The Story So Far

It began on a warm summer evening, with five strangers who had never met. Drew was on her way to mend an old lady's clock in Julkem. Fëanor, the black sheep of a rich Waterdeep family, had been sent to find a blacksmith for the horses. Lily was off to mend boots for coppers in Daggerford. Sirius, a young paladin of Lathander with a fondness for wine, was heading for his favourite bar, and Sir Osric, a farmer from Goldenfields two weeks into his knighthood, was taking a message to the smith. A cold mist rolled in on each of us alone, and a family keepsake came alive and pulled: Drew's amber pendant, Fëanor's star-stone, Lily's wolf's tooth, Sirius's raven feather, Osric's banner. They led us all to the foot of a staircase that had no business being there.

The mist around the stairs was a wall. Sirius and Fëanor walked back into it hand in hand and wandered for hours, while the rest of us waited a few seconds for them. So we went up, to a tall, narrow house, and as soon as the last of us was inside the door slammed, the fire died, and a verse ran red down the wall about a beast beneath the house that wakes at midnight and must be brought a gift. The grandfather clock struck six.

The house lied to us. Its silver crumbled, its wine was vinegar, its food was rotten. It also armed us, with a shield, a sword, crossbows and silvered bolts, as if it wanted us to have a fighting chance. A portrait named the family, Durst, with two children on the plaque and three in the painting: the third a baby the mother plainly despised. Under a harpsichord we found a starving hound called Lancelot, and Osric swore to protect him with his life. In a hidden study we found a letter to the lady of the house that mocked her husband's bastard son, signed by Strahd von Zarovich, Count of Barovia. None of us had ever heard of Barovia.

The house fought back. An empty suit of armour threw Sirius over a banister, and we took it apart together in our first real fight as a company, with Lily's awl finding the seam at the end. A maid stepped out of a mirror not knowing she was dead, and told us the baby of the house was "not wanted, but loved." The nursery crib held only swaddling, centuries old.

Behind a locked attic door were two small beds and the ghosts of Rose and Thorn Durst, who knew exactly what they were. "We were locked in here. It got very hungry. And then we were no longer hungry." Their mother had filled the house with a cult, and carried their baby half-brother down to the basement for "something about innocence and sacrifice." They asked us to bury their bones, and Drew promised. The maid, lucid at last beside her own skeleton, asked to be buried too, out of yelling distance of the children.

The children's dollhouse showed us a secret stair through the heart of the house. We followed it down to the cult's quarters, where Fëanor read a notebook of failed experiments and threw it down the well. We argued about what gift the beast might want, and Drew announced that she would rather sacrifice a baby than the dog. Somewhere to the west, a baby was crying.

The family crypts under the house were empty, except for the mother's, which was full of insects. Gustav Durst had hanged himself in the cellars, and his wife stepped out of a wall with a black heart beating in her ribs to promise that her creature would get us, until Fëanor put a fire bolt through it. Past a painted statue of a gaunt, pale man with a wolf at his side and a grey orb in his hand, past four ghouls that fled from Fëanor's holy symbol, we followed a chant down into the dark: "He is ancient. He is the land."

At the bottom stood an altar over black water, with a knife and a bundle of tiny bones on it, and above it thirteen faceless figures chanting "One must die." Any living thing would do, and Lancelot was standing right there. We said no. Sirius brought his sword down on the altar, the clock struck midnight, and a mound of dead flesh rose out of the refuse. Fëanor spotted the crystal heart inside it, and Osric, with his second natural 20 of the fight, shattered it.

The mist had parted when we walked out of the front door, and as we stepped off the grounds, the house vanished behind us. We buried Rose, Thorn and the maid beside an unwalked road, and they thanked us, warned us that "a greater evil still stays here," and named him: the devil, Strahd. Morning came grey and sunless, and we woke stronger than we had lain down, as if the land had noticed us.

The road led to a crumbling gate: "Welcome to Barovia, the crown jewel in the Strahd empire." Above the words was the sigil from the letter, and the same sigil was on Osric's banner. Below a spiky castle on its pillar of rock lay a village where everyone hid from us except an old woman selling pies, who called us mist walkers and said our kind make the devil take an interest. The pies were wonderful.

