Date: September 26, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Randoah of Oak, Enki, Ivek the Seer, Ulfgar Kegbreath, Captain Gor
They had been gone a single night. That was how it felt, at least, walking down from the crossroads with the bent signpost lying in the grass behind them and the sun only just clearing the trees — one long, terrible night, and now the ordinary road home. The road did not agree. The fields along it had been standing and green when the carriage took them away, and now half of them were reaped to stubble, wheat and corn and squash all gathered in, and the other half had simply died where they grew. A sweet, sick miasma drifted off those farms. Horses lay in the pastures under blankets of flies, and cattle and pigs beside them. Some of the farmhouses still had smoke in their chimneys and animals moving in their yards; some of them very plainly did not.
It was only when they looked down at themselves that they understood something had followed them out. The finery they had bought with the Count’s gold — the bright blues and yellows, Randoah’s purple feather — had come through the mists drained almost to nothing, faded into greys and muddy browns, as if the colour had been left behind on the other side. They were filthy, starving, and had not slept, and in the distance, as the road rose, they could see Marin’s Hold on its hill with the Reeve’s little keep on top and the palisade around it, and far more thin columns of smoke rising from around it than any village of three hundred souls should have.
Enki wanted food before anything else, and they tried the nearest farmhouse that still had living animals. It was a turf-roofed hovel built into the berm of a hill, one room with a dirt floor and the beds along the wall, and the woman who opened the door was still rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her husband and son had already gone to market with the harvest. She took one look at their clothes and asked what noble folk were doing so far out, and then, because St. Terragnis would curse her if she turned away travellers in need, sat them at her rough little table and ladled out what was left of the family’s breakfast: wheat-and-oat porridge with a little pig fat in it, which to people who had not eaten in what felt like days tasted like a feast. When they were done she told them to be gone before her husband came back and scolded her for giving away good food. Enki pressed a gold coin into her hand. She had plainly never held so much money in her life. It would pay, she said, to mend their well — broken since last winter, so that they had been hauling water all the way from the village and wearing out the horses doing it. Her own farm had been spared whatever plague was sweeping the countryside; her husband said it was because they were godly folk, but she knew these things struck good people as readily as bad.
Randoah had not gone inside. She had heard enough through the door to wander round behind the house, where the well’s winch had snapped clean off its crossbeam. Under her breath she called up her little bubbling cauldron and reached into it, and came up with a small vial bearing the words touch me. She rubbed its contents along the broken spar, and the wood seemed to come alive for a moment and knit itself together; the iron handle fused back on; and then it was only an old well again, and it worked. She clattered about a little so it would sound as though the strange halfling child was merely making a nuisance of herself, and left the farm’s faith to explain the rest. The woman was already shooing them out when she stopped them on the step: there was one other thing. She had seen strange hooded figures at her neighbour’s farm, and all she could make out of them was that their hands were wrapped in bandages.
Ivek was moving before she had finished. Whatever had followed him out of Ravenloft — whatever shadow of Mugdulbulb he had brushed against there — had hold of him, and at the words hooded figures he started down the road toward the neighbour’s farm with the others trailing after. The smell reached them first: rot, and something sickly-sweet underneath it that made them cover their faces. The livestock lay dead in the fields, half torn by scavengers, and beside a dead horse lay a dead wolf. The crops had not withered so much as dissolved; where they walked, the ground sucked at their feet, the stalks slumped into a sticky, liquefied green. The farmhouse stood intact, and its door swung open at Ivek’s knock.
Someone sat in a chair at the cold hearth with their back to the door, as if napping over a book. Ivek said he had heard there was trouble and asked if he could help, and got no answer, and went in and laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. A half-melted skull turned toward him, pustules crusted over what flesh remained, the face sliding off the bone — and then the whole body gave way and came apart onto the floor, and the stench in that small room redoubled. Ivek barely kept his breakfast down. When he could look again he saw that the house had been stripped: no tools, no clothes, nothing of value. Someone had packed this farm up and carried it off.
