03/31/2026: Tales at the Amber Temple

When Exethanter finally retires, retreating into the silence of his quarters with the slow, shuffling certainty of a man who has lived too long, Neferon watches him go. There is something sorrowful in that gaze — something ancient and unspoken — and the group feels it too, a heaviness that settles into the cold stone of the temple around them.

Then Neferon turns back to the group, and he begins to speak.

His voice is low, almost careful, as if the words themselves carry weight. The torchlight gutters. Somewhere deeper in the temple, something drips.

“You want to understand this place,” he says. “You want to understand him — Strahd. Then you must understand how it began.”

He tells them of a conqueror. A soldier. A man who marched at the head of his father’s armies and broke a valley open like a fist through stone. Strahd Von Zarovich was not born a lord — he made himself one, campaign by brutal campaign, until the valley of Barovia lay before him, conquered and his. And when his father died, Strahd settled into his inheritance without sentiment. He was the lord of Barovia now. He had earned it.

He built Castle Ravenloft on the bones of the mountain, and the years became decades, and the decades became the shape of his life.

He had a brother. Sergei. Born during the long years of campaign and construction, born into a world where his great older brother was more legend than presence — a name on dispatches, a face on a portrait. Strahd took no notice of the boy. What was a child to a man who had built an empire?

And then Sergei grew up, and fell in love.

Neferon’s voice shifts here. Quieter.

“Her name was Tatiyana. Red-haired. Bright-eyed. The kind of woman who makes a room feel warmer just by being in it.”

Strahd noticed her. Of course he noticed her. And with her arrival came something he had not expected — a mirror held up to his own face. He looked into it and saw a man grown old, a man whose best years were spent on campaign trails and cold stone battlements, a man who had never once stopped to want something simply because it was beautiful.

He wanted her. He wanted her with the desperation of a man who has only just discovered what he has been starving for.

But Tatiyana loved Sergei. Young, warm, laughing Sergei — his brother — and she looked at Strahd with nothing but polite courtesy. He told himself it was the age difference. He told himself there was a solution.

He came here.

Neferon gestures, almost unconsciously, at the walls of the Amber Temple around them. The amber sarcophagi loom in the edges of the torchlight, their imprisoned contents still and waiting.

“He came here,” Neferon repeats, “on the eve of their wedding.”

The group is very still.

Strahd walked into the temple and he made a bargain with one of the imprisoned gods — the entity known as Vampyr. Eternal life. Freedom from age, from decay, from the slow indignity of mortality. In exchange, he would free Vampyr from the amber that held it.

He agreed. And then he went home.

What happens next, Neferon tells them plainly, without ornament, because some things do not need embellishment.

Strahd returned to Ravenloft with Vampyr’s gifts already stirring in his blood. He went to Sergei. He killed him. He drank from him, and the last thing that made him human burned away like morning frost.

And then he went to find Tatiyana.

.

The group can imagine it, perhaps — the castle in chaos, servants screaming, the smell of blood on the stone. And Strahd, still wearing it, walking toward the woman he loved and telling her what he had done. For her. Telling her that he had made himself immortal. That they could be together now.

Tatyiana looked at him.

And she ran to the balcony, and she threw herself off it.

A long silence.

“They never found her body,” Neferon says.

The gods, Neferon explains, were watching. The freeing of Vampyr, the murder of Sergei, the death of Tatiyana — it was enough. Too much. The greater powers looked at Barovia and saw what it was becoming, and they acted.

They sealed it.

The mists thickened at the borders of the valley, impenetrable and absolute. Nothing could leave. Not the living. Not even, in time, the dead — their souls drawn back again and again, reborn without memory, doomed to repeat the same lives in the same valley under the same grey sky.

“Every soul in Barovia,” Neferon says quietly, “is a prisoner.”

He lets that settle. Then, slowly, he looks at the group. His eyes find Ireena — or rather, linger on the space where Ireena is absent, where the memory of her red hair exists in the room like a ghost.

