07/22/2026: Resolutions

Orbart pounds down the hall and finds Bayleaf braced in a bedroom doorway, weapon up. The minotaur rounds the corner into the room and stops. The one who called himself Viktor lies where he fell. His daughter is gone. The Vistana swordsman stands at the ready, a dangerous glint in his eye. 

Bayleaf comes in beside Orbart, and his blade lands, knocking the elbow of the Vistana, who swears. Together they drive the swordsman back, and for the first time something moves behind the man’s eyes that might be fear.

In the hallway, Torgan calls for rope. Dag throws him a length and the dwarf cuts it into working pieces, binding the unconscious lieutenant at wrist and ankle. Above him, Krelldutt looses an arrow down the corridor and catches a second lieutenant mid-search. The man snarls and answers with his crossbow. The bolt skates off the tortle’s shell and Krelldutt swings into the shelter of the far bedroom. The lieutenant does not stay to finish it. He runs in the direction he hopes the girl has gone.

Arabella is in the front room, flat against the wall, breathing in short hard pulls. Her scream when his hands close on her is high and thin and does not stop. She gets his wrist between her teeth and bites down, and he swears but does not let go. He hauls her against his chest and turns for the door.

On the other side of the wall, in the bloodied bedroom, the swordsman rears back and opens Orbart from shoulder to ribs. The minotaur goes down. Bayleaf falls a moment later, close enough that their blood runs together on the boards.

The Vistana runs, heedless of his mission to retrieve the girl. He crosses the hall into the parlor, where a startled guard throws a spear that goes wide and a knight’s arrow scores him without slowing him. He hits the flimsy back door and flings himself into the shadows beside the jamb, out of sight. The guard comes pelting through after him and does not see the sweep of steel that takes him. But the knight is close behind, and a second guard, then Dinan of the Order of the Feather. They capture the swordsman alive. There is a rope waiting for him in Vallaki.

In the front room, Arabella is still fighting. She finds the same wrist a second time and bites until she tastes blood, and this time the man howls and drops her. She lands on her feet. She is out of the room and into Dag’s arms before he can straighten. Then the guards, Krelldutt, and Violet Robin are on the Vistani lieutenant. He will not get a third chance at Arabella.

Torgan reaches the nearest body first. Orbart finally draws a shuddering breath and stays. In the same moments, Bayleaf goes through the veil after Viktor.

From Dag’s arms, Arabella begins to wail.

⚔

Twelve hours earlier, a handful of hunters stand over the battered body of Komzin, deep in the footprint of the Wintersplinter. The blight is still descending the hillside, missing one dusk elf cabin by a hand’s width and stepping clean over another, shouldering through the forest as though it were grass. It has an appointment at the Sunset Gate.

Komzin lies still in a rising pool of mud and his own blood while they discuss him overhead. They discuss him in their own language, Vistan, which is a language that Komzin is fortunately fluent in. 

“Serves the traitor right. Feed his body to the wolves — easier than burying or burning him.”

Rough hands take him by the wrists and ankles. They swing him twice and let go, and the clatter of his plate down the slope covers the sound he makes on landing. He comes to rest face-up. Rain washes the mud from his cheek. He does not risk a breath.

A door to one of the cabins opens and one of the Vistani snarls, “Not your business, old man!” The door closes without comment. The hunters go back to their conversation.

“Both swordsmen and all the scouts are hunting the girl. They’ll go all the way to Vallaki if they must.”

“They won’t need to.” Laughter rolls down the hill after him.

When the voices have gone Komzin rolls to his knees, then stands. He moves through the blackness between the cabins that ring the hill, and despite his keen darkvision his boot finds no purchase in the mud. He goes down in a clanking heap.

A door creaks open again. “Who is it? Who’s out there?” The words are Drowic, and Komzin has not heard the tongue since he visited his mother for the last time at Ravenloft. Komzin lies as still as the grave.

Bells jingle from the hilltop. The hunters have come back.

“What is it, old man?”

“I heard someone in armor stumbling around out here.” The old man switches to heavily accented Vistan.

A silence, and then: “Are you sure he was dead?”

“Of course he was dead. Who gets stepped on by the great blight and lives?”

“He wore platemail, ass. We must find him.”

Komzin gets his hands under him and his boot slips again, and the noise goes up the hillside and comes back off the cabin walls twice over. Two of the Vistani start toward him. A third hesitates. The fourth points the other way and says flatly that it came from over there.

They argue. Komzin holds his breath.

They go west. Away from him

Komzin fills his lungs, slowly, unable to believe his luck. He starts the long walk back to Vallaki.