Outside, Ulfgar knelt by the cattle with the practised eye of a man who had carried remedies to the sick for years. They were covered in lesions and weeping sores, and some looked as though they had melted from the inside out. They had not starved and they had not gone thirsty; they had eaten or drunk something that poisoned or infected them, and the wolf had eaten one of them and died of the same thing. Asked whether this was the sort of ruin his old cult left behind, Ivek could only say that it was well within their habits. Ulfgar, curious, dipped the steel tip of an arrow into the ooze; it stretched and clung like mucus before a fat drop fell away, and when some of it splashed his clothes the cloth began to dissolve and run colourless under his fingers, and he had to cut the piece away before it spread. Captain Gor, meanwhile, turned out the farmhouse for anything useful and came away with makings for a torch and nothing else. Brielle turned the dead wolf over with the point of her dagger: the same bloated belly, the same perforations, the same sores across its snout.
Enki, not a man to leave a door unkicked, went to the grain silo and kicked it open. A wave of green ooze burst out over him, carrying bones and half-dissolved rats with it, and it ate through his boots before he could get them off and began on his feet beneath. Gor heard him shouting about his feet and came running with an herbal salve that smelled, improbably, of a southern kitchen, and Enki sat down in the dirt and wriggled his bare toes at the sky in gratitude. Enki still thought to scoop a little of the silo’s ooze into one of the party’s empty vials, and it did not eat the glass.
Randoah had grown bored of waiting by the road and wandered over to find Enki barefoot, and — feeling it was not a very kind thing to do even as she did it — began kicking at the dead rats. They burst wetly under her boot. Then one of them twitched, and then another, and their eyes lit a dull and poisonous green, and they rose: cat-sized skeletons held together with green jelly, hissing. Behind Brielle came a gurgling growl, and the wolf stood up from beside the dead horse, its intestines sliding out of its opened belly in ropes of ooze, its eyes glowing the same green.
The rats went for Randoah first. They were on her before she could get clear, gnawing, and she screamed and went down. One bit into Enki’s arm and the wound sizzled. The wolf lunged at Brielle and she slipped it, and its teeth only scraped the bracer on her arm. Ivek got his shield up and his light hammer down on the rat that had felled Randoah, and knocked a leg clean off it — and watched the ooze simply grow it a new one. Gor tried to mix a healing draught over her and it went off in his hands like a firecracker, leaving his ears ringing. Enki’s blade cut a rat in half, and the two halves drew themselves back together. Ulfgar ran to Randoah’s side and prayed over her, and nothing came but a few useless sparks from his fingers; there was too much corruption in that ground for the blessing to take hold. Ivek, desperate, prayed to St. Terragnis for luck, for anything — and instead of his saint he heard a deep, bubbling, gurgling voice inside his own head, blotting the saint out entirely. You are weak, it said. He swung anyway, and this time the hammer shattered a rat’s skull and sprayed it across the yard, and he placed himself over Randoah’s body.
She was slipping away. Enki knelt over her and let the demon in him rise — the power his order embraced to hunt its enemies — and forced some of it into her. For a moment Randoah’s eyes glowed red and her face was something unholy, and then the bleeding stopped and she jerked, still senseless, but alive. Brielle slashed the wolf’s throat; black blood poured out, and then green, and it staggered and kept coming. Ulfgar tried again and again his prayer would not come. Ivek, one last time, begged his saint — I left that life behind me, I want to be in your service — and heard nothing at all. Then Captain Gor drew his bow and put an arrow through the wolf’s ear, and the green light went out of its eyes, and it fell over and burst on the ground like a waterskin. A rat leapt for Enki’s face and Brielle, circling for a clean shot, took it out of the air with an arrow that splattered it across the silo wall. Ulfgar brought his morningstar down on another and it exploded in ooze that bubbled the earth where it landed, and Ivek spun and caught the last with the back of his hammer and it was gone.