“Tatiyana’s soul may have returned,” he says, carefully. “It is… possible. Over the centuries, there have been women — red-haired women — whom Strahd has pursued with an obsession that goes beyond politics, beyond strategy.” He pauses. “Is it possible your friend Ireena carries that soul? Could that be why he hunts her so relentlessly?”

No one answers. No one has to.

The group sits with this for a moment — the weight of the story, the cold of the temple, the amber sarcophagi pressing at the edge of vision. Then Neferon speaks again, and his tone shifts to something smaller. More personal.

He tells them about the Librarian Priests. About his brothers, who served the Amber Temple alongside him and Exethanter before the sealing, before Strahd, before any of it. About the long centuries that followed, the evil emanating from the Lesser Gods seeping into the stone and into the flesh, warping the priests slowly, terribly, into the hunched and broken things the group has already encountered in the temple’s corridors. The nothics.

Neferon’s voice is flat when he describes it. Practiced in its flatness.

“We could see it happening,” he says. “There was nothing to be done for them. But Exethanter — we could not lose Exethanter.” He straightens slightly. “So we performed the ritual. To make him a lich. To preserve him against the corruption.”

He pauses.

“I have hidden his phylactery, the vessel that contains his soul. He does not know where it is. He cannot undo what was done to save him, even in his darkest moments.” A beat. “Even when he wishes to.”

The lamps flickers. The amber glows.

It is in this somber quiet that Neferon makes his mistake.

He is speaking of Soulfire, describing the group, and the word slips out before he can catch it. Demon. He says it plainly, matter-of-factly — and then he stops. Looks at Soulfire. Sees the expression there.

“I — forgive me,” he says. “I did not mean to—”

But the damage is done. Soulfire’s jaw is tight. The air around them feels fractionally colder.

“You didn’t mean to,” Soulfire repeats, each word clipped and deliberate.

Neferon has the decency to look uncomfortable. He opens his mouth, closes it. There are no good words for this particular error, and he seems to know it.

Soulfire, still simmering, pivots. “The goddess Fekre,” they say. “She escaped. You know this temple better than anyone. Help us track her.”

But Neferon shakes his head slowly. “I cannot. Not while Exethanter sleeps and requires watching. I will not risk his safety — or my own — while he remains… as he is.”

Soulfire stares at him. Neferon does not blink.

Eventually Neferon withdraws to watch over Exethanter, and the group is left alone with the amber light and the weight of everything they have just heard — and a choice they cannot agree on.

What follows is, charitably, a full day of arguing.

Soulfire, Nike, and Shifty form one faction, their voices growing louder and more insistent as the hours pass. The phylactery. That is the key, they argue — if they can find Exethanter’s soul vessel and hold it, they can leverage him. Threaten him. Force the lich to hand over the Resurrection spell without demanding they re-imprison Fekre in return. Lord Wachter’s body is not going to keep forever; eight days, perhaps, before decay makes the magic impossible.

The other faction counters with equal heat: they made an agreement. They fight Fekre. The goddess is weakened — Neferon said so himself, diminished by a millennium without worship. This is manageable. This is the plan.

“She’s weakened now,” comes the retort from Zilk. “That won’t last forever.”

“Neither will Lord Wachter’s body!” exclaims Nike, with frustration.

Shifty, caught between both groups, is subjected to the particular misery of being the most useful person in any dispute — the healer — which means that everyone wants Shifty on their side and no one is remotely subtle about it. 

Spells are cast on party members in ways that are pointed, if not quite hostile. Someone produces a knife at some point during an exchange with Soulfire that probably did not need to involve a knife. The argument spirals, loops back on itself, and spirals again.

By the time the arguments finally exhaust themselves, the torches have burned lower and everyone is tired and somewhat worse for wear. The soul-stealing plan is abandoned, quietly, without ceremony. The factions dissolve. The group looks at each other across the cold floor of the Amber Temple, and the silence that follows is not peaceful, exactly, but it is at least agreed upon.

They will face the goddess.

As originally planned.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​