02/18/2026: Confrontations

The fireball leaves a ringing silence in its wake. The corridor reeks of scorched stone and burnt hair. Komzin is pressed against the balustrade, invisible to the flame skulls. Bayleaf dashes from the base of the stairs to hide next to the knight. Trying to still their heaving chests, they quiet their breathing to near silence. Above, the skulls drift back and forth at the top of the staircase with the slow, patient rhythm of things that do not tire.

As they watch, the pale green glow pulses more slowly. Then, without warning, they stop. Their light dims. The buzz they make drifts farther away, retreating into the deep darkness of the Temple’s upper gallery.

Komzin waits for silence, saying nothing for a moment. Then: “They aren’t following us. They seem to stay where they are posted. In this case, only up the stairs.”

He is right. The skulls move in fixed paths, guarding specific ground. Beyond their zones, the Temple might be navigable — if carefully.

Before the companions can act on this, a door bangs closed and a figure slopes across the slick black marble floor. Neferon steps from the shadow of the massive statue, his bearing precise, his expression weary. He is the guardian here, sergeant to the lich, Exethanter. He speaks without preamble.

“The goddess Fekre, Shard of Pox and Disease, has been freed from her amber prison by a young follower who crept into the Temple. He found her sarcophagus and broke the seal that had held her for centuries. The act has cost him. He now sits trapped in one of the Temple’s upper rooms, unable to descend and menaced by one of the amber golem guardians. Fekre, diminished by her long imprisonment, is loose somewhere in the Temple corridors

— but too weak to climb back up to him, too weak to free him from the golem, too weak to flee.”

Neferon lays out the shape of the problem plainly. Fekre, even in her current state, cannot be forced back into the amber. She is still a goddess, however reduced, and direct confrontation with a divine vestige — even a weakened one — invites consequences the party is unlikely to survive. “Perhaps that is Exethanter’s wish. I know not. He is old. He is weary. He is anguished. I hope he does not wish you ill, but I cannot say for certain what is in his mind.”

The arcanaloth stares off into the distance, lost in thought, before continuing. “But I do not believe she is unreasonable. Her follower freed her at significant cost to himself. That attachment is the key. Free him from the golem’s reach, deliver him to her, and she may be persuaded to return to the amber willingly.”

“What if we just kill the follower? Wouldn’t that do the same thing?” Bayleaf, eyes slitted and challenging, demands of Neferon. The arcanaloth turns his strange yellow eyes on the elf.

“Yes. That is a second option: kill her servant, sever whatever link sustains her, and she must collapse back into her prison by attrition. I do not advocate for either path. I leave the choice to your conscience.” He states both options with the same flat economy of words.

Bayleaf casts Healing Word on himself, drawing closed some of the worst damage. Then he and Komzin venture west.

The corridor is long and cold, its ceiling lost in shadow above the reach of their light. They find another flame skull at the southern end of the passage, and this time there is no cover, no alcove, no convenient line of retreat. The fight is close and ugly. The skull weaves between them, conjuring a Flaming Sphere that rolls and scorches in long arcs across the marble, engulfing both warriors in their turn in green, searing fire. A Fireball follows, landing awry — it could have been far more devastating than it was. They press through it.

Finally, the flame skull is vanquished, smashing to the marble floor with a hollow crack. Its green glow fades and dies.

Then the doors open.

Two of them, set into the corridor walls on opposite sides, swing inward without sound. From each emerges a figure robed in the remnants of priestly vestments so old the fabric has gone colorless and thin. The creatures wearing them are hunched, their limbs too long, their single enormous eyes catching the light and reflecting it back with an unblinking pale gleam. They move without speaking, without making any sound at all. They approach Bayleaf, stop close enough that he can see the veins branching across the surface of that single eye, and simply stare at him.

The sensation is immediate and deeply unpleasant — a pressure behind the elf’s eyes, a feeling of being browsed through like the pages of a book. It lasts only seconds. Then whatever the creatures find in him appears to satisfy them, and they withdraw, stepping back through their doors, which close behind them with echoing clicks.

The corridor settles back into silence.

Set into niches on one wall the hallway, the party finds a collection of alabaster animal sculptures arranged on a low shelf with no obvious purpose — a hare, a rearing horse, something with too many legs that might have once been a spider. Some are laying on their sides, broken.

Rakthe, badly wounded and having gone to ground, emerges from the darkness behind them.

Past the sculptures, a door stands open, exhaling cold air from the darkness beyond. They will move toward it, but after they rest. Their noise has raised nothing from it so far. But for now, they must rest and heal before anything further can be done.

⚔

Dawn arrives drizzling, grey and cold over the village. It cannot be seen nor felt from the tavern’s cellar. Krelldutt and Torgan are woken out of sound sleep by Friedrich’s frantic barking on the other side of the cellar door.

The dwarf’s eyes, gifted with darkvision, immediately find a thin but steady stream of smoke flowing from beneath that door. It streams over the floor to slip under the door to the Vistana sisters’ office.

Krelldutt pulls his magical hilt from beneath his bedroll and ignites it. The blade comes to life with a crack of cold light that fills the rough cellar room from floor to beam. The shadows retreat instantly, snapping back into the corners as if burned there. Near the pounded dirt floor on the far side of the room, something responds.