In the quiet afterward, Enki noticed barrels stacked beside the farm’s well, which smelled of putrescence and something acid. They had been emptied. Their insides were coated in a thick green mucus, and their lids bore a seal Enki did not recognise — still possessed, still furious, he smashed them apart with his greatsword and hacked the seal free to keep. Ivek recognised it: the Bittermold Estate, where his cult had kept a hideout. He did not say so aloud. Ulfgar’s healing finally took once the fighting was done, and Randoah came round groggy and bewildered to find everyone looking beaten half to death. Captain Gor pointed out that if the rats and the wolf could get up again, there was nothing stopping the cows from doing the same, and so they spent two ugly hours building a pyre and dragging every carcass on the farm onto it. Handling the bodies finished off what the mists had started with their clothes; by the time the fire was going they looked less like nobles than like people who had murdered some nobles and taken their clothes. While it burned, Ivek tore off the dark cult robes he had never managed to stop wearing — the ones he had embroidered with golden suns — and threw them into the flames, and stood in his leather armour staring into the fire, his eyes huge, answering nobody. Three times now he had called on St. Terragnis and heard nothing. Enki burned the ruined remains of his party clothes beside them and stood with him. Gor gave up his jacket to the fire but kept the hat.
The smoke columns over Marin’s Hold turned out to be cook fires. Tents and lean-tos lined the road for the last stretch to the gate, and children chased each other between them as though it were a fair, but it was not a fair. There was a long line to a tent by the gate, where a goblin clerk wrote each person’s name and home into a ledger with a kindly, red-bearded man at his elbow, and where Egrid, the priestess of St. Terragnis, ladled a scoop from a great cookpot into each bowl held out to her. A woman in the line stared at Ulfgar and cried out his name. She was from Orlaine. She had heard he had done terrible things, she said, and had never believed it. Orlaine was not safe anymore; people had simply started disappearing, and she had woken one morning to find her daughter gone from her bed. Many of the people in this camp were from Orlaine. Valos had come away with them, and was here somewhere. And then she grew more desperate: her husband and son, the last of her family, had gone off days ago as guides to some old healer or medicine woman who had come looking for help and paid in two chickens, which a starving family could not refuse. She had told them not to trust the woman — friendly, suspiciously friendly, who had invited her round for tea sometime, and whose name had something to do with a colour. They had not come back.
On the road stood the posts where the village displayed its witches. There had been three bodies on them before. Now there were four: an old woman, with cheap amulets and charms nailed into her flesh. As Ivek went to look at her a gruff voice behind him told him to hold back his empathy, son: such was the fate of heretics who delved into the devilish arts. The speaker laid a hand on his shoulder and regarded the dead woman with something close to pride. She had come here selling charms and love potions, he said, and the agents of the devil hid among the common folk. He wore severe black clothes and a tall, wide-brimmed hat with a silver buckle, and the two men behind him were not the Reeve’s guard — they wore great red crosses on their mail. He was gaunt, with a sharp, pointed nose, and he introduced himself as Inquisitor Morvath. Randoah disliked him on sight.
Enki told him he was a Knight of Ydris, a hunter of demons, and Morvath approved: there was always use for more soldiers of God. The Reeve had closed the gates a week ago; there was simply no room for so many people, and anyone who was a citizen or had business inside would be let in by the guards. The refugees came from Orlaine and from the farms that had been corrupted, and if no new source of food were found, winter would be very harsh indeed. Brielle, while they talked, took quiet stock of him: fine clothes, but good, functional travelling leathers — and a rapier at his hip that her eye told her was silver. When Enki, testing him, asked whether he knew of the castle beyond the crossroads and its Count Demetrius, Morvath had never heard of either, and asked whether Enki had fallen ill; and when Enki mentioned vampires, the Inquisitor seized his head and turned it to search his neck for bites. Enki slapped his hand away. The guards’ hands went to their swords before Morvath raised a hand to stop them. He did not seem infected, the Inquisitor said, but he would keep an eye on him — and as they parted he warned Enki to be careful whom he threatened, and made him the sign of the Order of Ydris. Enki came back to apologise, against his better judgement, and returned the sign; Morvath did not recognise him and asked who had sired him. Enki asked after Mathilda the Mauve. Morvath had been watching her closely, to see whether her powers went beyond simple herb-lore into the devilry so many of these folk fell prey to; she was one of the last healers the village had left, and so he had mostly let her pass. He had heard dark rumours. He did not know where she had gone. The woman on the post was not Mathilda — when Randoah went to look, she saw that most of the charms nailed into her were nonsense, the stock of a charlatan and not a witch at all. While Morvath’s attention was on Enki she snapped one of the amulets free and slipped it into her pocket. Even a charlatan deserved some dignity; she meant to bury it.