In the silent tavern, Ismark, burgomaster for all of a day, told us how things stood. The devil is real, and drinks the villagers' blood. The mists are the bars of a cell, and nobody leaves. His father had died because the devil wanted Ismark's sister, Ireena, and the old man said no. He asked us to help bury his father and to take Ireena west to Vallaki, where the walls are high and there is a church the devil is said not to enter. We agreed. The devil's face, we noticed, was on the coins. Lancelot went home to his owner, Mary, whose daughter Gertruda was missing, and Mary left believing we had promised to find her. Lily woke the next morning already eating her pie.

After the funeral, Father Donavich asked us to help his son, and above all not to kill him. Doru was in the crypt under the church: eighteen or so, clinging to the ceiling, undead and starving. Nobody wanted that fight. By the end of it Sirius had hit him with enough holy fire to end anything and he was still standing, Lily had him pinned, Drew was begging everyone to leave, and his father stood in the open hatch as Osric told him the truth. "I'm sorry, but he's a vampire, too."

It ended as a mercy. Doru told his father how the devil had drunk from him and made him drink back, and that he had been forbidden to allow his own destruction. "Do what you must," said Donavich, and Doru crumbled to dust. Ismark gave us a map and, pushed by Ireena, admitted he had known what was in the crypt and sent us down as a test. "You will learn not to trust people in Barovia."

That night there was a knock at Ismark's door, and everyone who looked at the visitor simply knew he was a friend. Only Fëanor saw through it for a moment, and nobody listened to him. It was Strahd. "I am this land, and this land is me." He drank from Sirius's neck as a token of fealty, told us "I own this place. You may have your fun, but I get what I want," and left. The charm wore off by morning and left us feeling sick.

We took Ireena and the one road west. We passed crying lights we didn't follow, and a mossy standing stone carved with a winged, three-eyed woman and ringed with the symbol on Fëanor's heirloom. When wolves came out of the trees, Drew built a cheerful little cannon called CLOVER in the middle of the fight, and the pack ran. At the Vistani camp at Tser Pool, Sirius paid for supper with the story of his misspent youth, and a large man stepped out of the great tent and greeted each of us by name. "You are expected."

Madam Eva had been waiting for us, and we drew our fates from her cards. Knowledge of our enemy lies far to the west, "hidden behind the walls of man." Protection lies in the house of a dragon. Power begins in "an amber palace of darkness." Our ally is a hunter of hunters, and the devil will be found "in the tomb of the only man he ever envied." Then our own cards named our heirlooms one by one. Osric's blood "marched beneath that banner," and he must kneel and answer for it. Fëanor must one day stand in glowing water at dawn and choose. Drew's amber holds a secret her family has carried for generations, to be bought dearly in the mountains. And Lily heard the thing we had all been watching said out loud: "Something sweet has taken root in you, little one. Starve it. It is not yours." Sirius was refused a reading. His card was blank to everyone else, but on it he saw a lady of ravens, who told him that what was stolen can be reclaimed.

The Vistani told us of their old agreement with the devil, and of the one passenger they had tried to carry out through the mists, who vanished; the devil sent them a note by wolf. In the morning, over real bacon, Fëanor's magic showed the enchantment in the pies and around Lily's head, and Lily admitted she couldn't honestly promise to stop. On the road a Vistani rider called Aragal asked us to bring his daughter a toy from Vallaki, and we felt the land make us stronger again.

At dusk we reached a leaning windmill with a henge of old stones behind it and the smell of fresh baking all around. Granny came up the road with her cart and admitted the pies were enchanted. Then the cart started screaming. Inside was a woman in a silver net, a werewolf begging us not to free her under the full moon, whose mate was a prisoner in the mill. And out of the mill door came three hags.

We lost. Within a minute Sirius and Osric were frogs and Clover was scrap, and Lily ran in under the hags' claws to scoop up both frogs while the hags laughed us off the hill. The woman from the net, Vasha, told us by the fire what the pies were made of: her arms and her mate Radu's, cut off and grown back again and again. We cremated every pie we had, and promised her we would come back for the hags. For the next two days Lily spent an hour every dawn needing a pie more than air, and on the second night Sirius had himself tied up beside her so she wouldn't be alone.

A dire wolf brought Ireena roses and a love letter: speak his name three times, and he would come and take her to "our castle, Ravenloft." The raven that had watched us since the village found us again, and would not answer Lily, because it was not an animal. At an abandoned farm Ireena saw Sirius's raven wings, fell to her knees, and decided he was an angel of the Morninglord.

