06/23/2026: Before Bed in Vallaki

Urwin and his family leave the companions in the taproom, bidding them a good night. Late at night, the Blue Water Inn has settled into its particular quiet — the kind that feels less like peace and more like held breath before bed in Vallaki. Candles gutter in their sconces. The fire in the cavernous room has burned low, casting everything into amber and shadow. The party lingers rather than retreating to their rooms, drawn together by some unspoken instinct that tonight is not a night for comfortable beds.

It is Pinecone who hears it first.

The wolf raises his grey muzzle and goes utterly still, ears swiveling toward the shuttered windows. Outside, somewhere in the fog-swallowed streets of Vallaki, wolves begin to howl — not the long mournful cries of the hunting pack, but something clipped, purposeful, almost conversational. Soulfire watches Pinecone’s hackles rise and asks Biblo for his magic.

The barbarian nods, letting the words of his Speak with Animals spell unspool under his breath.

“What is it?” he murmurs to the enormous animal. “What do you smell?”

Pinecone’s answer is immediate and unambiguous: Wolves. But wrong. They smell like people.

The party exchanges glances across the firelit room. Nobody suggests going upstairs — the stairs are only accessed from the outside.

The debate that follows is quiet and earnest and slightly absurd, in the way that genuine fear often is. Someone floats the idea of pulling chairs together to sleep on in the common room — safety in numbers, keep the fire stoked. Someone else points out that the hallway upstairs is exactly the kind of narrow, lightless corridor that something with claws would find very convenient. The consensus, unspoken but unanimous, is that staying together is better than being separated in the dark.

Then the sound of breaking glass. Not in the front room. From the back of the Blue Water, likely in the kitchen.

Nike is already leaving through the front door, placing her Mask of Shadows upon her face before the others realize what’s happening. She fades a shade, her form half-dissolved into the dark, pressed flat against the blackness of the entryway, the walls, the ground.

Outside, at the corner of the building where the bottom of the stairs empties, a werewolf crouches. It is large, disheveled, and terribly alert, scenting the air with slow, deliberate patience.

The elf, in shadow form, slips past it and slides up the stairs. As a shade, she slides beneath a door, becoming solid as the light from the taproom and the hallway sconces banishes the shadows she needs to stay ephemeral. She slips into her room and closes the door with a click.

⚔

In the Blue Water's taproom, the companions hear wood splintering from somewhere in the next room.

Soulfire doesn’t hesitate. Her Daylight spell blooms from her fingers like a small and furious sun, brilliant white light blazing out from the common room and into the Blue Water’s courtyard, climbing the stairs, pouring under doors and through windows, filling the area with a radiance that has no business existing in Barovia. For just a moment, it is almost beautiful.

⚔

Whatever is on the outside stairway does not find it beautiful. There is a sound — half-snarl, half something worse — and the shape retreats from the light, back through the door and into the hallway where Nike crouches behind a locked door.

She can hear the creature pad down the corridor, testing latches. It sniffs outside her door, jiggling the mechanism. Nike freezes, holding her breath. It cannot find her in the shadow form she has resumed, but there are very few corners of the room now not illuminated by the magical light pouring through the windows from the courtyard.

⚔

In the taproom, what comes next is not elegant.

Zilk opens the door to the kitchen.

The werewolf on the other side — a broad, pale-eyed thing that smells of wet fur and old blood — does not wait. While its bite misses, its sword finds Zilk. The impact drives the bugbear back, pain blooming sharp between his ribs, and for a moment the whole corridor narrows to the sound of his own breathing and the creature’s low, continuous snarl.

The other werewolf begins its moves toward the bugbear.

Biblo follows with the Flame Tongue Trident in one hand, its tines radiating light and heat. In his other hand, he clutches a coiled whip. The kitchen fills with the acrid smell of scorched fur.

Crystal barrels into the tight hallway, fire already gathering at her fingertips.

⚔

Shifty makes his decision quickly and cleanly: he ghosts outside to the stairs as Soulfire's spell illuminates the yard. The two werewolves hiding in the stairwell rise, sniffing the air: the have smelled Shifty's approach.

