Date: September 5, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Randoah of Oak, Enki, Ivek the Seer, Ulfgar Kegbreath
The crypt smelled of cold stone and old wine. Strahd’s own coffin dominated the chamber — ebony black, carved over every inch with raven heads and gothic tracery, lined in velvet the colour of a fresh wound — and around it stood the three coffins of his brides: one of fine cherry wood with gold filigree, one carved all over with spiders and their webs, and one a plain pine box of the sort a peasant is buried in. In the corner sat a great chest banded in iron. And on the floor, snoring among a scatter of empty bottles, lay a dwarf nobody had met before.
His name was Ulfgar Kegbreath, a priest of Ord and a Seeker of that faith, and he woke the way he always woke, patting himself down for his flask before he thought to ask where he was. He had been bored at the Count’s masquerade. He had gone looking for the good wine, found a cellar stocked with vintages from worlds and centuries he had no name for, and drunk his way steadily down into the catacombs until the floor came up to meet him. He had not yet noticed the mark the Count had left on him along with everyone else. Ivek came in through the great arch a moment later, dusty and irritable, having spent hours lost among the tombs looking for a way back to his companions. The party was six no longer — the captain and the others were somewhere else in that castle, or somewhere else entirely — but it was five, and five would have to do.
The clock had not started yet, so they took what they could carry. Brielle went over the great chest inch by inch with the point of her dagger and found the lever hidden along the seam where lid met base; she slid the blade in to pin it down and lifted, and the chest gave up every scrap of gear the castle had taken from them at the door. It also gave up a bottle of dark blood, with a note tied to its neck reading drink me, and the moment the smell reached her she was lost. She drank it standing there, tipping it back until it ran down her chin, a dying woman at a well. When it was done she found she could open her own veins for a heartbeat of terrible clarity — and that her shadow, which had already been in the habit of moving on its own, had grown horns and hunched itself into something bestial, and would wander off entirely if she did not keep it firmly in mind. It laughed at her from a corner while she stood there wiping her mouth.
Randoah went to the cherry-wood coffin. Perfume rolled out of it when she opened the lid, floral and spiced and unmistakable — Christine’s, from the carriage ride out of Marin’s Hold, when she had poured them champagne and made the road pleasant. Randoah leaned in and let it take her, and lived a stranger’s life for a moment: a young woman in a nobleman’s court, courted by a dark and handsome man, whirlwind and elopement and then the honeymoon, and the beast that had carried her out of her father’s house, and the screaming. She said nothing about it to the others.
Enki climbed bodily into the same coffin and lay down in it, and felt a lump sewn into the lining behind his shoulder. He tore it open with his hands and his teeth and came up holding a dagger far too ornate for any soldier, which he handed over to Brielle a moment later; she turned it through her fingers, feeling out the balance, and it answered her better than any blade she’d carried. Then Enki ate the cookie the old woman had baked for him back at the beginning of all this, thinking to be rid of the weight in his pack. It tasted of home. It tasted of his mother’s kitchen — and then the lamps went out, and the shutters banged, and something came in through the window and tore her apart in front of him before turning its bloodied face his way. He came up out of the coffin kicking the lid off and did not want to talk about it.
Ulfgar opened the pine box. It was plain to the point of poverty inside, a linen pillow and nothing else, but every surface of it had been painted over in black pentagrams and sigils and inverted crosses wreathed in flame, and leaning against the inner wall was a morningstar cast in the shape of an inverted cross, the sort of weapon a religious order might carry if the order had gone very badly wrong. It was heavy in the hand and it wanted to be swung. He took it. Brielle went over the cobwebbed sarcophagus the same careful way she’d done the chest, found no trap, and slid the lid back on its hinges to a faint smell of lemons and a lining of black felt — and a feather duster lying at the bottom of it, which she pocketed. She cut the lining out with her dagger and found a shirt of chainmail hidden beneath, which Enki took gladly, on the theory that their hosts felt it unsporting not to leave something behind.
That left Strahd’s coffin. Randoah looked into it and found a black signet ring stamped with the double-headed raven of Ravenloft, tied to a folded letter. The letter was not the Count’s. It was her brother’s — written on some long road years ago, asking how she was, asking after everything she had done since he’d seen her last, a letter she had never received and never read. She read it in the crypt of a vampire with his ring in her other hand, and something in her stood up straighter. She put the ring on her thumb; he had asked her to be his bride and she had refused him, but she saw no reason not to keep the jewellery.