Then Vallaki: high walls, forms to fill in, every weapon registered, the devil's name forbidden, the stocks full, and a Festival of the Blazing Sun in seven days that was "punishable by punishment" to miss. All will be well. At the church of St Andral, Father Lucian told us the saint's bones, which had kept the church holy, had been stolen six days before, and the groundskeeper Milivoj had been asking questions. At the Blue Water Inn a very old man stared at us as if he had seen a ghost. Roger was all that was left of the last Mistwalkers.

Roger's band had come through the mists forty-five years ago and drawn our first three cards. On their way to Krezk they met a creature, half raven and half man, which said "Greetings, friend. I come in peace," and they killed it. After that the whole land turned against them. The devil killed a street of people because the band had grown boring, a dusk elf killed the rest of them at the castle gates, and Roger was spared to pass on one message: "Don't be boring." Their ally card had been the raven. "Don't kill the ravens."

The rest of the Blue Water had its own stories. The landlady's family owns the winery, the wine was late, and she winced when the raven-man came up. The Wachter brothers blamed the Baron's son, Victor, for their sister's broken mind. A bard called Riptarvo said the devil's name aloud, spoke of old powers usurped from the land, and told us he would watch us with great interest. The next morning Lily woke free of the pies at last.

At the orphanage we found the groundskeeper Milivoj cursed and unwakeable, and in the attic a small boy called Felix who was only "Mostly Felix." The rest of him was a shadow demon. It possessed Drew, drained a quarter of Osric's life and failed to take Sirius ("I am an angel, sent from the celestial realms to end you unless you repent"), and our light drove it into a rusted locket, which Sirius shut. When Milivoj woke and we asked him about the bones, he said he had never touched them.

He had. Three boys had run away from the orphanage, the hunters who might find them wanted three hundred gold, and a cloaked stranger with a short black beard and very clean shoes had paid him that much to leave the bones in the Vallakovich crypt. We left Milivoj at the orphanage on his word, with Sirius's sentence on his hands postponed. The headmistress told us the only man who could deal with a demon in a box was the abbot above Krezk. In the crypt we found a handful of curious nails.

Then came dinner with Lady Fiona Wachter, the richest woman in Vallaki. She believes the Baron killed her husband, knows his son broke her daughter, and wants them both dead: "They just don't know it." She offered us fifty gold for proof of what Victor did. One of us said the devil's name five times at her table and nothing happened. Her pet raven was a fiend, Sirius's divine sense told him, and after we discussed it in her bathroom it flew out of the house. She had come home with it, her sons told us, after writing to the abbey about raising her dead husband.

At the inn Ireena sang a song she had dreamed, about two brothers, a stolen sun and a girl beneath a lake. The Wachter brothers asked us to find their friend Bluto, lost at the haunted lake. A note appeared in our locked room from the Ravens of Barovia, saying Lady Wachter's raven was no true raven, and Sirius wrote back asking to meet. In the morning a smith looked at the nails and named their maker: "Oh, you've got Henrik's nails."

The Baron sent for us first. In his back office, with his wife grinning at his shoulder, he offered us deputies' writs, and later Lady Wachter's house, for proof that she consorts with the devil. He let Sirius go up alone to meet his son Victor, and Sirius came back thirty-five minutes later remembering five of them. As we left, Izek took Fëanor as surety for our good behaviour.

Henrik the coffin maker wore dirty boots, and he broke when Drew simply told him the truth. Ernst, Lady Wachter's manservant, had frightened him into collecting the bones from the crypt and handing them over, and the next day six coffins had arrived that he was told never to open. Sirius counted six undead upstairs. Back at the Blue Water another note was waiting, and when we pressed Urwin the landlord, he turned into a raven the size of a man. The raven-man Roger's band killed was his great-uncle, and he was one of the Ravens of Barovia. The bones in the church, he said, kept every lesser undead thing out of the town.

Lady Wachter caught Lily in a lie and tried twice to put her to sleep. By half past seven she had filled her house with fifty happy citizens eating canapés, and told Sirius our services were no longer required. There is more to Barovia than Vallaki, Urwin told us. You can just leave.

