sunburst statuette. The smoke blinded him again, but he knew where the door was. A beam came down on him on the way. He walked out and put the statuette in Lucian's hands.

Sirius: "Remember, Father, Lathander lives in our hearts, not in our places." Lucian: "Thank you, my son. But this church, it was a symbol for so many." Sirius: "And then we shall rebuild it stone by stone, once it is finished burning to the ground. Do you have a fire brigade here, Izek?" Izek: "We do bucket lines when there's a fire."

Izek stood staring into the burning church. One of us read him, and he was badly shaken:

"The baron promised. The baron promised me. This can't happen. This couldn't happen. Evil can't come into Vallaki."

We told him we'd been trying to tell him. The Baron was wrong.

Sirius asked Lucian whether anything else in the church needed saving. "I am not a worldly man. The one item of true importance is unfortunately not in the church." We told him again that it's in Lady Wachter's house. Lucian: "So you've said before, but that seems so hard to believe." There were vampires in his church; why would we lie? "The vampires I believe, but the Lady Wachter?" Surely we'd earned some trust by now. "You have. Thank you for saving me. Thank you."

Izek said he must report to the Baron: no evil can come into Vallaki. We asked if we could organise a bucket line to save what we could. "Do what you must." And he walked away.

Noon

Three or four buildings in every direction from the church were burning. Drew made everyone a bucket. (The buckets weren't really the problem.) Sirius organised the line; Drew worked out from the street layout where the water and people should go; the smoke defeated our search for trapped people, and Osric's instincts were for the countryside, not a city. We did about average.

By midday:

• The church is seventy per cent gone, a roofless shell. About fourteen houses and a couple of shops burned with it. A lot of people are hurt and dead. Nobody has counted.
• There's no more chaos in the streets, but things are happening. The DM warned us that the world is moving now: if we choose one place, things will go on happening in the others, and we could miss them. Choices will have consequences.
• Two rumours are going round. One: Lady Wachter has opened her house as a hospital, a triage centre for the wounded. Two: an angel of the Morninglord came down and accused Lady Wachter of evil.

Sirius wants very much to meet this angel: it might be our ticket out of here. Lucian has never heard of an avatar of the Morninglord. We asked Sirius whether he'd happened to fly over the crowds earlier, glowing, with wings. He had, but so, obviously, had an angel. "Absolutely not possible. The agents of the Morninglord are radiant beyond all. One would know if one had seen one."

What we think now:

• The Baron has been slowly bleeding the town. Lady Wachter just gave it shock therapy.
• Killing both would leave a hole the town might not survive. "A theocracy under Father Lucian" was floated. ("Those always go well," someone said, and Sirius agreed with them sincerely.)
• Everyone's bad. Who's worse? Right now, the lady. "She literally has a demon with her at all times."
• Izek probably could have done with some moral tuition growing up, but he doesn't seem a bad sort. Perhaps he's been through something like the Reformation Center himself.

Muriel suggested a spy's approach: "You don't need to always go in with knives. You can go in with feathers." A house open as a hospital is a house you can sneak around. It has a cellar with a locked door, and a second floor. If we can find a ritual room or the bones, and enough people see it, that might turn the town. Sirius: "I only break into bastions of evil. This is not a home. This is a bastion of evil."

We were running on empty: Sirius was out of flying and out of holy power, and Clover was spent. Nobody had rested. We went anyway.

Ireena is gone

At the Blue Water, full of people huddling and recovering, Urwin was in despair. "Oh, what a terror. You were meant to stop this." He gave us commoner cloaks from the Ravens' stock: "What's the point now? Half the city's gone." We told him we'd killed six vampires between us, and it could have been much worse. "I hate living in Vallaki. I hate living in Barovia."

Then: "Your friend, she left. I couldn't stop her." Ernst came and invited Ireena to Wachterhaus, and she went.

The minutes record one of us saying "Oh, fuckballs." Somebody then asked whether we'd ever told Ireena anything, kept her in the loop, included her in any of it. Not really, no.

Sirius: "Now I definitely wanna get there, and carve them open, and share with them the light of the Morning Lord, and his pleasant words of morning awakening." He took a flask of wine for the road. It's ten per cent wine now.

Wachterhaus: the cellar

The house was thronged with the wounded, the doors open, people being cared for. It's a place of sanctuary and healing. One of us noticed it has far more medical supplies than any house would keep. She'd stockpiled for this.

