09/09/2026: Close Enough

The two hags close on Vincent, easily a head and a half taller than him, close enough that he can feel the ground tremble faintly with each step.

"Where is the child? Why is she not with you?" Vincent has little to offer them — a girl glimpsed once, at a distance, through a haze of bad wine and unfamiliar company. "I really don't know," he tells them. "I didn't even know the people I was traveling with."

The hags withdraw, hissing to each other. The larger of the two — Morgantha, her sister calls her — drifts a hand to the hilt of a wickedly curved dagger. A dozen feet away, Vincent's fingers crackle with violet-black light.

The bolt catches the nearer hag as she charges, claws raking down his chest before Morgantha flanks him from behind. He answers with another crackling strike — a shriek of pain and fury comes back through the dense fog. But two is more than one, and Vincent, alone, is quickly overwhelmed. 

Morgantha loops an arm around his neck to tilt his head back. She works a stopper free with her thumb, and upends a phial over his face. Sickly green vapor blooms, and the last thing Vincent registers is the stench of it before the world goes black.

⚔

Krelldutt calls into the tunnel beneath the Gulthias Tree. No one answers. He enters, slow and careful. Torgan and Orbart close behind, moving through the stink of wet dog, sweat, and something older and worse.

Somewhere ahead, there are wet crunching sounds in the dark. The three try to move silently toward it — then Torgan's armor clanks, loud enough to still the chewing dead. A heavy tread starts forward instead. A voice — not spoken words, but simply there, inside the skull — demands to know who has entered the cave. It is Torgan alone who hears it clearly, and Torgan alone it seems to address. He thinks his answer back rather than risk speaking aloud: We are visitors. We don't mean you any harm. Whether it lands, he has no way of knowing.

Krelldutt eases to the mouth of a wider chamber ahead and gets his answer: an otyugh, enormous, shambling on its three misshapen legs. The creature drops a dead dog from what might charitably be called a mouth. It stumps through the burned-out firepit, overturning the bowls of rotted food that sit abandoned. Baskets of clothing lie where they were dropped. No druids. No people at all — just the signs of a camp left in a hurry, which is exactly the answer Krelldutt needs for Vallaki.

The otyugh keeps coming.

This should have been enough for them all to leave. But Torgan, eyes bright, asks Krelldutt, "Can we kill it?"

Krelldutt shakes his head — "I don't think so" — and the tortle turns to go. Torgan, never one to leave well enough alone, calls into the dark instead: "Are you friend or foe?"

The voice answers almost before he finishes: I will find you. Which is not, Torgan notes, an answer to the question asked.

The otyugh fills the tunnel mouth a moment later, three elephantine legs braced, a lipless gash of a mouth ringed with barbed, groping tentacles. It forces itself half into the passage, an eye-stalk swiveling to hunt for Torgan, one limb squeezing through the tight space while the other pins uselessly against the stone above. It roars — in frustration, maybe — and lashes the free tentacle out to a distance Torgan wouldn't have believed, hauling him in with its throat gaping wide enough to leave no doubt of the otyugh’s intentions.

"Foe," Torgan confirms, somewhat late, and scrambles free as Orbart's mace almost immediately comes down on the offending limb. The blow buys them a few feet of retreat, but that is all they need: the otyugh cannot fit through the tunnel to the surface.

Dwarf and minotaur trade a look on the way back up the passage — the specific look of two people simultaneously remembering they'd already been warned.

⚔

Brom, Urwin Martikov's eldest, finds Komzin with Blinsky, an empty bottle and a pair of wooden mugs between them. The boy delivers his message shyly, then bolts for the door before anyone can ask questions. Komzin pushes back and heads to the barn behind the Blue Water Inn. Urwin looks like a man who hasn't slept, and gets straight to his point: a friend named Dinan, last known to be traveling near Berez, has gone quiet. Would Komzin go see if he's still breathing? It would, Urwin adds, have the added benefit of getting Komzin out of Vallaki while Dunlarr cools off.

Komzin knows Berez. Not from rumor, and not quite from memory either — from something closer to having lived it more than once. Like others in Barovia, his soul returns again and again to be born back into Strahd's realm. Unlike others, he keeps dim but persistent memories of his lives before. And unlike nearly all others, he is always remade to serve the Count. In his first life, he marched as the general of Strahd's foot soldiers, heading into Berez during the conquest of the Valley of Barovia. 

All of this before Strahd had become, well, Strahd. No matter.

Berez then was a pastoral stretch of riverbank, trout-rich and green. Two or three lifetimes later, Komzin remembers hearing that the Count had drowned that same village in a fit of temper over a woman named Marina. Eight hundred years later, and the swamp remains — all of Barovia still under Strahd's curse, but Berez itself gone. What's left, by all accounts, is haunted by a witch. It probably should be.

Komzin agrees to go. Urwin lends him a horse — a great black gelding called Kyril — and he rides out. Just past the bridge over the Lun, something glints in the mud catches Komzin’s attention. It is a pocket watch, half-buried, its hands stopped at eleven minutes past ten. Komzin flicks the mud from the cracked crystal face and recognizes it at once — Rahadin's. He pockets it without ceremony.

The road south turns to soupy fog and biting flies, insistent enough that Kyril's ears go flat and his pace slows to almost nothing. A raven's cry, too close, spooks him badly enough that the animal throws Komzin from his back into the mud; the horse bolts back the way they came. Alone now and caked in mud, Komzin follows the sound — the same cry, over and over, from the same place, more exhausted than alarmed. 

He nearly steps into a stretch of standing quicksand before he finds the source: a raven nailed through one wing to a length of timber, flapping its free wing in a slow, hopeless rhythm, held fast by a nail that catches what little light there is strangely — as though it had never known rust at all.

The bird spots him and begins to squawk, frantic, its one good wing beating uselessly at the air.