02/24/2026: What’s Behind the Door

The mewling from behind the door is unsettling—something between a whimper and a keen, echoing off the stone walls of the hall. Zilk sucks the slashed finger, the copper taste of blood sharp on his tongue. Whatever clawed him through the gap in the timbers is still moving on the other side. The muffled scrabbling raises the hair on the back of his neck, and curiosity curdles into frustration.

He kicks the door in.

The banded timbers rip from the hinges with a crack that rolls down the corridor, the door slamming inward in a cloud of dust and splinters. A shadowy creature scuttles backward with a hiss, claws scraping stone—then turns to face him.

Zilk takes a step back.

It is manlike in shape but coated in brown, horny scales that catch what little light reaches this far into the ruin. Its hands and feet are enormous, tipped with thick, curving claws. But it is the face that stops him cold: where eyes should be sits a single, vast eye, dark and glistening, and it slides past Zilk without hesitation to fix on Crystal. Crystal, for her part, goes very still.

“That’s a nothic,” Nike breathes, her voice hushed with recognition. “The stories say they’re vicious—brutal things—but here in Barovia, they say they’re tame.” She glances between the creature and Crystal. “Mostly.”

Crystal is not comforted. An enormous pressure builds suddenly behind her temples, a sensation like cold fingers pressing inward, and she realizes the nothic’s great eye has not moved from her face. Then the creature swings sharply toward Zilk, and the eye fixes on him instead—wide, searching, almost imploring.

Zilk’s eyes fly open. A voice rings between his ears, vaguely accented, rough as gravel: Gimme eats. It scrapes the inside of his skull like a beggar rattling a tin cup.

The nothic’s clawed hand gestures toward the corridor, toward the smell of roasting venison that has been drifting through the ruins for the past hour.

“It’s hungry!” Zilk exclaims, the tension in his shoulders dropping an inch.

Crystal’s eyes cut quickly to the gap in the wall where the hunters’ fire still crackles. Her Charm spell won’t hold much longer—she can feel it thinning already, like ice going soft underfoot. She turns to the creature and keeps her voice slow and clear. “Walk that way,” she says, pointing toward the gap, “and you will find a pile of venison. All of it, just for you. Go that way and it can be yours.”

The nothic regards her for a long moment with that single unblinking eye. 

Then it shuffles forward.

The party parts. The creature moves through the room with a wet, scraping gait, its scaled bulk squeezing through the gap in the wall. Shifty presses himself flat against the stone, hardly breathing as it passes, close enough that he can smell it—something damp and ancient, like a cellar that has never seen sun. He watches it go, head tilted.

“It was wearing robes,” he says quietly to the others as they reconvene. “Tattered. Priest’s robes, I think—the faith of Lathander, if I’m reading the remnants correctly.” He glances back toward the gap where the nothic has already disappeared into the grey curtain of falling snow. “Curious.”

The observation hangs in the air for exactly as long as it takes for the buzzing to start.

It builds from somewhere deeper in the ruins—a dry, papery sound like a hornet’s nest—and then the hallway lights up orange as a fire spell detonates against the far wall. The hunting wolf barks, sharp and alarmed. Zilk and Crystal are moving before anyone speaks.

The flameskull rounds the corner in a blaze of sickly light,  grinning with jeweled eye sockets flashing green. It moves with an erratic, bobbing energy, wreathed in emerald flame that casts lurching shadows up the walls. It fires.

The ray catches Zilk across the arm and chest. His fur ignites with a sudden whump, and his cloak catches immediately, flames crawling up his back. He roars, batting at the fire even as the skull wheels toward Crystal. The spell strikes her and her clothing erupts. Before she can react, Nike takes a hit—the smell of scorched hair and cloth sharp in the close air of the hallway.

One of the hunters moves fast. A cloak slips back to reveal coiled horns curving from a shadowed brow, and a longbow arcs through the air toward Nike. The elf nods her gratitude at the hunter as he raises a hand and to drive a Mind Sliver at the skull—the spell bounces off the tiny, savage creature like a stone off iron—but a heartbeat later, Ilya closes the distance and dispatches it. The green flame gutters out.

Then Ratrick’s spear catches the latch of a door on the north wall, jostling it open.

A second flameskull emerges.

The fighting is immediate and desperate. The air fills with heat and the acrid bite of scorched stone. The second skull is relentless, darting and diving, but the party hammers at it until it is barely holding together, its green fire guttering low. Finally, badly damaged, the creature slips sideways through an arrow slit and vanishes into the grey outside. A moment of ragged breathing follows.

In the relative quiet, the hunters begin to pack their camp, rolling bedrolls and kicking snow over the remains of their fire. Ratrick prowls the hall, prodding at doors.

He opens one.

The third flameskull emerges buzzing with fury.

⚔

While chaos reigns in the hall, Biblo has found himself somewhere altogether different.

Further up the corridor, he pushes into a room that stops him in his tracks. It is a dining room, and the table is set—laden with a feast that has no business existing in a ruin like this. Candles gutter in iron holders. Platters gleam. The smell of roasted meat and warm bread drifts toward him, rich and somehow too perfect, too vivid for a place that has been abandoned to the cold.

Biblo sits.

The room changes.

Specters materialize slowly, seeping up from the stone and the shadow until they surround him completely—pale figures in tattered finery, regarding him with hollow attention. One extends a translucent hand toward his Flame Tongue trident. Another gestures graciously toward the table.

Try the food, the specter seems to say.

Biblo loads a forkful of what looks like succulent, glistening pork—it smells extraordinary—and puts it in his mouth.

Nothing. Not cold, not rotten. Simply nothing. As though he has eaten air.

He processes this. Then he moves to hand over the trident, placing it into the reaching hand across the table.

The hand is incorporeal.

The trident drops through ghostly fingers and clatters loudly against the flagstones.

Somewhere behind him, back down the corridor, the sounds of the third fight continue without him.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ But he cannot break away from the table, nor his hosts, the specters.