The guards on the palisade told them to be gone, vagabonds, the city was closed — and then, when they gave their business, that they were a week overdue; the Reeve had told the watch to expect them a week ago. One of the guards asked how he was to know they had not killed the real adventurers and taken their clothes, smelled them, and suggested a bath. But the crossbeam came off the gate, and when the crowd behind them surged, bows appeared over the palisade and drove the refugees back, and the gates shut behind them.
Finch Three-Fingers’ shelves were much barer than they had been. He looked up at Brielle and said he’d written her off for dead, and asked whether the rumours were true — had they found the Heart of the Raven? They had come within reach of the ruby medallion and had not taken it, and Brielle informed him that she held him personally responsible for sending them into that hellscape. Finch pointed out that they had been going anyway; he had only given them a little shopping to do while they were there. His ex-wife blamed him for everything too. Still, he had had a buyer lined up, and his reputation would suffer, and he might be willing to let it slide if they did him a different favour. Famine was good for business: he had found an importer willing to sail a load of only slightly expired salt pork upriver from the Southern Kingdoms, several days’ journey south, and the man was a week late. Finch suspected foul play. He laid a severed finger on the counter, a signet ring still on it, which one of the fishermen had pulled from a carp’s mouth — and when Brielle picked it up to look at it, he slapped his hand down, pulled the ring off, and tossed it into a drawer holding twenty others. Not much call for rings these days. Not many weddings. Buy low, sell high. He would pay a hundred gold to know what had happened to his importer. Brielle thought he was full of it, and took the job.
Finch bought what treasure they had carried out of Ravenloft: the silverware for twenty gold, the golden censer for a heavy purse of a hundred, and a golden candelabra Ivek recalled carrying for another hundred. Randoah’s pouch of ash from a self-immolated book earned her a long look and a brush of the hand, and Gor’s perfectly ordinary broom a single greasy copper. Enki showed him the Bittermold seal. The family had been dead for years, Finch said, so people told it; theirs was one of the first holds to fall when the curse came down on the forest — the demons pouring out of the trees, the rise of Mugdulbulb, all the foul happenings of the last couple of hundred years. When Enki showed him the vial of ooze, Finch poured a drop out, threw what it touched into the fire, and asked him to destroy the rest; they had been spared the pestilence inside the walls so far, and it was spreading across the countryside at an alarming rate. Enki put the vial away. Gor split the whole of the takings evenly between everyone, with a generosity that surprised the others and possibly himself.
The smithy was mostly outdoors, its forge under a roof and its anvil in the open, and the smith was a young dwarf with a very short beard — far too young, by any dwarven reckoning, to own a shop of his own. He cursed under his breath as he worked and tossed his failures onto a junk pile, and on his hooks hung a handful of truly fine pieces among a great many a journeyman might have made. He had no time for them: the Reeve had ordered new armour and arrows for the wall. The fine pieces, he admitted, were his master’s work. His master was dead. He had put wood in the forge before it had dried, and the steam had burst and sprayed molten metal over the old dwarf — no better way for a dwarf to go, perhaps, consumed in a fireball of metal and earth, though the screams had suggested otherwise. He was the only one left in the village with any skill, and he was making do. He sold Gor a plain oak hunter’s longbow that some farmer had traded him for food; the farmers were bartering away their heirlooms now just to reach the next meal. And he had a job for anyone who went into tombs and dungeons: the Inquisitors wanted silver arrows on the wall, because silver burned the flesh of the foul things that came out of the forest, and he would pay top price for every scrap of silver they could bring him, and make some of the arrows for them too. The creatures attacked every so often, he said. It was why the Reeve had banned magic — he believed it drew them. Other settlements in the forest had been overrun entirely; only the Reeve had held on. Farms disappeared every year. Never like this.