The smoke that has been lazily drifting beneath the gap in the door pulls back from Krelldutt, coiling in on itself, pressing against the damp cellar walls with the shuddering agitation of something that does not want to be touched.

The hilt communicates extreme fear to Krelldutt as a bolt running up his arm.

The tortle watches the smoke retreat and says nothing. The sword’s light holds steady in his grip, clean and unwavering. The fear transmitted by the hilt dials back, if only by a fraction — but the hilt also sends something else: a faint hope that confrontation may yet be avoided.

The last tail of the smoke slips quickly beneath the office door and is gone.

The two men begin to toss their things haphazardly into their packs. They cannot leave this room fast enough, hoping to get away from the closed door before finding out whatever is behind it might come for them.

On the other side of the cellar, Friedrich has pressed himself against the far wall, trembling violently. When Krelldutt and Torgen join their companions, the dog scrabbles over to the tortle, whining and leaning hard against Krelldutt, tail between his legs. Of those gathered on this side of the door, none save Friedrich had noticed the smoke at all.

Sorvia appears at the top of the stairs. “Put out that light!” she snaps at Krelldutt, who holds the glowing hilt aloft. She takes in the room — the trembling dog, their hastily bundled packs — and her expression settles into something hard. She tells them, without particular drama, that she would like them to leave. Now. “And Torgan — before you go, a word.”

Nobody investigates the smoke, its origin, or its destination. This is, by unspoken agreement, the correct decision.

⚔

Despite the early morning hour, the taproom upstairs has occupied tables. Krelldutt joins Hoolian and Feesh, turning his attention to the road ahead — Vallaki first, then Kresk beyond it. Neither knight will travel beyond Vallaki, but there is strength in numbers, and the road through Barovia’s countryside is not a place to move through alone. Each man wants capable people at his back. They will travel as a group.

Torgan privately shares the account of the smoke with Sorvia, who offers nothing in return. He then joins Krelldutt’s table, seating himself near Hoolian, and raises the matter of traveling with their group to Vallaki, where opportunities for employment might be marginally less grim. The group works through logistics — horses, supplies, if an extra animal is needed to carry what the journey requires. It is settled that Torgen might ride behind Blinsky, unless a pony of suitable size can be found before mid-morning. the baggage can be shared among the other mounts.

Duster, who has been eavesdropping from a nearby bench, offers to sell a horse. It is the horse he stole from the stockyard in Vallaki.

Hoolian and Feesh both look up.

“We know that animal,” rumbles Hoolian. Feesh shrugs and goes back to his breakfast, but Hoolian pushes back his chair and crosses to where the kenku is sitting, towering over him. He demands, in the measured tone of a man who suspects he already knows the answer, how Duster came by this particular horse.

Duster’s response does not satisfy him. “You are also linked to other matters in Vallaki, I believe.” The knight’s voice carries the flat certainty of someone who has command of the facts.

Again, the rogue’s answers do not dissuade Hoolian, who demands to see the contents of Duster’s pack.

Duster shrugs, reaches in, grips the first object his fingers close around, and flips it up at Hoolian — startling him just long enough. It clatters to the flor as the kenku bolts for the door.

Hoolian scoops up the item then examines what he is holding. The dagger is well-balanced, with a viciously curved blade already beginning to weep a foul-smelling green fluid along its length. He takes this in for perhaps one second. Then he jogs after Duster and, framed in the tavern doorway, hurls the blade at him.

End over end it tumbles. It buries itself between the kenku’s shoulder blades.

Duster stumbles, straining to wrench the dagger free as he crosses Barovia’s main road. He cannot reach it. He keeps moving anyway, the venom spreading quickly now — his legs going rubbery, nausea rising behind his eyes — and begins hammering on the door of Bildrath’s Mercantile with both fists.

“Open!” he shrieks.

The alarmed face of Bildrath’s enormous nephew appears in the doorway. Duster tumbles past him and up a back staircase without knocking, not stopping until he pushes through the door of a rear bedroom.

Bildrath is inside, still in his nightshirt, one hand occupied with the business of pulling on his trousers. He looks up. Duster looks back at him, breathing hard, the dagger still in his back. The Burgomaster does not appear to be in good health. His hands are not steady. His color is poor, nearly grey and his eyes are sunken. 

Duster makes his case as best he can, working around the limits of his kenku’s borrowed vocabulary. A guard is persecuting him without cause. This is an affront to the order Strahd demands. A loyal Burgomaster would not permit it.

Bildrath listens with the slightly unfocused attention of a man whose concentration keeps sliding sideways.

Hoolian arrives before Duster has finished. He steps through the door with Pariwimple at his back and presents the matter plainly: horse theft, flight from a lawful search, and additional charges outstanding in Vallaki that Duster has not yet answered for.

Bildrath looks at Duster. He looks at Hoolian. His hands complete the buttoning of his trousers. He pulls on a shirt, still unsteady, and appears to weigh something behind his eyes that has nothing to do with either man standing in his bedroom.

Then he nods at Hoolian.

The kenku  is arrested, his hands locked in iron manacles behind his back. Without much concern for pain or safety, Hoolian rips the dagger from Duster’s back and wipes it on the rogue’s cloak.

Duster will be returned to Vallaki in chains.