08/26/2026: Ravens and Revelations (PG-13)

The fire at the Vistani camp burns low for Viktor. Danika holds her cup without drinking much of it. Dag and Violet Robin drink in the measured way of people pacing themselves through a long night. Zzizix touches nothing stronger than water. Vincent Yeager touches everything within reach, and by the time Madam Eva shuffles out to sit by the flames, he is well past the point of walking straight.

The old woman studies Zzizix first. He meets her stare and finds nothing in the ancient creases of her face he can read. Then Madam Eva’s attention slides to Vincent, who lifts his cup to her, delighted, mistaking her flat regard for warmth. She sends a young Vistani to fetch them both to her tent.

Inside, incense hangs thick. Three porcelain cups sit before her, so fine the candlelight seems to pass straight through the porcelain.

Vincent drops onto the bench hard enough to rock it. “What is it that we are here for?” He squints at her. “Who are you?”

She waits until his eyes drop before she answers. “My great-granddaughter has offered you a reading from me. Some call me a fortune teller, a term I dislike. But I can sometimes see into the future.” She gestures at the deck, worn soft as old leather. “You have but to ask, and I will look. Which of you will go first?”

Zzizix tips his head toward Vincent. “He may go.”

Vincent’s question tumbles out in two halves — whether he’ll see Waterdeep again, and why he was ever brought to Barovia at all. Madam Eva chides him for asking two questions, then forgives it, tender tonight with her own grief over Viktor.

Madam Eva closes her eyes and intones, “Your way home runs through whatever task brought him here, and that the task concerns something you have lost.”

Eyes round, Vincent gasps, “Yes! I lost a book that—”

”Not a book!” The old woman’s hand slaps the tabletop with shocking strength. “You have lost something nearer to you. Your memory. Of how you came to this land at all.”

She kisses the deck and holds it out. He kisses it in turn. He plucks a card.

”The Star,” she reads with her brow drawn tight.

“West,” she says. “What is lost is not always gone.” She describes a house of stone above a fearful village, a keeper who mends what is broken and keeps those who serve him close enough that they never think to leave. Something of yours may be there, Vincent, but whether it would be returned gently, or willingly, I cannot say.”

Then her eyes move to Zzizix, and her grip on his hand tightens. “The Heirophant.” She sighs, muttering. “You are also called to St Markovia Abbey, high above the village called Krezk.”

“Does this being have a portal?” Zzizix demands.

“The being is a healer. Very powerful.” Madam Eva says, “And he has spent longer than either of you or I have been alive digging at the wall between this world and the next — and never broken through. But go carefully. Not everything that heals is kind.”

 “But does this being have a portal?” Zzizix is singleminded about this point.

“It is possible,” whispers Madam Eva.

“Kresk.” Zzizix repeats the name once, and leaves the tent without another word.

Behind him, Madam Eva catches Vincent’s hand as he rises. “Moderation,” she tells him. “You will need a clear head for what comes next.”

⚔

A Vistani calls after Zzizix as he crosses the firelight toward the dark. “The roads are not safe, gnome! Wait for morning!”

He doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t slow.

The rain has stopped by the time he reaches the stone bridge at Tser Falls, the roar of the falls swallowing the sound of his footsteps. Ravens crowd every parapet and column, hundreds of them, dozing with their beaks tucked into their feathers. He picks his way across, careful, and is nearly clear when a loose stone turns under his boot.

The bridge erupts. Feathers and beaks and the beat of wings close over him, and for a moment there is nothing in the world but screaming birds. He carves a word into the air with a shard of glass, and dozens of ravens around him drop in bloody, shredded piles. The survivors scatter noisily into the dark.

Zzizix walks on. An hour later he passes a wrecked wagon lost under vines, tempted by the ruin but walking on. An hour after that, a stench reaches him before anything else does — and the ghasts are already closing before he can finish turning around.

This is the last road Zzizix will ever walk, in a country that was never his home.

