07/28/2026: In the Rain

The last of the wolves goes down in a wash of fire, Crystal and Abi's spells silencing the pack's howls. Smoke curls off scorched fur and drifts low across the frost-stiffened grass near the windmill, and for a moment nobody speaks — just the tick of embers cooling and the distant creak of the mill's broken sails turning in the rain and wind.

They take stock. Packs are checked, blades wiped clean, potions counted against what's left of the road ahead. They set out on a curiously uneventful trip back along the Old Svalich Road.

They opt to go around the city rather than stop, and soon Vallaki is behind them. By the time they've circled its walls and made camp on the far bank of the Luna River, light is fading and clouds are building. The water is black and quick beside them, murmuring over stones. No fire tonight — not with the rain and not with the kind of eyes that watch this valley — so they eat their rations cold, huddled close, trading jokes to keep the dark at a comfortable distance.

Overhead the clouds have started to lower. Lightning flickers within them. Then the sky itself seems to peel apart into wings — a swarm of bats pours out of the dark in a chittering rush, wheeling low over the camp before scattering up into the tree line. Everyone's hand finds a weapon. Someone hisses the word 'vampire' before Nike, craning her neck, spots a large bat hanging upside down from a branch, wings folded around itself like a cloak.

"These are flying foxes!" she cries, delighted, all thought of danger forgotten.

Soulfire is already grinning beside her, already calculating. Between the two of them a plan hatches fast and entirely unwise — catch a pair, tame them, keep them as pets.

"You know they spy for Strahd," Zilk says, flatly.

Neither of his entranced traveling companions listens. Nike and Soulfire move off after the bats, heads tipped back, eyes fixed on the branches above, and Zilk watches them go with the particular unease of someone who can already see how this ends.

He's right to worry. In the distance, he sees something detach itself from the dark behind them — tall, elegant, unhurried — and Zilk's stomach drops. He hisses at the others, waves, tries to drag their attention down out of the trees and onto the danger walking toward them instead.

"Good evening, Nike."

Count Strahd steps out of the shadow like he's simply out for a stroll, and the night seems to go quieter around him. Undeterred, or maybe just too caught up to care, Nike and Soulfire try to bargain — bats for their blood, an absurd little trade offered with a straight face. Strahd is not amused. He barely glances at Soulfire.

"I need a word with you, Nike."

Even at a distance, Zilk feels those eyes pass over him and he takes an involuntary step back. "Absolutely not," he says, though it isn't really his choice to make.

"Come, Nike." It isn't a request, but a powerful Command spell. Strahd turns and walks into the treeline, and Nike — jaw tight — is compelled to follow. Only Soulfire and Zilk are close enough to catch fragments of what passes between them, murmured just above the sound of the rain starting to needle down through the leaves.

What they hear is enough to chill the both of them. Strahd already knows — of course he knows — that Nike took something from him. The amulet. The one she tried to destroy just before passing it to Rahadin for safekeeping. Nike is both terrified and outraged that Strahd is accusing her of yet another theft.

Count Strahd stares at her deeply, and then says, "Yes, I see that you did pass it to Rahadin."

What the Vampire Lord of Barovia does not explore in front of Nike: why Rahadin hasn't returned it to its rightful owner, Strahd himself. The Count's voice, when he asks, has the softness of a blade being drawn slowly from its sheath. He does not raise it. He doesn't need to. He tells Nike, almost gently, what awaits her when she dies — not the release of her ghost, not even the curse of serving as a spawn chained to his will, but something worse. Much worse.

Something he doesn't bother to name.

Nike shudders, but in a show of bravada, demands, "Can we have some of the bats?" Apparently even threats of a fate worse than undeath can't fully derail Nike's train of thought.

Strahd looks at her for a long moment. "What do you wish with my pets?"

"We love them!"

"They are my spies," he says. "They let me see into every corner of my domain." And then he is gone, folded back into a coil of mist as if he were never there at all.

The two bats Soulfire actually managed to catch are not having a good night. They squirm and snap, scratching at her hands, clearly desperate to be anywhere else. Biblo, taking pity — or maybe just curious — casts Speak With Animals, and what the bats have to say is enough to change everyone's mind. They aren't spies, or pets, or omens. They're just creatures a very long way from a family they'd like very much to go home to. Chastened, Nike and Soulfire let them go, and the two shapes vanish gratefully back into the storm-dark trees.

It's Crystal who notices the pocket watch lying in the mud where Strahd had so recently stood, its case rain-slicked and gleaming faintly in what little light is left. She turns it over in her palm, and a small key tumbles free from inside the lid, landing soft in the wet grass. Nobody quite believes it was dropped by accident.

"Strahd doesn't do accidents," Zilk points out, and no one argues. Still, Crystal pockets the watch — with a plan, at least, to hand it back the next time their paths cross. The key, Crystal thinks, she will keep for herself unless Strahd asks about it expressly.

They don't get much sleep. The watch ticks, loud and steady, a sound that seems to burrow directly into their brains. Soulfire is fairly certain by now that it's magical, which does nothing to make it less irritating. Eventually Shifty wedges it under a rock, muffling the tick to something almost bearable, and the group turns to the more pressing problem of where, exactly, a person can safely sleep in a thunderstorm. Crystal and Biblo claim the bed of the wagon. Soulfire crawls beneath it. Shifty climbs into the branches overhead. Zilk tucks himself under an outcropping of rock, ignoring every warning about what heavy rain does to loose stone. Beneath the drumming of the storm and the watch's stubborn tick, wolves howl somewhere out in the dark — far off, for now.

It's the silence that alerts Crystal. The ticking has stopped. Unable to sleep anyway, she goes to check, and finds the watch gone — taken as quietly as it was left. In its place: two bats hang from a perch in a gilded birdcage. The pair watch the sorcerer with far too much intelligence in their small black eyes. Beneath them, at the bottom of their delicately filigreed cage, is an elegant ivory box of caterpillars.

Zilk eyes them suspiciously.

⚔

The woods answer with violence. Green-skinned shapes lurch out from between the trees. Ghasts, the grave caller variety, slip over the slick undergrowth, deliberate and hungry. Soulfire takes a hit thick with poison and staggers under it; Pinecone and Crystal manage to dodge clear. Around them the rain hammers down harder, thunder rolling in on the heels of every flash of lightning, and the battle grinds on into the storm — Crystal's spells guttering and flaring against wet air, Zilk darting between rotted limbs, the caged bats screeching from somewhere in the dark like a warning nobody has time to heed.

The rain does not let up. Neither does the fight.