Ivek slipped out into the catacombs to Sergei’s tomb, where the Count’s murdered brother still sat on his own coffin, still weeping. Ivek did not want to disturb him, and said so, and said that he meant to give the man the vengeance he was owed and needed the Sword of Vengeance to do it. Sergei turned, aware of him for the first time. My sword is not buried, he said. The Count is taking great pains to make sure no one else gets this sword. It is at the top of his castle. He could not say how to reach the top; he could not say much of anything about the mortal world any more, save that he had lost a duel to his brother and that he wanted, more than he wanted release, to be reunited with Tatiana. Ivek left him to his grief and carried the news back — three trinkets, and a sword somewhere high where stone met sky, and no time at all left to reach it.
Because the clock had begun to toll.
The first peal came down through the castle like something falling, and a hunting horn answered it from outside the walls. The second brought the baying of dogs, and, from somewhere far above, a man’s voice screaming in a way that a man’s voice should not be able to sustain. They ran. Enki went first with his greatsword dragging behind him, the little ones at his back, up the great spiral stair at the heart of the catacombs while the third bell rang and bats poured up past them in a black river out of the dark. They came out into the foyer, and through the stained-glass gallery the light was all wrong — orange, flickering, crackling — and they could hear the screaming again. Brielle put her shoulder to the door and they burst out into the rain.
The moon over Castle Ravenloft was full and enormous and red as a wound. In the middle of the courtyard, between them and the chapel, a bonfire had been built that had not been there an hour before, burning white-hot in the downpour, and a cross stood up out of the heaped logs, and on the cross was Brother Kristoff, blackened and long past saving. Somebody had burned the priest who had prayed the way open for them at the stake.
Kneeling in the mud before the flames, telling her beads, was Sister Geraldine. He watches over us, she was saying. He spreads his dark wings around us and protects us from harm. Randoah ran to her and touched her back, meaning to pull her away, and Geraldine rose and turned and had no eyes at all — only the blood running down from where they had been. Greetings, my sister, she said. It is good that you finally decided to see the light. The threadbare cloak slid from her shoulders and what was underneath was a nun’s habit reimagined in tight black leather, and the symbol in her hand was a cross turned upside down with a pentagram carved through it. The gods of this realm could not protect us, she told them, pleasantly, while her face began to lengthen into something not quite a face. Only Strahd. The beasts had come for her convent and she had hidden from them shaking, and he had swept in and destroyed them and taken her under his wing, and now the beasts listened to her instead. Wolves came out from behind the headstones on every side. The party had been given the chance to leave and had not taken it, she said, and she thought that meant they truly wished to stand at his side. Like her. Like all the rest of them.
What followed was the worst hour of any of their lives. Ulfgar reached for Ord and found the corruption pouring off Geraldine like heat off a forge, and reached again, and again, and each time came back gibbering and cut off from his god. Enki charged her with the greatsword and she simply was not there — dropping to all fours in the mud with one clawed hand braced against the ground, fangs bared, moving like something that had never walked upright. She stared into his eyes and he knelt, unable to help it, and drove his own sword point-first into the earth and bowed his head to her while she stood over him with her claws out. Inside the chapel, the corpses in the pews began to twitch and rise, still clutching their hymnals; outside, hands broke up through the wet soil of the graveyard and closed on ankles. Brielle sheared the fingers off one of them with her new dagger and watched the face of a dead holy woman push up out of the dirt after it, mouth full of earth, moaning without sound.
The wolves took Ivek down and were at his throat before anyone could reach him. Randoah went down under the zombies, and again after that, and had perhaps a breath left in her when Ivek — back on his feet and barely standing — begged the goblet of endless blood off Brielle and blessed it, thinning that awful red into something bright and shimmering, and dragged Randoah bodily out of the dead hands to pour it down her throat. She came back. She came back with canines that had not been there before, sticking out just far enough to look faintly ridiculous, and a strength in her limbs that was not her own.
It was Ulfgar who turned it. He set himself in the chapel doorway between the dead and his new companions, forced one more prayer up through Geraldine’s aura, and this time it went through. The wisdom of Ord filled the desecrated chapel and for a moment they could all hear singing — a congregation long dead, from back when this had been a consecrated place, joining their voices to the dwarf’s. The zombies shrieked, covered their eyes, and fled out into the graveyard. You might have forgotten, Ulfgar bellowed after them, but I have not forgotten my God. A pair of skeletons closed on him and he was drunk enough, and lucky enough, to sway aside at exactly the wrong moment for them, so that one took the other’s skull off with a sword and the second impaled itself on its own comrade’s ribs.