Snarling, they move to intercept the kobold priest.

⚔

Downstairs, the situation at the kitchen entrance is deteriorating. Two werewolves stare out at three companions. The air tastes of woodsmoke and fear.

Then Crystal tries something.

“Friend,” she croons, her voice warm and reasonable and entirely at odds with the circumstances. The werewolf pauses. His pale eyes fix on her, and his expression shifts from predatory to merely confused, and then — improbably — cooperative. His eyes go unfocused, clouded.

Then they clear and find Crystal. The werewolf's brows knit in anger as it dawn upon him that he has very nearly been charmed by the dragonborn.

Crystal has bought time for Biblo and Zilk, but the furious werewolf is now coming for her.

⚔

Shifty,ambushed at the bottom of the stairs by two more werewolves, twists free and scampers up the stairs. At the top, he wheels to confront his pursuers, flings a Banishment, spell at one. With a yelp of terror, the creature is torn from this plane entirely and hurled into the Shadowfell, the melancholic echo of the Material Plane.

Startled by the sudden vanishing of his companion, the remaining werewolf barely has time to register his surprise before an enormous conjured pile of food sweeps him off his feet. The creature tumbles down the steps and lands in a painful heap at the bottom.

⚔

From the arcade above the taproom, Urwin’s voice calls down: “What is happening down there?”

Soulfire calls back a brief explanation, and there is the sudden flutter of feathers. A raven alights near Shifty in the facing arcade. He is trying to open Nike’s locked door. Behind it, the sounds of growling can be heard.

Urwin, human once more, draws a key from his pocket.

They find Nike backed into a corner, menaced by a werewolf with a wickedly sharp blade mid-swing.

The creature has approached, weapon raised. Before Urwin or Shifty can assist Nike, the werewolf's short sword slices downward in a fierce and brutal arc — directly into an iron boot scraper bolted to the floor planks.

The blade rings once, sharply, before shattering. The werewolf stares at the broken hilt in his clawed hand with an expression of profound offense.

Then he takes in the newcomers and the calculation he makes does not favor him.

He throws the broken sword aside and charges toward the window, shattering it. He hits the ground fifteen feet below and rolls to his feet, shaking the broken glass from his fur like a dog.

Nike puts Reynaldo, her demonic familiar, out the window. Magicked safely to the ground by the newly arrived Soulfire's Feather Fall spell. The demonic rabbit leaps to tear a strip of flesh and fur from the werewolf’s leg, and the creature flees howling into the dark, throwing his voice back over one shoulder: “You are a dead woman, Nike! Beware!”

⚔

The fight in the Blue Water’s kitchen is ugly and close. One werewolf disengages, carefully backing across the blood-slicked floor toward the kitchen door and the night beyond. Biblo looks to Zilk.

“Should I kill him?” Biblo has the second werewolf backed against a sturdy table.

Zilk has run out of goodwill. His answer comes back clear and uncomplicated. “Show no mercy.”

The werewolf falls, and in falling, changes: the fur recedes, the shape collapses, and what lies on the floorboards of the Blue Water Inn is simply a man — pale and still, wearing whatever he was before all of this.

Nobody says anything for a moment.

Then Crystal throws herself to her knees, trying to stanch the wounds, pressing her hands against the bleeding with focused desperation. But she cannot get ahead of it. He dies despite her ministrations, despite her trying, his blood darkening the kitchen floor while the candles gutter and the fire ticks and settles in the next room.

Her scales plae and blood-satined, she asks quietly, "Does this make us murderers?"

Zilk snorts in disgust. That is enough of an answer for the sorcerer.

⚔

The party stands in the wreckage of the evening, catching their breath. It is then that someone thinks to ask the question that should perhaps have been asked sooner.

The werewolf knew Nike’s name.

Not a name. Her name, specifically — called across the dark hallway with something that sounded almost like recognition. The group turns this over in the exhausted silence, and the only answer that presents itself — the wanted posters, circulating through Vallaki, Nike’s face reproduced in ink on every corner — is not quite enough to fully account for it.

Somewhere outside, the howling has stopped.

That is not necessarily reassuring.