The Crayfish Tavern was strangely full, and smelled of eel and turnip stew. Ysolde Brack looked up from wiping the counter and told them to sit and not to stink up the place, and that if they had no coin they could walk right back out — at which Captain Gor declared that they were having a party. Ysolde counted the money with her eyes getting wider, and bellowed for Timtam, and a dishevelled cook in a smock and hairnet came out of the kitchen and was sent running to the Castellan’s cellar for his finest wines and to the huntsman for choice cuts of beef and venison. Timtam came back laden with paper-wrapped packages, bottles of good Southern Kingdoms vintage, tankards of dwarvish mead and ale, and a little tray of paper-packeted teas, fired up the charcoal stove, and fed them roasted meat until they could not move.
An old man had been sitting by the fire, deep in his cups. He got unsteadily to his feet and peered at them: they were the folk he had seen a week ago. Had they found his daughter? Had they found poor little Elsie? Brielle told him, as gently as Brielle knew how, that she had most likely been eaten — or married — they didn’t know which. He had lost his farm, he said; he could not work; he cried himself to sleep over his dead wife and his lost girl, and this beer was bought with his last coin. Enki told him they had not found her, and that though he could tell him the way, he did not look like a man who could survive it. The old man moaned her name and ran out of the inn, and the door swung behind him. Randoah asked if they could ever go back for her. The mists were gone. They had first come at the end of October; they might come again next year.
The rest of the night is not entirely accounted for. There was a card game with a stranger none of them could afterward describe, and all of them lost to him. Randoah woke to the sound of horses, lying in a gutter with rainwater running through her hair and straw in it, somewhat poorer. On her way back to the Crayfish she passed through the main square and found two familiar figures locked in the stocks under a placard reading ARSONIST: Enki and Ulfgar, who had apparently been testing a theory about how far a fire arrow could fly and had burned down someone’s house doing it. They spent two days there. When they were finally let out, the sheriff told Enki he was surprised to see such behaviour from someone who knew the Reeve.
Ivek went to the church. Egrid had turned it into a command post for feeding the refugees — collecting what the townsfolk and farmers could spare, ordering helpers about, getting food made as efficiently as it could be — and she looked up at him and said she had given up hope; she had thought he had vanished like the priest, and had nearly sent someone after him before remembering they had already lost six. Ivek told her Sister Geraldine and Brother Kristoff were lost. She had not known Geraldine; Kristoff had been an old man who knew what he was getting into, and a kind soul. Enki told her he had been a hero, and that they would not have got out without him. Then she clutched her head as if at a sudden migraine. The visions had come back, she said. There was a woman, trapped underground, who had been there a long time and only wished to rest. Egrid thought St. Terragnis must be sending the visions so that someone would put the woman’s soul to rest, and she was needed here — perhaps they could go instead. She did not know where. She thought the woman had been some kind of student, and that her name was Jane. The faithful made their own luck, and made do. Then someone needed her, and she was gone into the crowd, ordering grain brought from the silo whatever the guards said about it. Ivek stayed behind to pray. He had to try, hard, to reach St. Terragnis again.