Enki broke Geraldine’s hold on him when she seized him by the throat, lifted him off his feet, and threw him bodily into the bonfire; he rolled clear of the flames and came up furious. He screamed two of the wolves dead where they stood, their skulls collapsing under the wave of sound. He put a spear into her chest and she snapped it off and threw it aside laughing, blood on her teeth. He put the second one through her belly and she pulled it out. He made a bottle of oil and a rag into a burning thing and hurled it at her feet, and her dress caught, and she beat at herself and screamed — and then said, through the fire, that through the fires of agony she would prove her true devotion.
By then they knew they were not going to win. Brielle got everyone below the level of the hidden stair beneath the altar, said a short prayer to St. Terragnis that began I’ve never asked you for anything, and threw the switch. The great stone slab ground back into place above them and the dark came down absolute. Ivek got a torch lit with shaking hands and the light showed a narrow spiral stair going down and down, and after a while the sound of rain, and then the sound of a river. Ulfgar found the strength for one more prayer and closed the worst of Ivek’s wounds. And then the ninth bell rang somewhere above and behind them, and mist came seeping through the cracks around the altar, and took on the shape of a man, and said: Drop to your knees before your Lord, and he may yet forgive you. Geraldine came through after them and started down the stairs.
They came out onto the side of the mountain in the rain and the thunder. Twenty yards away a river ran fast and swollen and muddy, and beyond it the forest stood black and dense and dropped away down the slope, and far below in the valley they could see a great wall of mist moving slowly up toward the castle — the same mist, they were fairly sure, that had brought them into this place to begin with. Brielle tied a rope around her waist and waded in, and found the water deeper than a dwarf would like and the current worse, and got across on stubbornness alone, hauling herself up the far bank with her lungs burning. Randoah drew the silk cloak around herself and stepped sideways out of the world; where she had been standing the dead grass came up suddenly green and thriving, and then withered again as the place reasserted itself, and the same brief bloom sprang up and died at her feet on the far shore. Enki went across the rocks in a series of pirouettes and backflips, twenty years of circus in every step, and landed beside Brielle with an expression that asked why anyone would do it the hard way. Ivek walked the rope hand over hand and made it look easy.
Ulfgar slipped. He went off the rope into the current and the river took him, and Enki tore off the chainmail he’d been so pleased with an hour before and went in after him. They collided with a rock hard enough to crack Enki’s skull against it, and it was Ulfgar — drunk, half-drowned, badly hurt — who got a handhold and dragged the elf up out of the water onto the stone beside him. The others threw a rope, and got them both in.
Geraldine could not follow. She came to the water’s edge and stopped there, and her body warped and swelled into something huge and wolflike, and she howled at the red moon and clawed at the bank in a fury while the rain came down. Enki stood on the far shore and told her, quite calmly, that he would kill her, and then turned his back and walked into the trees.
Randoah pressed the feather duster into his hands as they went. She had noticed how badly he’d wanted to kill the nun and how badly he’d wanted, before that, something of the castle’s white-haired maid to keep. It was, she said, not much, but it was hers, and he could have it.
They ran down the mountainside with the dogs baying somewhere behind and above them, and ran headlong into a wall. The trees ahead were hung with webs as thick as ship’s rigging, and Ivek and Ulfgar were caught fast in them before anyone could shout. Above, swaying gently on what looked like a great cushion slung between two ropes, was the maid herself. I’ve been waiting for you for so long, she said. What took you guys so long? They had been trying to kill Strahd, Enki told her, and she laughed and laughed and asked how that had worked out, and observed that most fools who challenged the Lord ended up as mortar in his castle.
Then she stopped, and sniffed the air, and her whole manner changed. You’ve seen my baby, she said. What have you done with her? Enki drew out the black rose that was all that remained of Clover and held it up, and she snatched it and cradled it against herself and rocked back and forth, singing a nursery rhyme to it. When she looked up again her hair had fallen back from her forehead, and there were eight eyes set into it. That Count is a beast, she said. I came to him seeking shelter. He was so kind to me. So very kind. When my child was born, he turned me and left me in a room with it alone. She wept. She thanked them for showing her daughter kindness. And then she told them to run before she changed her mind, and rose backward into the branches — and the cushion she had been sitting on was no cushion at all but her own great spider’s abdomen. Above her, in the canopy, thousands of red eyes had opened and were watching them. Enki cut his companions free of the webs with his greatsword and they ran.
