Episode 9 · Session IX
Cut the Thread
A confession in a corridor, dinner with a lady who wants two men dead, a pet raven that isn't, and a dreamed song.
Milivoj tells us why he took the bones, and Sirius has a liturgical opinion about his hands. A headmistress names the one man in Barovia who could deal with a demon in a box. Then dinner at Wachterhaus, where our hostess says the devil's name freely, wants two men dead, and keeps a raven that Sirius does not like at all.
Back at the inn Ireena sings a song she dreamed, and upstairs, in a locked room, somebody has left us a letter. By morning we have a name to go with some very particular nails.
Stay past the credits.
The recap
Session 9 in about 2 minutes. The full record is in the field notes.
Milivoj broke in the corridor. He had taken the bones. Three boys had fled into the woods, two hunters wanted three hundred gold to go after them, and as Milivoj left the Blue Water in despair a stranger stopped him: a man in a deep cloak with his face hidden, a short black beard, and very nice shoes. One small thing, and the gold was his. He left the bones in the Vallakovich crypt, and the next day the gold was there. "It was necessary. I'm not gonna apologise." Sirius proposed, on liturgical grounds, removing both his hands ("It's only two hands. He'll still be able to walk"), and was talked down to a deferred sentence.
Headmistress Claudia told us the one man who might deal with the locket: "If there's someone in this Morninglord forsaken place who... can do something about a demon, a proper demon, it'll be the abbot." The abbot above Krezk heals bodies and minds, is said to raise the dead, and helps nobody. At the orphanage door a manservant called Ernst invited us to dinner with Lady Wachter, and in the Vallakovich crypt we found a handful of long, custom-made iron nails.
Lady Fiona Wachter received us in the finest house in the noble district as equals. She believes the Baron killed her husband ten years ago, and his son Victor broke her daughter Stella three years ago. She wants them both dead. "They just don't know it." She offered fifty gold for proof of what Victor did. She said the devil's name freely, so one of us said it five times at her table, and nothing happened. It matters who speaks it. She also told us the winery's name: the Wizards of Wine.
In her hallway a raven watched us from a perch, and Sirius's divine sense named it a fiend. We held a whispered conference about it behind the bathroom door, somebody listened at the keyhole, and by the time we came out the raven had flown out of the house. "Ravens are plenty in Barovia," the lady told us. "They are a sign of goodness. You can trust anyone with a raven." Her sons told us the rest: after their father died she wrote to the abbey about raising him, vanished for two weeks, and came home with a raven.
Back at the Blue Water, Ireena was on the stage with the band, singing a song she had dreamed: two brothers at an altar, a cloak nailed across the sun, a girl beneath the lake, and "a raven on the shoulder of the shadow of a man". "They'll snip it, and they'll spin it, and I'll wake another girl." She didn't know where it came from. The Wachter brothers asked us to find their friend Bluto, who had gone north to the haunted lake to right a wrong. Upstairs, in our locked room, a note lay on the floor from the Ravens of Barovia: Lady Wachter's raven was no true raven, and she did not have their support. Sirius, weak with relief, wrote back asking for a meeting.
In the morning, five days before the festival, Drew showed the nails to the smith in the Workyard. "Oh, you've got Henrik's nails." Henrik makes coffins, and his nails curve a particular way as they go in.
We stopped there, at the smithy, about to go and knock on the coffin maker's door.