Date: September 5, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Randoah of Oak, Enki, Ivek the Seer, Ulfgar Kegbreath
The party began the night exactly where the last one left them — in Strahd’s own crypt, with less than thirty minutes on the clock. Two more figures joined them there: Ivek, who wandered back out of the catacombs after hours lost in them, and Ulfgar Kegbreath, a dwarven priest of Ord in the robes of a Seeker, found face-down among a scatter of empty bottles. He had wandered out of the ballroom looking for the good wine, drunk his way through vintages from worlds he’d never heard of, and woken up marked by the same curse as everyone else.
Before they ran, they looted. Brielle wedged her dagger into a trapped iron-banded chest and found all their confiscated gear inside — and a bottle of blood with a note reading drink me, which she could not stop herself from draining. It left her able to draw on her own blood for a moment of terrible focus, and left her shadow more independent than ever, wandering off on its own and laughing at her from the corners. The three brides’ coffins gave up the rest: Randoah breathed in the perfume of Christine’s cherry-wood coffin and lived through the woman’s own memory — a noble girl courted by a dark stranger, swept off her feet, and undeceived only on the honeymoon. Enki climbed inside the same coffin and tore an ornate enchanted dagger out of its collar lining, which he traded to Brielle. Ulfgar opened the pine box and found it painted inside with pentagrams and burning inverted crosses, with a morningstar shaped like an inverted cross leaning against the wall; he took it. Brielle stripped the lining out of the cobwebbed sarcophagus and turned up a shirt of chainmail, which went to Enki, and a feather duster, which she kept. In Strahd’s own coffin, Randoah found a black signet ring bearing the double-headed raven of the Zaroviches, tied to a letter — a letter from her dead brother that she had never read.
Ivek slipped out to Sergei’s tomb to ask after the Sword of Vengeance, the last of the three artifacts, and was told the sword was never buried: the Count keeps it at the very top of his castle, and has taken great pains to see no one else ever holds it. Then the great clock began to toll, and there was no more time to look.
Hunting horns answered the first bell. Dogs answered the second. The party ran up the spiral stair, through the stained-glass hall, and out into a courtyard lit by a bonfire that had not been there before, under a full and blood-red moon: poor Brother Kristoff was burning on a cross at the heart of it. Kneeling before the flames with a rosary was Sister Geraldine — eyeless, blood running down her cheeks, her holy symbol an inverted cross scored with a pentagram, welcoming them into the light of her new lord. Wolves came out from behind the headstones, and the fight that followed cost the party nearly everything. Geraldine’s presence smothered every prayer Ulfgar tried to raise; she moved on all fours like a beast, grew claws and fangs, held Enki kneeling and mesmerized at her feet, and called the graveyard’s dead up out of the soil and off the chapel pews. Ivek went down under the wolves. Randoah went down twice under the zombies, and was hauled clear only when Ivek blessed Brielle’s goblet of blood into a healing draught and poured it into her mouth — which brought her back with fangs of her own. It was Ulfgar who finally broke through, forcing a prayer past Geraldine’s aura; the chamber filled with the sound of a long-dead congregation singing, and the dead fled screaming from the church.
They retreated down the hidden stair beneath the altar, sealed it behind them, and came out on the far side of the mountain in the rain — a swollen river between them and a dense forest, and a wall of mist creeping up the valley below. Geraldine came down the stair after them. Brielle waded the river with a rope around her waist; Randoah stepped across in a shimmer of the silk cloak, green shoots rising and dying where she’d stood; Enki went rock to rock like the trapeze artist he was raised to be; Ivek walked the line. Ulfgar was swept downstream, and Enki stripped off his new chainmail and dove in after him — the two of them ending up clinging to the same rock in midstream before the others hauled them in. Geraldine could not follow. She warped into something huge and wolflike at the water’s edge and howled at the moon while Enki promised, across the water, to come back and kill her.
Down the mountainside they ran into a clearing strung with webs like ship’s rigging, and there was the castle’s white-haired maid, swinging above them and delighted to see them. She smelled her child on them; Enki handed over the black rose Clover had left behind, and she cradled it and sang a nursery rhyme over it. She told them what the Count had done to her — taken her in when she came seeking shelter, been kind to her, and then turned her the moment her child was born and shut her in a room alone with it. She thanked them for showing the girl kindness, told them to run before she changed her mind, and rose back into the branches on the great spider’s abdomen they had all mistaken for a cushion, thousands of red eyes watching from the canopy above.
The hounds were closing. Between them and the mist was a campfire, a full dining table set out impossibly in the middle of the forest, three saddled hunting horses — and Christine, in riding gear, offering roast chicken and champagne and a simple choice: join the hunt, or be hunted. She admitted freely to being one of Strahd’s brides, and to being neither the first nor likely the last. While Randoah, Ivek and Ulfgar stalled at her table, Brielle went quietly to the horses, and the moment she mounted, Christine called her a thief and set two fanged servants on them. Brielle reared her horse into one hard enough to break his bones against a tree, and he simply stood back up. Randoah caught Christine’s eye with Strahd’s own signet ring and left her drooling and blank. Enki took a sharpened stick from the fire and drove it into her heart — and Christina screamed, and then leaned into it, pushed it deeper herself, and hurled him across the camp before overturning the table. Randoah’s Willow Man broke one servant entirely and sent him screaming into the trees, and the party got clear on horseback with Ulfgar riding along as a bat, watching Christine cut one of her own riders’ throats to take his horse and his hunting horn.
The chase came down to cleverness. Brielle took a false branching path; Randoah threw her witch’s hat aside so it would look dropped; Ivek turned in the saddle and screamed a rotted tree down across the trail; Enki terrified their horse into a headlong gallop; Ulfgar shrieked and circled where the hat had fallen. The dogs lost the scent, and the party reached the mist ahead of them. Ulfgar even doubled back for the hat, crawled under it and hid in a shrubbery while the whole hunt thundered past.
In the mist, each of them fell asleep and woke alone with Strahd standing over them, arms folded, openly disgusted with his wives. He offered Enki a castle and a countryside to ravage; Ulfgar every fine brew in creation; Brielle his vaults and cities to rob, and the news that he had been watching her since she was a child hiding in the shadows; Ivek libraries and true dominion over others, since “lions do not fear the concern of sheep”; and Randoah her brother, alive and confused and standing in front of her, and eternity with him. Every one of them said no. Strahd drained Enki’s stolen power out of him and inhaled it, called Brielle’s honor an overused trope, beheaded Randoah’s brother a second time before throwing the skull back, and dismissed the rest.
They woke at the crossroads where Christina’s carriage had first collected them, in the early morning, the signpost bent on the ground exactly as it had been. Ravenloft was behind them and all of them were alive. Every trace of the curse was gone — and the skull Randoah carries now bears a glowing rune on its brow. It turned in her hands, looked at her, and asked where it was. Her brother will answer one question a day.