06/09/2026: Wintersplinter

The Abbey of Saint Markovia clings to the hillside above Kresk, its bells casting a long, resonant toll across the valley. As the sound resonates, the creatures within the abbey yard answer with yipping, howls, growls and screams.

Nikolai Wachter sits in the relative warmth of the abbey’s receiving room and tries, very hard, to understand what he is being told. A year. He lost a year. He had closed his eyes — he is almost certain he had merely closed his eyes — and the world had continued without him, rearranging itself into something unfamiliar. His wife’s face when she looked at him. His sons’ boisterous laughter. These things do not line up with the man he remembers being. He is not entirely sure he is still that man. He keeps his expression composed. He is a Wachter. Composure is the last thing he can cling to.

The Abbot, gracious and faintly luminous, extends an invitation to dine. The group accepts. There is no polite reason not to, and several impolite reasons they choose to ignore.

⚔

The dining hall is lit by tapers that drip wax in long, pale ribbons. A servant moves between the table and the kitchen — a quiet, shuffling figure with the face of a wolf and one foot that lands with the particular flat slap of a duck’s. Nike watches the foot for a moment too long, and then says something. It is not unkind, exactly. It is, however, not kind. The servant’s wolf-ears flatten almost imperceptibly. The soup is served in silence and the creature drops a hot, wet serving spoon into Nike’s lap with a splat.

It is good soup. The bread is warm. The Abbot watches his guests with eternal and unreadable patience. He then politely inquires whether Ratrick will return the boy that the ratling absconded with months back.

Ratrick, occupying the chair nearest the door, stiffens and tells the Abbot plainly: Ilya is safe. He is healthy. He will stay in Kresk with his family, and Ratrick will remain there, as well, watching over the boy. The Abbot receives this with a slow nod, and does not push the matter. He is many things, but he is not a being who needs to be told something twice.

The meal continues. Beyond the abbey walls, something distant howls.

⚔

The conversation turns, as conversations in Barovia inevitably do, to Strahd.

Before the Abbot can complete his question about the party’s intentions, the door opens.

She enters without announcement, because she cannot speak. Vasiliska — the Abbot’s work, his great project, his perhaps-masterpiece — moves into the room with the careful, deliberate movement of something that has learned to imitate living. The smell arrives before she does. Rot, sweet and heavy, the smell of meat kept too long past its purpose. Soulfire goes very still. Down the table, Nikolai’s composure, which has survived quite a lot this evening, makes a quiet and dignified retreat. He excuses himself. Soulfire follows shortly after, stepping out for air with the brisk certainty of someone whose alternatives are worse.

The rest of the group watch Vasiliska with the careful expressions of people who are absolutely not thinking anything impolite.

⚔

Biblo, who has never in his life been accused of subtlety, states his position: he does not want to kill Strahd. But he wants to free Barovia from him. To remove him. To end the long, grey misery of this place without adding more blood to the ledger. The Abbot tilts his head and considers this. He agrees: he is not disposed to shed blood, whatever the vampire’s crimes. The Abbot came to Barovia two thousand years ago — he says this as though it were last Thursday — to help. He was here when the Greater Gods sealed away this place, when Strahd was incarcerated and the whole of Barovia was trapped with vampire. The Abbot has been here since, with Strahd. He is not bitter about it. And he is quite clear: nothing leaves. Not, people, not souls may escape this domain until the vampire is deposed and the Greater Gods see fit to open the portal again. This applies to everyone in the room. He lets that settle.

“But let us turn to lighter topics. Mr Biblo, would you share your music with us?”

Biblo tells the Abbot: “My bagpipes were damaged, and cannot be played.” He glares briefly at Nike, who does not meet his eyes, and then shows the slashed instrument to the Abbot. The deva takes it, turning it over in his hands. His expression is thoughtful, the way a craftsman’s face goes thoughtful when given something worth fixing. He casts Mending on it.

And Biblo plays. The tune is, unexpectedly, rather lovely — an old melody, something that might have been composed before any of them were born, drifting out through the stone corridors while the candles burn low.

⚔

There is the matter of the resurrection scroll. Destroyed, the Abbot confirms — the diamond along with it. However: he has copied the spell into his own spellbook. Should they ever need him, should someone need bringing back and they come to him with the right gem, he will offer his skills freely. He says this as though it is a small thing. It is not a small thing.