The barking was closer now. Below them the ground began to flatten out, still deep in trees, and through the trunks they saw firelight, and smelled woodsmoke and roasting meat, and heard a horse whinny. Brielle, who did not like the look of it at all, decided that a horse was worth the risk of whatever came with it, and led them in.
Come in, come in, friends, said a very familiar voice. I was waiting for you. Why don’t we have some victuals before the festivities really begin in force?
Christine sat at a full dining table — tablecloth, roast chicken, pork, champagne, silver — set out impossibly in the middle of a forest clearing, in riding leathers with her hair pulled back into a simple ponytail, with two servants attending her and three saddled hunting horses at the edge of the firelight. She invited them to sit. She promised the dogs would not bother them. She said it had been a long while since she’d had interesting company. And when Enki asked how one left this place, she looked honestly puzzled and asked why anyone would want to leave such a wonderful playground for people like us — hadn’t they been blessed by the Count? Hadn’t they drunk the blood of the innocent, over and over? She thought they simply hadn’t realised it yet.
There were, she explained, two options. Join the hunt, or be hunted. And when asked who exactly they would be hunting, she looked around the clearing and said, brightly: Well, the rest of your friends, of course. Whichever ones of you say no.
Enki drew the greatsword and swung it past her ear, close enough to stir her hair, and stopped it dead. She did not so much as pause mid-sip. Please, dear, she said, setting the glass down. No need to be such a barbarian. Randoah sat down at the table instead and complimented her and asked about her courtly life, and Christine’s face went briefly somewhere far away — oh, that was a lifetime ago, darling; I was a different person then — before she recovered and allowed that immortality had its benefits, and that the Count was quite generous, and that these hunts brightened up a dreary autumn evening. Ivek sat beside Randoah and took a chicken leg and did his best to look like a man being persuaded. Ulfgar went to the champagne, poured his own, and announced that he would neither accept nor deny good hospitality when it was offered. She raised her glass to him and said it would be better for him if he just joined them — she did not much care for the taste of dwarf, but she did what she had to.
And while all this went on, Brielle walked quietly over to the horses and began checking their tack.
She was in the saddle and shouting let’s go before Christine was on her feet. Thief! the bride cried, and her two servants dropped into a crouch, drew their swords, and grew fangs. Brielle hauled her horse up rearing and it came down with both hooves into the first servant’s chest; he went off his feet, struck a tree, and they all heard his bones break — and then heard them grind back into place as he stood up, straightened himself out with a series of wet crunches, and picked up his sword again.
Randoah stood, and held up the signet ring she had taken from Strahd’s coffin, and caught Christine’s eye with it. The champagne flute slipped out of the vampire’s fingers and shattered on the ground, and Christine sat there with her mouth slightly open and her eyes empty. Enki took a piece of wood from the edge of the fire, sharpened it in his hands, and drove it into her chest with all the borrowed strength in him.
She screamed. And then the scream changed — became something closer to ecstasy — and she leaned forward into the stake and pushed it deeper herself, and picked Enki up and threw him the length of the campsite. She rose out of her chair and overturned the entire table. Enough, she said. You are all base creatures unworthy of his attention. I shall destroy you.
Randoah called the Willow Man into the mind of the servant nearest her, and whatever he saw, he dropped his sword and ran screaming into the dark and did not come back. Ulfgar became a bat. Ivek got onto a second horse and led a third across the clearing to where Enki had landed. Brielle pulled Randoah up behind her. And they went into the trees at a gallop, and as they looked back they saw the hounds pour into the campsite with mounted hunters behind them — and saw Christine, still bleeding, open one of her own riders’ throats, throw him from his saddle, and take both his horse and his hunting horn.
