05/05/2026: Carriers

.

Soulfire, Nike, and Crystal face the newly hostile nothic together. It glares at them with its single enormous eye, the air between them gone suddenly sharp. Soulfire casts Dragon’s Breath on Nike, wreathing them in crackling potential — a lightning cone ready to be exhaled should the situation demand it. Crystal doesn’t wait. She unleashes Scorching Ray, bolt after bolt connecting with searing precision. The nothic crumbles, smoldering, and moves no more.

The group regard the dead creature in the corridor’s half-light. Then a large door grinds open, and a Shield Guardian steps through — nine feet of articulated metal, its footfalls heavy and deliberate on the stone floor. Soulfire and Crystal instinctively shelter behind Nike, who raises the key Exethanter loaned them. The guardian’s blank iron face turns toward the key, and seems satisfied. It stoops without ceremony, collects the smoking body of the nothic, and disappears back through the door without a word or a warning. The three of them let out a slow breath.

⚔

Biblo climbs the stairs as quietly as a man of his size and enthusiasm is capable of managing. The heavy footsteps from above are louder up here, reverberating through the stone. And then, threading through the rhythm of those footfalls, he catches something else: a man’s voice. Talking to itself. Weeping.

An amber golem lurches out of the darkness and Biblo startles badly — but the creature pays him no attention whatsoever, spinning on its heel and marching back the other way as if he isn’t there. Biblo watches it go.

“Hello?” he calls.

“Here! I am here! Please — I need help! I am trapped!”

Biblo runs. He ducks through an open door just ahead of the golem’s return and finds himself at the rear of what appears to be a chapel, cold and still. At the bottom of a short flight of stairs, surrounded by his scattered gear, a man drags himself to his feet. He moves like a man twice his age, stiff and effortful, though he seems no older than Biblo himself.

“I am Vilnius,” he stammers.

Up close, the man is clearly unwell. His face is an unhealthy hectic red, his eyes glassy and over-bright, his forehead slick with sweat despite the biting chill of the air. The heat radiates off him in waves. Biblo clocks the swellings behind his ears and along his jaw, and keeps a careful inch or two of distance.

“Have you any water? Food?” Vilnius reaches toward him with a shaking hand. From it dangles a medallion — a large ruby set in gold, its chain swinging gently. “I can pay you. For whatever you can share.”

Biblo accepts the medallion and passes over some of his rations without much hesitation. That is, in hindsight, a dire mistake.

A flush begins creeping up the back of the dragonborn’s neck. His head feels thick. “I think,” Biblo says, with dawning suspicion, “that you’ve given me whatever you have.”

Vilnius stops chewing and looks up. His eyes glitter. “Fekre, the Lady of Poxes, will be pleased.”

Biblo sits heavily, fighting a sudden wave of dizziness. “I know Fekre,” he mutters. “She’s a friend.”

Vilnius rejects this with conviction. “The Lady has no friends. Only worshippers. And I am her most devoted follower.” He points to the angry rash already blooming across the back of Biblo’s hand. “You bear her mark now. Help me leave this place — help me free the Lady — and together we can bring her to Vallaki.”

Biblo, through the growing nausea, manages to ask, “Why Vallaki?”

“To punish the unbelievers!” Vilnius’s eyes burn with feverish certainty. “The deaths in Vallaki will make the Lady stronger, the survivors will fear her, worship her, and she will. She will return, will grow stronger. She will rule all of Barovia.” He leans forward. “Help me find her.”

Biblo refuses. The standoff between them settles in, uneasy and unresolved.

⚔

In the Great Library, Zilk knocks and Neferon opens the door. The arcanaloth’s gaze is cutting and immediate.

“Have you found Fekre?”

“We have,” grins the bugbear. “We’ve brought her to you.”

Neferon’s eyes sweep the room. “Where is she?”

“She’s inside me.” Zilk’s grin holds. “I allowed her to possess me. She’s been quiet now for a while — “

But he doesn’t finish the thought. Fekre seizes control like a hand closing around a throat.

She swings Zilk’s magical longsword up over his head and brings it slicing down toward Neferon. Fekre does not yet have the fine motor skills to manage Zilk’s body, and she misses hugely. 

While Fekre attempts to pull the blade from the gash in the marble floor, Shifty lunges, casting his net. He is trying to tangle the rampaging bugbear, slow him, contain him. Crystal throws herself at Zilk in a full tackle and is shrugged off as if she weighs nothing. Inside his own skull, Zilk struggles against the goddess’s grip, clawing for purchase, and finds none.

From across the room where Zilk has thrown her, Crystal fires off a Charm spell — simple, direct, devastatingly effective.

Zilk’s eyes, with Fekre’s shadow coiled behind them, cloud over. The sword lowers. A strange, dazed smile crosses the bugbear’s face. Shifty, taking no chances, follows immediately with Hold Person, locking Zilk in place before anything else can go wrong.

They carry him down the stairs to the prison chamber in the lower level of the Amber Temple, Zilk suspended between Crystal’s compulsion and Fekre’s fury, unable to speak or move or do anything but feel himself being pulled apart.

The lich pistons out a clawed hand that latches onto Zilk. He tears a strip of skin and fur free from Zilk’s forearm, and Fekre comes screaming out of him, driven by the pain of the wound. Her sudden presence in the chamber summons the ettin guardian immediately from the etheral plane— Soulfire slams the door with Prestidigitation, and the lock takes.

From behind that door: the sounds of something enormous and terrible happening. A lich. A two-headed giant. A goddess.

The companions do not open it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​