We went round to the slanted cellar door, cloaked, where nobody was watching. Two guidances and a bit of Lathander's luck later, Lily picked the lock. Inside: a dirt-floored room, two staircases facing each other, four neatly made cots, and tracks in the earth leading to the bare west wall, which pivots.

Behind it was a room lit by candles in iron holders, with a large black pentagram on the floor, a wooden chair at each point, and in one chair a frail, starved man.

• "You're not gonna take me back." Back to the Reformation Center. His crime: "I chuckled during a festival."
• "I was saved. The lady saved me. I owe her my life. I would do anything for her."
• He'd been brought down and told to sit there. Why the pentagram? "I don't know. Decoration?"

We told him the city was on fire and coaxed him out: we'd go outside together, to where it's safe. "Okay. If you say so." As he stepped over the threshold of the pivoting door, skeletons came up out of the ground. (The DM told us there are "various magical wards and tracking things in this house".)

The first blow went at him. Sirius tried to put his shield in the way ("No, hit me, not this poor reclaimed person"), but it wasn't enough, and the man was cut down. Sirius: "I take that very seriously, and I feel like I've failed myself, my religion, and my God."

The skeletons, some with bows:

• Drew laid a line of acid through them.
• Osric rolled a natural 20 and smashed one, then stood in the doorway with Sirius. Later he smashed another on a second natural 20.
• Sirius crit another to pieces and high-fived Osric over the dead man. "Hold the line."
• Muriel changed at last. "Action: beak."
• Lily climbed to the stair landing and stabbed one down through the railings.
• Drew burned one with a fire bolt.
• Sirius shoved the last one flat, and Muriel tore it apart.

Set dressing

Then we looked at the pentagram properly. The chairs were just loose. The pentagram was only lightly scratched into the floor. Drew's arcana was clear: it isn't magical at all. "This is decoration. This is for show." The skeletons were a real ward on the room, but the circle was never a summoning circle.

"This is staged. This is like it was for us to see, or for someone to see. But it's not real." Muriel: "There's undead and then there's demons. Often they're different." Someone suggested it was for a play, or nobles' parties. We were not reassured.

If we dragged the town down here to see it, she could show it was fake and say we'd tried to frame her. We need real proof that she's a baddie, because nobody listens to us. We're outsiders.

Up through the house

We took the far cellar stair, Lily leading, cloaks up:

• A secret door into a cloakroom of boots and cloaks.
• A mudroom, with a door either side.
• A box room holding a complete set of polished silverware and baskets of turnips and beets. Lily took the beets to share with people who need them. Nobody took the silver. "We're not common crooks."
• The kitchen, turned into a ward: people on bedrolls, some burned, some with vampire bites. In our cloaks we look just like them. We don't know whether a spawn's bite can turn someone. We know the devil's can.
• The stairs, empty. Up we went, Muriel at the rear.

The upstairs hallway

A hallway with windows at each end, wrapping round the staircase. Portraits and mirrors on every wall, judging looks and dark reflections. People moaning behind one door. The other doors all carry signs: No admittance.

At the top of the stairs hangs a great framed map of Barovia: wolves, the moon, and somewhere the goats and the cows. Sirius thinks it's art. Drew, who knows cartography, is committing as much of it to memory as she can, since copying it would take hours and stealing it would mean carrying something very big.

The DM: time is passing. This is the highest floor we know of.

Where we stand

• In the upstairs hallway of Wachterhaus on the afternoon of the fifth, in commoner cloaks, with Muriel, above a kitchen full of the wounded. Nobody has rested since last night. Drew has one spell slot at most. Sirius has no holy power left.
• All six spawn are destroyed. St. Andral's is a roofless ruin, Frederick and Petru are dead, and so is the man from the cellar.
• Ireena is somewhere in this house, as Ernst's guest.
• The bones weren't in the cellar.
• Izek's deadline (physical proof against Lady Wachter by tomorrow morning) still stands. So does Fëanor's captivity.
• The town believes two stories: that the lady is a healer, and that an angel accused her.

Questions on our minds

• Where are the bones? Answered, Session 13: in a secret room off the library upstairs.
• Where is Ireena? Answered, Session 13: upstairs, sitting with Stella.
• Who is moaning behind the door? Answered, Session 13: Stella Wachter, with Ireena sitting by her bed.
• Who set up the pentagram room, and for whom?
• Does the house know we're here? The DM mentioned tracking things.
• Can a spawn's bite turn the people in the kitchen?
• Who is the angel of the Morninglord? (Sirius wants to know.)
• What did the Baron promise Izek?