They bid the deva farewell.

⚔

Crystal takes the wagon down the hill with confident hands, the wheels finding the switchbacks in the gloom as though she has made this particular descent a hundred times before. Below, in the quiet of Kresk, there are goodbyes to be made.

Ratrick, for a ratling who has never been accused of sentimentality, has quite a lot of things to pass to his now-former comrades.

To Biblo: a Spear of Throwing. To Crystal: a Flying Pan, and — separately, wrapped with more care — the Orb of Gravity Detection. To Soulfire: several Planks of Sleep, which are exactly as useful and exactly as strange as they sound. To Nike: the Knocker of Unwelcoming, which suits her perhaps a little too well for comfort.

And then the Tome of Strahd. He passes it across without ceremony. The history of Strahd von Zarovich — his life, his fears, the precise and specific shape of his weaknesses — pressed between covers that feel heavier than they should. Several of the group’s hands reach for it, and then don’t, and then Crystal takes it.

Crystal and Zilk, standing by the wagon in the grey Barovian morning, begin discussing what a Flying Pan might do if fitted into an improvised cannon. This is either a terrible idea or a tremendous one. The line, in Barovia, is difficult to locate.

The wagon rolls away from Kresk. Ilya watches sadly from the gate until their wagon disappears into the mists of Barovia, Ratrick’s paw resting lightly upon his shoulder.

⚔

The road to Vallaki stretches grey and cold through the trees. The pines press close. The group are well into their travel plans — wagon versus teleportation circle versus Crystal’s newest and possibly inadvisable theory about a flying pan machine — when they meet the refugees.

A ragged cluster of figures moving away from Vallaki. Their faces have the particular hollowness of people who have left something behind them still burning.

One of them recognises Crystal. “You’re a friend of the blacksmith,” she says. “I am so very sorry to tell you about him. The blacksmith is dead — killed by a tree creature, something vast and wrong that has come out of the forest and is laying siege to the city. The stockade walls at the west end of the city are destroyed. The Sunset Gate is gone.”

Pillars of smoke rise in the far distance, thick and dark against the pale sky.

The group is warned not to go. The group thanks the refugees for the warning and heads directly toward the smoke.

⚔

Vallaki is burning.

The tree blight stands at the broken edge of the city like something from a bad dream — massive, creaking, the smell of green rot and char rolling off it in waves. Its roots have torn up the cobblestones. What was a gate is now kindling. Around it: screaming, the crack of timbers, the flat orange light of buildings that have given up.

Soulfire moves first. Her Hypnotic Pattern unfurls through the air, shimmering and strange, and the blight stills — caught in the spell’s grip, its vast branching limbs arrested mid-reach. It is incapacitated. It is not, however, finished. Everyone knows that a single blow will break the spell and bring it back to its vigorous assault on the city. Nobody takes the soft option.

Crystal raises her hands and the Fireball blooms. The heat rolls outward in a visible wall, and when it reaches the blight it catches — really catches, the tree’s dry heartwood taking the fire like a gift, the immolation spreading fast and bright. Biblo charges in from the left, Flame-Tongue Trident in hand, and the second impact sends sparks spiraling upward into the smoke. Shifty calls down Sacred Flame — the blight flinches but does not fall; non-magical weapons would have done nothing at all, but this is not nothing. Zilk moves like a shadow along the creature’s flank, and when the Booming Blade connects the sound is like a thunderclap pressed down into something solid, driving deep through bark and rot and whatever passes for bone in something like this.

Soulfire steps back, calculates, and throws the final Fireball.

The blight comes apart.

It does not fall gracefully. Nothing that large falls gracefully. It tilts, and then it leans, and then it comes down in pieces with the full, final weight of enormous things that are on fire, branches whipping outward in long, lethal arcs. The group scatters.

Zilk clears it completely — a clean leap, almost contemptuous in its precision. Nike and Biblo catch the edges: branches, a glancing blow, nothing that will keep them down.

Shifty does not clear it.

Nikolai Wachter, who has had an exceptionally difficult week by any measure, does not clear it either.

The burning tree settles over them both with a sound like thunder, and the smoke rolls up in a black column over the broken gates of Vallaki.