The forest chase was won on wit rather than speed. Brielle found a path that branched off the main track and took it, doubling back through the roots and low branches. Randoah threw her stolen witch’s hat off to the side of the trail where it would look dropped rather than discarded. Ivek turned in the saddle and screamed a great rotted tree down across the path behind them, a huge thing bristling with limbs that no horse would jump. Enki grabbed a fistful of mane and put such a fright into their horse that it went from a gallop to something barely controllable, branches whipping past. And Ulfgar, in bat form, circled and shrieked over the place where the hat lay until the dogs came for it. From a branch they watched the whole hunt — Christine, her riders, her hounds — turn confidently down the wrong path and keep going, and the dogs mill and circle in confusion a long way off before anyone realised the scent was gone.
Ulfgar, unwilling to see a friend’s hat abandoned in the mud, went back for it. He got in under the brim, discovered he could not fly with it, and crawled along the forest floor beneath it like a very slow mushroom until he could roll himself into a shrubbery. The dogs went past him. The riders went past him. Christine stopped, stood up in her stirrups, and smelled the air — and grimaced, and rode on. He took the hat and went after his friends.
They rode into the mist together and it went through them like cold hands. For a while they were riding, and then they were only barely awake, and shapes moved past them in the white — faces, hands, spectral things trailing away — and then the sleep took them and each of them woke alone.
Strahd was waiting for every one of them, arms folded, without his wine or his good humour. He was, he said, very disappointed in his wives; they had not failed this dramatically in a long time.
To Enki he offered everything: a countryside to ravage together, women, money, a castle of his own. You have already embraced a demon, he said. You are more like me than you realise. Enki looked at him and said he didn’t need it — but that he would be back. Strahd told him he would not forget what had been done to him, and snapped his fingers; and every scrap of stolen power went out of the elf at once, the blood running from his face and nose and swirling up into the air, where the Count opened his mouth and breathed it in. Leave this place as a weak mortal. You are not worthy of my powers. And then, as an afterthought: It’s a shame you never saved that farmer’s daughter. I’ll need a snack when I go back to my house.
To Ulfgar he offered drink — as much as he liked, the finest brews from across the universe, forever, for the small price of his friends. Ulfgar considered it with the seriousness the offer deserved, asked exactly how much booze they were talking about, and then said that the good thing about drink was never the quality but the company, and that he had found better company to be around. Strahd snarled at him. So humble. So wholesome. You would have no place in my court anyway. And he turned to mist and was gone.
To Brielle he offered vaults full of treasure and cities left to conquer, and told her something worse than any offer: that he had been watching her for years from the shadows, that he had first seen her when she was a small child hiding in the dark, that he had sensed her ability to change the rivers of fate and had made certain she found her way into his court. Your shadow already knows what it wants. Brielle asked whether he had been under her bed when she was a child. His face did not change. She told him that as much as she loved the idea of a good robbery, she could not stomach the idea of robbing with him. He sighed. Thieves with a heart of gold are so frustrating. Such an overused trope. So boring. His red eyes were the last of him to fade.
To Ivek he offered true dominion — not the indirect power of prophecy he had already turned down once, but power over others, and libraries full of tomes, and an end to guilt. To quote someone famous: lions do not fear the concern of sheep. And you, sir, are a lion. Ivek refused him too, and Strahd only sighed and observed that they all so deserved it, and waved him away without even bothering to leave.
And to Randoah he waved his hand, and the skull was gone from her pack, and her brother was standing in front of her — alive, bewildered, asking what in the world was happening. I can return him to you. To your side. You could both live forever. Randoah looked at her brother, who had never feared much of anything in life, and told the Count that she feared him greatly, but that the one thing that frightened her more was the thought of spending a single moment longer in his company. She pulled the signet ring off her thumb and threw it at his feet, and refused him a second time. Strahd looked down at the ring and growled, and beheaded her brother in front of her; and then he screamed a word that set his whole body alight, and there was nothing in his hand but the skull again, which he hurled at her. Then begone from my realm.
They woke at the crossroads in the grey light before dawn, all five of them, with the bent signpost lying in the dirt exactly where it had been the night they climbed into Christine’s carriage. The mist was behind them and thinning. Ravenloft was gone.
So was everything it had given them. The strength that had let Brielle shrug off a wolf, the wings Ulfgar had flown on, Enki’s scream, Randoah’s fangs — all of it drained away with the last of the fog, leaving five ordinary, exhausted, badly-injured people sitting in the road. Only one thing had come out with them. In Randoah’s hands, her brother’s skull had a rune glowing softly on its brow; and as she turned it over, it turned too, and looked at her, and said: Where am I?
He will answer her one question a day, for as long as she cares to ask.