04/15/2026: The Iron, the Witch and the Treasure

The great hag’s house moves with a rolling gait in wide circles as Duster waits. Its great chicken legs carry the structure back and forth in an uneasy, rocking swagger, the boards groaning with each step.

Baba Lysaga stamps her enormous feet and mutters to herself. She is shifting something the rogue cannot see. Around Duster, bones litter the ground. Some are ancient and grey, and some still so fresh that the armor nearby has not yet begun to rust. Scattered among these remains and tufts of dead grass are the ruins of muddy toys, each one tagged with a small label: “No fun is no Blinsky!” The flies are everywhere.

Finally, Baba Lysaga wheels on Duster before he has time to speak.

“Which one of your companions murdered my daughter?”

Duster claims not to know. The hag’s eyes narrow. She knows he was there. She tells him so, and the threat in her voice is not subtle. But Duster’s deception holds, and Baba Lysaga—her fury briefly uncertain—changes course. She scoops him up without ceremony and drops him into a woven basket. He rides beneath her arm like groceries as she strides through the swamp, the world lurching and swaying. The flies follow in a cloud, raising itchy, bloody welts beneath Duster’s feathers.

She finally sets the basket down—by kicking it, so Duster rolls out onto the ground.

Before him sits the inverted skull of a dragon. It is enormous. It stinks of old death and the swamp. Baba Lysaga gestures to it with something approaching pride.

“The skull of Argenvost. A silver dragon. I killed him for my son.”

She is more powerful than Strahd, she tells Duster. Strahd is her son. She aggressively asserts this like a correction to a very old misunderstanding. Duster lies to her with a steady voice that he and Strahd are great friends.

“Does he mention me? When you speak with your friend, my son?”

“Yes! Strahd speaks of you!”

In his halting, kenku way, Duster implies that in fact, he has been sent to invite her to the nuptials. Of course, she is invited to the wedding that is being planned. Something shifts in the hag’s enormous face.

In a voice thick with emotion, she asks, “Do you believe that the bride will replace me? In his heart, do you know this?”

Duster tells her no—a son always has a place for his mother. Baba Lysaga seems to grow with satisfaction.

“I have been waiting. I have a gift!”

Her eyes go to the dragon skull. She asks Duster to find her something suitable to wear at the Ulric Mansion to the east. She cannot fit inside—built for people his size, she says. She will leave a note for her daughters. They can go to the castle together, now, if he brings her a robe. She stuffs him back in the basket and strides off in a different direction.

The Ulric Mansion is four hundred years of neglect. Dust thick enough to show every footstep. Air that smells of mold and old decay. The front door opens onto silence. Duster moves through the sitting room and finds velvet curtains, intact enough, long enough, that they might serve. He reaches for them.

The spiders fall on him before he hears them.

They come down in a swarm—down his collar, across his hands, biting everywhere at once. He conjures a Firebolt from the air and lets it loose, and the old wooden room ignites around him. But the spiders are already inside his clothing, already working.

The swarm covers him, reaching the already bitten skin beneath his feathers. The tiny load of venom each arachnid carries accumulates, and slowly Duster’s throat begins to close, preventing him from casting again.

What remains of the kenku-shaped swarm of spiders crumples to the moldering floor of the Ulric Mansion.

It does not rise again.

⚔

Deep in the lower reaches of the Amber Temple, Bayleaf and Komzin have been tracking Fekre—or what is left of her. She is a cloud. Her mist drifts away slowly, then turns to float between them. Trailing pestilence in her wake, she is truly the bringer of plagues: a pulse of necrotic energy rolls out thirty feet and the frisson of infected air surrounds both men.

Weakness takes hold, and the cloud shimmers around them, conveying—what? Pleasure? Satiety?

Staggering to his comrade, Bayleaf lays on hands to strip the poison from Komzin’s blood. He cannot heal the wounds, but at least the corruption stops spreading.

The mist shifts away from them and moves as quickly as it is able toward the stairs. Komzin chases it, catching up in three long strides. Both of his strikes land—the second cutting through the gaseous form with magical damage that has somewhere to stick. Bayleaf follows with his own attacks, working carefully around the disadvantage his remaining sickness imposes, and the fact that his weapon carries no arcane force.

Fekre rematerializes in physical form. She opens her eyes: twin pools of utter darkness that glare at her persecutors. But their power finds no purchase.

The pair descend upon her again, driving her to her knees. It is Bayleaf’s blade that finishes her. The form that was Fekre collapses inward.

What hits the stone floor of the Amber Temple is a red crystalline shard, roughly the size of a fist. It steams. It smells foul. Heat radiates off the surface in waves. Bayleaf pockets it without ceremony. His paladin’s immunity to disease makes him the obvious choice to carry such a noxious object.

⚔

Exethanter receives them with something that functions as warmth—as much as a lich receives anyone. He is pleased that the shard has been recovered. He presents a scroll case, sealed and official-looking, and then thinks to ask whether it is going to Strahd.

Komzin hesitates. He tells Exethanter that he is not certain Strahd has his best interests at heart. But his untruth is detected by the lich.

“If I were you, I would not give this to him. You know what it is, do you not?”

Komzin shakes his head. Exethanter breaks the seal on the case and shows him the title: A Ritual to Prevent Permanent Banishing. He reseals it, stamps it so the wax looks untouched, and slides it back into the case.

“If you were wise, you would keep it to yourself.”

He then asks if there is other magic he might loan them while they’re here. Bayleaf and Komzin each ask for longswords.

Exethanter goes to his shelves, spins the mechanism, and what comes out is a longsword that hums faintly with enchantment. He regrets the generosity almost immediately, but hands it over. A Hero’s Blade. Most powerful.

Komzin receives a greatsword with a slight amber glamour upon it. The lich reminds them, on their way out, to take out the trash—meaning Rakthe’s body, which he would prefer not to leave on his floor.

A scroll of Resurrection had been offered for Rakthe, who betrayed them. Neither man takes it.

⚔

It is a three-day walk back to Vallaki. For a change, the road gives them nothing—no wolves, no ambush, no weather worth noting. By the time they reach the gates of Vallaki, the daylight is fading. They are where they need to be.

Somewhere to the east, in the smoking ruin of the Ulric Mansion, the hag is still waiting for her robe.