The others climbed the hill to the Reeve’s keep. On the way they could see four soldiers stationed at the mill by the fishing quay. The Reeve received them in his audience hall on his simple wooden throne, sitting as imperiously as though he ruled a great realm and not a cold hall, and asked what they had learned of this Count Demetrius. Enki told him the Count was Strahd, and that he lived in a hellscape in another world. The Reeve plainly did not follow; so this was some pretender lord he had never heard of, and they had slain him? They had not. Enki leaned in and told him that the Reeve’s whole army could not slay him — a vampire of great renown, whom Enki himself meant to kill one day, and whom they had barely escaped with their lives. Men were men, the Reeve said, and could be slain by force of arms like anyone else. Then they had only half completed their mission and would have half the reward. He snapped his fingers, and the Castellan came forward with a little goblin at his heels, poured out half a bag, and handed them twenty-five gold. The information was useful, the Reeve allowed. The village was overrun with peasants; Egrid kept urging him to feed them and he had been letting out small amounts of grain, but there was no way to support them through the winter, and many would die unless another source of food was found. He had sent men to the other towns, and they had not returned. He had heard talk of raiders, of pestilence; his Castellan had wanted someone to look into the Bittermolds, but no one had taken it up. Shown the seal, he recognised it at once: the Bittermolds had been a family of equal importance to his own until their keep was overrun — clearly not so esteemed as himself, since his house had survived and theirs had not. He knew nothing of the slime. As his chef brought out his late-morning second breakfast, he suggested they make up for their half-success by assisting Lord Inquisitor Morvath, who needed a good errand-runner, and mentioned in passing that his bastard kept begging him to send someone into the woods after something, and he could not be bothered. Enki was starting to lose patience with him. He was creeping onto a list.
They found Castellan Vane easily enough by following the sound of him ordering the servants about, with the goblin trotting behind him scribbling in a book — and in his big red beard they knew the kindly man they had passed that morning at the refugees’ ledger, the same goblin at his elbow. He was looking for someone to investigate the old Bittermold keep; there had been rumours of cloaked figures near it, surely cultists of some evil god or demon-worshippers, and with the foul pestilence that had befallen the realm he was concerned they were up to no good. The castle could afford a hundred gold for actionable information. Enki accepted on the party’s behalf, and the goblin clerk entered a hundred gold in escrow in his book.
They were heading for the gate when Ysolde Brack caught them in the middle of the street, fretting, and beckoned Randoah close. “I know what you are, lass,” she said. Her daughter had moved to Orlaine a few months ago with her husband and their child, and the daughter had disappeared; the son-in-law had brought the granddaughter back, and they were out in the camp now. The girl had always been sickly, and Ysolde used to get tinctures for her from Mathilda — made from some flower that only bloomed under moonlight, the only thing that gave her strength against the illness when it came on her. Ysolde had gone to Mathilda’s door and found no one home; she was no rogue, so she had not gone in. She knew Randoah and Mathilda were of the same ilk. If Randoah could find out what the tincture was, she would be grateful. Randoah said she would try, once she had found her friend. Ulfgar, whose people these refugees were, asked Ysolde to watch the camp for an older man with a scruffy beard named Valos, and gave her a coin for her trouble. She said she would take a walk out there when the bar was slow — she had been meaning to donate some food anyway — but told them not to get used to her charity, she was a very busy woman, and went back in complaining.
Morvath was out in front of the gate, preaching from a little platform on the evils of witchcraft and the foul magics that corrupted the soul as well as the mind. When he stepped down he said he had not expected them so soon. Told the Reeve had sent them, he began to call them a patsy and caught himself, and said instead that the Reeve had found someone to do a job for them. He led them off the main path where nobody was watching and had one of his guards take a lead coffer from his pack, a little bigger than a breadbox, with a strange symbol on the lid. In an ancient temple to foul gods there lay a book of foul magics. They were to recover it without reading it and without touching it, seal it in this coffer, keep it secret and keep it safe, and bring it to him; they would be paid fifty gold. The book’s title was the Threshold of Twilight. Asked what would happen if someone touched it, Morvath said foul magic would corrupt them; asked what he wanted it for, he said to destroy it, of course. Enki said he would do it. Randoah knew the symbol on the lid, although the Inquisitor could not have known she did: it was a witchcraft mark, a seal of protection and of binding. In the silent conference of looks the party held behind Morvath’s back, the consensus was that they would find the book, do everything he asked with it, and let Randoah read it first.
