06/10/2026: The Fall of the Sunset Gate

The forest is very quiet when a man is dying in it.

Torgan stands over the body of the first Vistani, the fallen leaves around him already gone dark with blood. The second one — his captain, a lean man with a crossbow slung across his back and a pair of scimitars still in his hands — circles to the left. Viktor watches from somewhere behind Torgan, breathing in shallow pulls. Arabella, round-eyed, does not make a sound.

The captain is not going to fall easily. Torgan can see it in the way he moves: unhurried, measuring. Torgan swings first, and the fight settles into something grinding and close. The captain’s blade finds him once. Torgan’s axe finds him back. Blood spatters on the pine needles. Neither man speaks.

To the west, barely visible through the treeline, something very large has arrived in Vallaki.

⚔

Wintersplinter comes through the western wall the way a fist bursts through paper.

The timbers of the stockade have held for perhaps thirty seconds. Then they don’t. A section of Vallaki’s fortifications — thick enough to have stood for generations — caves inward in a cascade of dust and shattered logs, and the creature steps through the gap. It is very tall. The fire on its shoulder smolders, ignited by Orbart Glandin, a minotaur cleric new to Vallaki, with a pitch-loaded arrow. Wintersplinter doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Orbart has placed himself directly in its path. The creature’s grasping root catches him before he can move. He takes the blow and does not fall, which is the best that can be said. A guard beside him is less fortunate.

“Nice campaign, guys,” Orbart says, to no one in particular. “Thank you for having me.”

Nobody argues with him.

⚔

The bat has been hanging from the broken eave of a collapsed house near the Sunset Gate since Wintersplinter arrived. It has not moved. It has not needed to. It simply watches, and no one in the courtyard is aware of it watching.

As Wintersplinter enters Vallaki, stepping directly onto a house that collapses beneath its enormous foot, the bat stirs. Its wings unfold. It flits toward the massive tree blight and perches, inverted, from one of the horn-like protrusions at the creature’s crown. The voice that comes out of it is not a bat’s voice.

“People of Vallaki, know that your Dread Lord Count Strahd von Zarovich demands that your city deliver unto me the priest known as Father Lucian Petrovich. Do so and the city of Vallaki will be spared. Ignore my demand and your city will be destroyed. Your fate is yours to choose. Your answer must be given to me in one hour.”

At first there is only silence. Krelldutt can see that the tree blight is burning. Vallaki needs time to let the fire do its work, but he wants to be prepared, just in case. 

Krelldutt calls out toward Wintersplinter: “We will bring you the priest — but we need time!” His voice is even. He is lying. 

What he actually tells Adrian Martikov is to go, in raven form, to find Dunlarr — say nothing about Father Lucian, and bring every available guard to the Sunset Gate before Strahd’s patience runs out. Adrian melts into bird form and lifts into the fog. He is gone between one heartbeat and the next.

A second raven emerges from the mist. Then Danika Martikov appears before Krelldutt. She tells him quietly that some of the townspeople are already encouraging the priest to come forward on his own. That word has spread. That Father Lucian may not wait to be surrendered.

Krelldutt sends her back. “Find him,” he says. “Tell him to stay. We won’t give him up.”

⚔

Father Lucian moves with more urgency than a man his age should be able to manage, cassock gathered in both trembling fists, eyes fixed on the tree blight.

Feesh steps into his path. “No, Father. It’ll be all right. You don’t have to go.”

“My son, I pray you, let me pass.” The priest’s voice is patient, the way it is when he has already made up his mind. “Listen to what is happening out here.”

“I am listening. That’s why you need to stay back.”

“Vallaki is burning.” Father Lucian puts a hand on Feesh’s arm, not to push past — not yet — but to be heard. “If there is something I can do, some way to save my flock, I will do so. That is what I have dedicated my life to.”

“It will be all right, Father. You don’t have to do this,” Feesh repeats.

The priest smiles at that, sadly, the way people smile when the argument is good but it doesn’t change anything. Then he tries to go around the knight.

Feesh holds him gently by the upper arm and does not allow him to move.

Behind them, there is the sound of a catapult launch. Then, the collective groan of its crew rises as the payload lands uselessly, crunching into the rubble beneath Wintersplinter’s feet.

⚔

The bat’s senses are sharp, but it relies on echolocation more than sight. The bloom of thick smoke finally rises from Wintersplinter’s shoulders, abdomen, and neck to register with the tiny creature.

When it does, Count Strahd hisses through the psychic thread that binds them: “Find the priest! You must bring him to me!”

⚔

Wintersplinter turns toward the sound of voices and whips out a grasping root.

The tendril snaps out from the creature’s bulk and wraps around Father Lucian’s cassock before anyone can move. Feesh wheels around, shocked. Father Lucian cries out. He is dragged thirty feet across the muddy street toward the burning mass of the creature, wooden shoes scrabbling for purchase he cannot find.

A red knight runs forward with a greatsword and swings at the root that binds the priest. The blade finds the wrong angle. He swings again. The root holds.

“It’s all right, my son — I want this, for Vallaki!” Father Lucian cries, face red with pain, still being dragged across the ground.

Nobody finds this comforting.

⚔

Wintersplinter shakes itself back to action. It seizes a chunk of the ruined building it straddles and hurls it. The payload strikes the parapet of the north tower, flipping the pot of boiling pitch. Tar cascades over the three guards and their runner — a boy called Yeska — and the sides of the battlements cave inward. The torch flames find the tar. The tower falls.

At the base of the burning tower, Orbart finally is able to free himself and races back toward the gateyard.

The ruins are still burning when Krelldutt reaches them. He dips the first arrow into the pitch that pools at the base of the smoking pile and lights it from the flames. He prefers not to think about what else might still be burning inside. He moves to the edge of the wall. He draws.

⚔

The first arrow finds Wintersplinter in the center of its mass. Not a graze — through. The creature shudders, a deep reverberation the people nearest to it feel in their teeth.

Krelldutt nocks the second arrow without pausing. It hits. Something in the way it strikes tells him, in his very bones, that the shot has found something vital. He does not look right or left. He draws again.

The third arrow sinks deep. Wintersplinter freezes mid-motion, a chunk of broken house still raised in what might be its hand.

The field of battle goes quiet.

The creature sways. It does not fall yet — but something has changed in the way it holds itself. The fire spreading across its surface, patient and methodical until now, begins to move faster. Wintersplinter takes one more lurching step toward the priest. Then its legs give.

⚔

Torgan arrives just in time to see it come down. It falls slowly, the way large things do.

There is a moment — three or four seconds, long enough that everyone in the gateyard understands what is about to happen — before Wintersplinter’s full weight meets the muddy streets. The impact is enormous. Burning fragments scatter across the houses, the guards. The heat is immediate and total.

Feesh and a guard do not get clear in time. Another guard leaps free at the last possible moment, skidding across the stones and coming to rest against the base of the wall, breathing hard.

Father Lucian — still caught in the root, his cassock torn at the collar, his knees scraped raw — is somehow not beneath the creature when it falls. He rolls clear. He sits up. He presses one hand to his ribs and looks around at what remains of the Sunset Gate.

He appears, briefly, to cartwheel with the force of the landing. This is not something anyone expected of him.

It is, by any reasonable accounting, a miracle.

⚔

The bat has gone. It left at some point during the fall of the gigantic tree blight, and no one saw it go.

Somewhere in Vallaki, a section of the western wall stands open to the sky. The fires are still burning.