⚔

The horse tethered at the Raven River bridge is not a horse. Its eyes burn, and twin jets of flame curl from its nostrils when Rahadin steps out from the treeline behind it, cloak settling over one shoulder.

He points a gloved finger at Torgan. “Dwarf. My Master sends a message.”

“I am Torgan.” His voice holds steadier than his companions would expect.

“He wishes you to know that after he has drained every drop of blood from your body, he will eat your liver.”

There is no real answer to this threat.

Rahadin’s attention shifts to Krelldutt, and he asks the tortle to walk with him — down along the riverbank, close enough that the others can still see them, far enough that they can’t hear clearly.

“You are a friend of the woman called Ireena.” It isn’t a question, whatever shape it takes. “My Lord wishes to invite you to Castle Ravenloft. His hope is that you might call her back from wherever she lingers. She is to be his bride. Will you come?”

“I have business of my own to finish first.”

Rahadin studies him for a long moment. “When might my Master expect you?”

Krelldutt does the arithmetic quickly. “Three days. Possibly more.”

“I will tell Count Strahd three days.” Rahadin is already turning, already swinging up onto the nightmare’s back. It wheels and bolts east before Krelldutt has taken a step back toward the others.

⚔

The camp that used to stand outside the Martikov vineyard — canvas, cookfires, a family too frightened to sleep behind their own walls — is gone. They’re inside again. Whatever had been circling the place has, for now, lost interest.

Davian Martikov meets them on the porch. The blights have all but vanished, he reports, and the druids have gone quiet with them — not out of mercy, he suspects, but because something up on Yester Hill has claimed their attention instead. “I don’t know what. I’d rather not guess.”

“Things,” he says, settling into a chair, “are better than we have any right to expect. But it’s like waiting for the other boot to fall.”

He already knows, by way of Dinan, that Krelldutt was delivered a message from Strahd concerning the woman called Ireena. He doesn’t ask who she is. Over the wine, he asks instead whether Krelldutt understands what saving her means.

“She has died before,” Davian says gently, “and she will die again. If it happens naturally, death is a mercy. She will return to Barovia in a few years, a few decades, spared from whatever waits for her at Ravenloft in this lifetime. Waking her now undoes that. Waking her now makes her a monster’s bride, and in time, perhaps, a monster of her own.”

He touches Krelldutt’s arm. “You are a man of honor, my friend. Would it not be kinder to simply let her go?”

Krelldutt doesn’t answer, and Davian doesn’t press. He lets the silence stand as answer enough and turns to feeding them — venison, bread, wine better than a vineyard under siege has any right to pour. He asks, almost carelessly, whether there’s word from the others, the ones who went east to Tser Falls. There isn’t. No one has seen them.

Talk drifts to back to Strahd. Asked whether the vampire lord’s promised interest in his liver troubles him, Torgan gives the kind of answer that sounds braver than it probably feels — that strength is the only real preparation, and worry accomplishes nothing against something that could be anywhere at all. 

Davian listens with the patience of a man who has heard young people say confident things before, and doesn’t argue. He only points out, gently, that strength has never been what protected the people he’s known from the Vampire Lord. Numbers have. Staying close. He can offer no guarantees beyond that, because in Barovia there aren’t any left to give.

The vineyard is offered as a place to stay the night. But the sun hasn’t committed to setting, and Yester Hill is close enough to make the offer feel optional. Torgan and Krelldutt settle it between them: the hill next, to see for themselves what has kept the druids so quiet.

⚔

As Krelldutt prepares himself to leave, he thinks back to much earlier in his time in Barovia. Madam Eva had waved him to her Tarroka deck and he had chosen from among the fan of her cards.

 In the candlelight, Madam Eva’s wrinkled face peered into his own. “This is the Executioner, Mr Krelldutt,” she said to him, very softly, almost apologetically. “You will be unjustly accused. And then punished for a crime you did not commit.”

He wonders if the time of that accusation is approaching.