Mathilda’s house was not the hovel Randoah had half expected, but a quaint little cottage with trellises of growing things up its walls and a garden around it, a cat or two about the place, and even from outside the old smell of cinnamon and cloves and flowers nobody could name. No smoke rose from the chimney. The door was shut, but not locked. There was no one inside. On a post by the door a note was pinned, addressed only R of O: she had gone on a brief journey, it said, and taken her apprentice, and would be back soon; if she did not return, take the red jar and destroy it. The red jar stood on her workbench, a clay jar stoppered with a cork and bound with twine tied in the careful, ritual way one ties something shut to keep something in. Beside it was a flask with a white tag that also read R of O. Randoah did not want to steal from a witch, but she asked the others whether it counted as stealing when the witch had told her to watch over it, and Gor pointed out that if it had her name on it and Mathilda was dead, it was hers either way. She took both. For a while the red jar rode in Morvath’s lead coffer to save space, until Randoah decided she would rather carry it herself and took it back.
On the counter lay a book of folk tales left open to a particular page: a tale of young women going to seek training in witchcraft, with a set of directions. Follow the forest path into the wood. West to the Hangman’s Tree. South to the Giant’s Playground. West to the Blood Falls. Then follow the laughing stream to the place of learning. The note had said nothing of the apprentice’s name. As they puzzled over it, wings flapped outside and a single black raven’s feather came drifting down past the windowsill. Enki went to the window with his dagger out; there was nothing there, and perhaps a bird already too far away to see.
Randoah had carried her brother’s skull out of Ravenloft with a glowing rune on its brow, and this was the first place since that she had felt safe enough to use it. Ivek stood guard outside against Inquisitors. The party argued over how to spend the one question a day the skull would answer, and Randoah’s first attempts earned her the sort of sass only a sibling could give — at the end of what? — until she asked him plainly: had he seen anything, in the life beyond this one, of what lay at the Threshold of Twilight? And the skull answered in her brother’s voice. The Threshold of Twilight was a catalyst for transformation, a metamorphosis from one thing into the next. It was a doorway from this realm into another. It was a path through the Feywild. It was a gift and a curse. Randoah wept to hear him speak, and thanked him. Between the pages of the folk-tale book they found one more thing, a pressed flower mounted like a keepsake in a scrapbook, labelled moon lily — the moonlight flower, surely, that Ysolde’s granddaughter needed — though the recipe for the tincture was nowhere to be found. Randoah tucked it into her brother’s left eye socket for safekeeping. He told her he felt very pretty.
When the others spoke of the Bittermold keep, Ivek told them what he could bear to: that he had done things in his past he was ashamed of and was trying to make up for, that much of it began at the Bittermold Estate, and that there was a great deal of darkness there. He suspected the pestilence came from it. It was a long way off, further than wherever Mathilda had gone, and Mathilda knew medicine and might know the cure for this plague as well as for a sick girl. They chose Mathilda first.
It would not be a short walk; it would be an expedition. They laid in rations, at twice the usual price with famine in the land, and torches, oil, a lantern, rope and a grappling hook. Enki, under considerable pressure from everyone including, perhaps, the heavens, bought a pair of boots. Randoah buried a small box of her keepsakes and a rib bone outside Mathilda’s cottage to collect on the way home, the things that needed to make it back to her village if she lived, and decided after some agonising to wear the cloak she had carried out of Ravenloft rather than leave it behind. Ivek left what gold he had to spare at the church. Asking around town about the landmarks got them nowhere: the hunters of Marin’s Hold went to the forest’s edge and not one step further than would let them be home by nightfall, and none had seen a hangman’s tree or a giant’s playground or a falls of blood. But at the end of town there was a line of large, smooth, rounded stones that people called the Fairy Path, running off in a roughly westerly direction into the dark forest until the forest swallowed them.
Ysolde let them sleep by the fire in her common room that night, and in the morning served them eel stew, thin but good, and sent them on their way. They stood at the edge of the Gloaming with their packs loaded: Marin’s Hold behind them, the farmland to the north where they had come in, the marsh to the south where the eelmen and the frogmen fished, and to the west, the Fairy Path, running into the dark.