We went into that party, all four of us. Lily's illusory shout of fire didn't empty the room, and Ernst told Sirius how he and his brother went into the Reformation Center and only he came out: "There's only one devil in Barovia, and you are flashing his writ." Back at the inn Muriel Vinshaw of the Ravens, who had been following us since the village, joined us because we had been mucking it up so far. The next morning Izek told us undead in Vallaki were impossible and gave us until the following morning to bring proof against Lady Wachter, and the bard left us a vampire hunter's chest with a note: "Hunt well those who hunt."

The six coffins at the Coffin Works had become six crates, and the crates held vampire spawn. Four escaped into the town. One nearly killed Lily, and Muriel pecked two of them into dust. Vallaki caught fire. When a mob turned on us, Sirius rose over them on raven wings, glowing, and told them the vampires had been let in by the servants of Lady Wachter, and they hailed him as the Avatar of the Morninglord. We ran through the burning streets to St Andral's, where Father Lucian stood on his altar holding two vampires back with his faith.

The church fought us all as it burned. Izek threw the last two vampires in through the back doors and followed them, and we watched both his guards die. He took the vampire that had killed the second guard by the head, promised to destroy it starting with its teeth, and threw it into the fire. By the end all six spawn were dust, and the church was lost, with fourteen houses around it. "The Baron promised me. Evil can't come into Vallaki." Sirius carried the sunburst from the altar out to Lucian: "Lathander lives in our hearts, not in our places."

Ernst had taken Ireena to Wachterhaus as a guest, and we had never told her anything. We went in after her, disguised among the refugees in the lady's new hospital. The pentagram in her cellar was only scratched decoration, but the ward guarding it was real, and a starved survivor of the Reformation Center died to it as we tried to lead him out. We climbed past the burned and the bitten to the upper floor, to a moaning door and a great map of Barovia.

Upstairs we found the lady's husband, ten years dead and kept fresh by magic in the bed she still sleeps in, and a letter to her from the devil. The Wachter sons found out what was in Mama's room. Drew finally told Ireena everything, and Ireena showed us the secret room where the bones lay. Lady Wachter saw them go and said only "The bones," and we went out of the windows with them while Sirius bellowed about blasphemy. That evening we laid them back beneath Lucian's altar, and the ruined church was holy again. We had won one.

The bill came at once. Izek gave us back Fëanor with two days missing from his memory, all but "a nice boy," and took the letter away to the Baron. The criers told the town there had never been vampires in Vallaki, only agitators in masks, and Izek told us the festival was tomorrow, Lady Wachter would hang on our testimony, and Henrik was in the Reformation Center. We woke at level five. Muriel left us. Sirius summoned a celestial horse called Clancy. And at midday, in torrential rain, the Baron and Lady Wachter each told the town that we would testify for them, and the whole square turned to see what we would say.

We said neither. Drew got the Wachter brothers to confirm, in front of everyone, what their mother kept in her bedroom. Osric brought Lucian forward to swear the vampires were real. Sirius cast Zone of Truth on the Baron, who would not read the devil's letter aloud, and then we proposed Ireena to govern, with Lucian beside her. "All is not well in Vallaki!" The square turned on both its rulers at once.

Izek caught Sirius in his demon hand and the Baron ordered him killed, and Fëanor put a lance of silver through the Baron, Izek, and the imp that had been Lady Wachter's raven. The Baron died on his own stage. Osric cut the imp down. Sirius hugged Izek until he called his guards off: "I don't know what to do. I have always had instruction." Lady Wachter surrendered to the crowd, and they trampled her to death. We didn't stop them.

Then Strahd came on a burning horse to see the mess for himself. The bones had spoiled his view of the town, he said, but they don't keep him out. We were doing better than the last lot. Ireena would do as burgomistress. He drank a man dry in front of us and left us with "Do not be boring."

What was left was quieter. The Wachter brothers asked us whether their mother had to die. Lucian took the Baroness to his church. Victor had escaped by a teleportation circle, leaving behind a book about how he broke Stella's mind, and in a room on the middle floor of the Baron's house we freed a prisoner, Udo Lukovich, manacled to the wall for the Baron's temper. Izek said he would serve Ireena. Her first order was to empty the Reformation Center, and inside, with Izek at our backs, we opened a door on the elves who run it, Ilimir and Ivalice, sitting in their armchairs. "We're making them think right. Cleaning their heads."