07/14/2026: Back to the Windmill

Morning light struggles through the shutters of the Blue Water Inn, catching the dust motes above tables still scarred from the werewolf assault. The companions gather in the main room, battle-worn but resolute, and lay out their plan to Urwin Martikov: back to the old windmill, to hunt down the last of the night hags.

Urwin listens, wiping the same tankard he’s been wiping for the better part of ten minutes. “You’re going back there,” he says. It isn’t quite a question. “Well. Luck to you, then. You’ll need it — hags do not easily forget slights, and you have killed two of her sisters.”

Grim-faced, the group can only agree.

⚔

Their wagon rolls eastward along the Old Svalitch Road, wheels grinding over frost-hardened ruts, the pines closing in dark and dripping on either side. Barely an hour outside Vallaki, the forest goes quiet — that particular quiet the party has learned to distrust.

Then the wolves come.

They melt out of the treeline in twos and threes until fourteen of them ring the wagon, breath steaming, yellow eyes unblinking. The largest of the pack — a grey brute with shoulders like a millstone — stalks straight toward Pinecone, hackles raised, seeking dominance. Soulfire’s hand flies to her sword hilt, but before steel can clear the scabbard, the two wolves are already at it: snarling, circling, teeth bared inches apart, each daring the other to make the first lunge.

Nike acts first. A flick of her fingers, a whispered word, and suddenly the air a hundred yards down the road is thick with the smell of fresh-killed meat — rich, bloody, irresistible. Fourteen heads snap toward it as one. The pack breaks and vanishes into the woods, the grey brute sparing Pinecone a single backward glare that promises this isn’t finished.

Pinecone, for his part, looks extremely pleased with himself.

⚔

Further along the road they find a man slumped against a fallen log, robes torn, blood soaking through where wolf teeth found him. A spellcaster, by the look of the component pouches at his belt and the staff in one hand — and by the fact that he’s still alive at all.

The party huddles. Helping strangers in Barovia has a mixed track record, and everyone at that huddle knows it. But Shifty steps forward, small hands already glowing, and knits the worst of the wounds closed.

The stranger sits up with a groan and, by way of thanks, does something peculiar: he gathers arcane energy between his palms and releases a soft cloud of moths and butterflies, which drift into the underbrush and begin laying eggs among the leaves. Shifty watches this with an expression of pure religious awe.

“Where are you headed, friend?” the party asks.

“West,” the man says, “to see a business partner — and to meet his adopted son, at last. Perhaps you know him. Or heard of the West Barovian Ratrick Trading Company?”

The name lands around the wagon like a warm coal. Ratrick. Their old rogue, out there somewhere with Ilya, apparently building an empire. The party sends the stranger on his way with well-wishes and a few more of Shifty’s butterflies trailing behind him.

⚔

The windmill rises against the grey sky exactly as they left it — torn blades creaking their slow, endless rotation, the thick wooden door still sealed as Crystal left it months ago, when they pulled the children meant for pies out of the hags’ clutches.

Zilk reaches into his pack and produces the door handle he pried from this very door. The little device stirs in his palm and mutters, “Home again,” and the door swings open onto darkness and a smell like old grease and older rot.

The ancient kitchen lies thick with dust. Nothing has been cooked here in months. Everyone is grateful for that.

In a side room they find containers of every kind — barrels, crates, and one cart that is unmistakably a cage, its bars crusted with dried blood and tufts of fur… or possibly hair. No one lingers on what it held.

Crystal pries open a chest and finds four darts plunged into her arms and neck. Fortunately, time has lessened the effects of the poison. Crystal pulls them out, tosses them to the floor, and smashes them. At the very bottom of the chest she finds a book and pulls it out. After one look at it, she makes a decision that requires no thought: firing up her portable forge, Crystal welds the chest shut. The book she tosses into her pack.

Shifty volunteers for the upstairs, and the party climbs after him into the gloom above. Four sets of empty manacles hang chained to the wall. A pile of tiny shoes sits along one wall; a heap of dirty childrens’ clothes lies by another flight of stairs that rises into the darkness. On a low table beside the great turning mechanism of the mill lies a set of shears and a mound of shorn hair. High above, the blades groan on and on, turning gears for no one.

Shifty finds a tiny box and opens it: baby teeth, at least three dozen of them. The little cleric goes very quiet, then tucks the box carefully away.

Soulfire, saying nothing, lets her senses drift outward with a covert working of detecting magic — and feels it at once. Conjuration energy is humming somewhere on the floors above her head.

Crystal takes the ladder to the attic, where the smell alone nearly turns her back. A pile of skulls sits mouldering in the corner, and beside it, a dirty, abandoned leather bag. Soulfire calls up that it’s radiating strong magic. Crystal, reasonably assuming she’s just found treasure, tucks it away.

The bag has other ideas. Within moments it has swallowed the only thing in Crystal’s backpack — her Bag of Holding, and with it nearly everything she owns.

Crystal’s reaction can be heard from the ground floor.

She marches the wretched thing outside, sets it in the dirt, and burns it with extreme prejudice. The bag detonates in a flash of unravelling magic, raining Crystal’s possessions across the hillside — every item accounted for except the Bag of Holding itself, digested beyond recovery by what was, it turns out, a Bag of Devouring. Crystal gathers her scattered belongings one by one, muttering things in Draconic that require no translation.

⚔

Back inside, Zilk decides it’s time for answers. He reaches into his pack and draws out the head of the hag Bella, setting the grisly trophy on the kitchen table. The dead eyes pop open and fix on him with undimmed malice.

“Where is your sister?” Zilk demands.

“I will never tell!” the head shrieks, jaw working furiously.

Crystal, still in an incendiary mood, steps forward and applies a small, persuasive tongue of flame. The head’s convictions prove flexible.

“Offalia!” it howls. “Offalia may have gone to our mother — she lives in Berez! Berez, you wretches!”

Berez. The party exchanges glances, and talk turns at once to the road ahead — until the conversation dies mid-sentence.

From the second level, in the room with the manacles and the shorn hair, comes a slow, deliberate knocking.

Hands drift to weapons. Whispered incantations gather on lips. Whatever is up there, it knows they’re here.