10/06/2026: The Scarecrow Fields of Berez

The companions gather their courage and leave the ruined Ulrich Manor behind, its broken windows watching them go like eyes. The swamp swallows them almost at once. Fog curls around their knees, insects whine in the reeds, and every step squelches into black mud that clings and sucks at their boots as if the ground itself warns them about going on. No one says much. 

Nike hears it first: a dry, brittle rattling, like twigs knocking together in a wind that isn't blowing.

Out of the fog lurches a scarecrow, burlap face slack and stitched, claws of sharpened wood raised high. Before the rogue can draw steel, its hollow eyes ignite with a sickly orange glow. Nike's own eyes cloud over with mist. Her arm locks in place, raised to ward the thing off, and there she stands, frozen mid-flinch, a statue of her own terror.

Biblo charges forward and meets the same fate, a second scarecrow's burning gaze pinning the great dragonborn where he stands. Three more emerge from the mist, fanning out toward the rest of the party with a horrible, unhurried patience. Soulfire seizes. Crystal feels the heat of the glare wash over her scales, and in the half-heartbeat before her body betrays her, the sorceress understands exactly what they are facing.

"Those are ember-warded!" she thinks, desperate and furious. "Protected from fire! Of course they are. Of course the hag would think of that."

Then her muscles lock tight, and the thought is all she has left.

Zilk takes one look at the situation, more than half the party turned to statues, the fog thickening, and makes a tactician's decision: things are dire, and dire calls for violence. The bugbear melts into the shadows. A moment later he is behind Crystal's captor, and his blades move faster than the eye can follow, a storm of blindingly lethal strikes that hacks the scarecrow apart. It doesn't fall so much as explode, bursting into a cloud of straw that drifts down to settle over the bugbear's shoulders and the muddy ground like a ridiculous harvest snowfall.

Zilk plucks a stalk of straw from his ear. Crystal gasps as feeling floods back into her limbs.

Farther back, Shifty plants his small feet in the mud and calls down holy fire, again and again, pillars of radiant light lancing through the fog. The scarecrows may laugh at ordinary flame, but this is something else, and the little kobold cleric is not about to stop.

But the scarecrows have plans of their own. Two of them seize the paralyzed Biblo and drag him backward, his heels carving furrows in the muck, until the mist swallows him whole.

And then the ground begins to shake.

Heavy footsteps, slow and deliberate, thud through the swamp. Each one sends ripples across the standing water. These are not Baba Lysaga's footsteps. These are far, far bigger.

Rolling out of the fog comes a crude, crooked hut, its thatched roof sagging, its walls patched and ancient, balanced impossibly on a pair of enormous chicken legs. It sways as it walks, scaly talons clawing at the mud. The hut leans far, far over, groaning like an old ship, and slams one of the gnarled roots that sprout from beneath its floor into the ground beside Biblo. The root whistles as it falls, a thin and eerie shriek, and strikes the bog with a crash that sends a wave of icy, filthy water over the dragonborn.

Biblo comes back to himself sputtering and soaked, the spell broken by sheer cold shock. He tries to rise and finds he can't move his arms. Iron manacles bind his wrists behind his back, the chains heavy and cold against his scales.

He has only an instant to strain against them, muscles bunching, a growl building in his throat, before another root snakes down from beneath the hut and wraps around him, and the Creeping Hut of Baba Lysaga lifts him off the ground.