09/30/2026: Morning in Berez

Morning in Berez arrives dim and damp, and it brings headaches. In Baba Lysaga's goat shed, Komzin and Vincent Yeager wake from a sleep that was not entirely their idea. Their heads are thick and throbbing. Their packs are gone. So are their weapons, and worst of all, so is Vincent's orb. Without it, whatever power he commands stays locked inside him.

They don't have to look far. Through the slats, Morgantha and Offalia stand in the mud, passing the orb between them, or failing to. Each wants it. Neither says why, but the way they grip it says plenty: whatever Vincent has been carrying, the hags think it is worth more than he is. Unarmed, outnumbered, and still half-drugged from whatever Baba Lysaga put in their stew, the two decide this is not the morning to settle it.

They slip out the back toward the edge of the village. Their packs, as it turns out, can be plucked from near a pile of firewood, but Vincent's focus may be lost. They turn to the flee from the hags into the swamp.

The ground there has its own plans. Again and again, one man or the other sinks to the thighs in quicksand, and each time he hauls himself free. They are moving, Komzin sincerely hopes, toward the road out of cursed Berez.

⚔

Picking his own way through the marsh, Krelldutt returns from Brother Gregor's churchyard, Marina's monument freshly scrubbed behind him. He finds his companions in the fog with company. Scarecrows ring Fiznik, Torgan, and Orbart: lanky, stitched, embers glowing where eyes should be. They do not charge. They shift with a sound like scratching twigs, then shift again, the way dogs move sheep. Someone has given them a job, and it is not killing. Yet.

Fiznik declines to wait and find out what it is. A scarecrow turns its burning stare on him, the kind that drains a man's courage. Fiznik laughs at it, but at a distance.

Krelldutt arrives at a run, wades in beside the gnome, and swings three times. The third blow finds something vital and undoes whatever magic holds the creature together. The scarecrow bursts into a storm of straw, screaming as it goes, loud enough to reach every ear in Berez.

The surviving scarecrows answer with their eyes. Fiznik shrugs off another glare. Torgan feels a deep, existential dread begin to take hold of him, but his fury burns it away before it can settle. Orbart is less lucky. The fear wraps itself around his heart and stays.

Torgan's rage has courage in it, but not much aim. His blows land like a man beating a rug: plenty of effort, and the rug is in no real danger. It is that kind of day for him.

Krelldutt's sunblade comes down on a second scarecrow, parting the fog along with the straw, and the light loosens the fear's grip on Orbart. The minotaur, still shaking but upright, calls holy fire down on another and watches it blacken. Fiznik's gauntlets speak in thunder, again and again, until his scarecrow ends up tangled in his cloak, clawing blind. Another loses its claws to Krelldutt and is abandoned by its companions. Orbart obliges by dispatching it.

Something to the northwest is shaking the ground as it move with heavy steps. Nobody is able to find out what it is.

⚔

Komzin and Vincent, muddy to the waist, find the church. Brother Gregor hangs on its wall as he has for eight hundred years, long enough to have run out of new things to say about it. He begs them to free him.

Komzin tries alone, and the chains decline. Together they try again, and after eight centuries, something gives. Gregor comes down off the wall and blesses them both. Should they ever stand before Lord Strahd, he tells them, they will carry his vengeance for Marina.

Then the skeletal monk slips away into the swamp, leaving Vincent and Komzin in the empty churchyard. Only the crumbling wall remains, still marked by the shape of him.