10/07/2026: The Hut Had Legs

The scarecrows arrive from every direction. They are stitched from sacking, stuffed with straw, and armed with long, amber-bladed claws, and there are far more of them than there were only moments ago.

Komzin and Vincent Jager crest a rise and find the rest of the party knee-deep in scarecrows. Komzin tosses Vincent a blade from their newly recovered packs. It is not the focus the tiefling needs to cast spells, his actual stock in trade, and he handles it clumsily.

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Orbart is once again in the grip of a fear that has nothing to do with reason. Torgan handles the arrival of more scarecrows the way he handles most things: furiously, with his axe. This leaves nowhere for the fear to take hold. His first swing goes so wide it nearly needs its own map. Torgan’s second connects, but without much enthusiasm.

Then Komzin wades in. His enchanted greatsword catches a scarecrow from the flank and takes it apart so thoroughly there is nothing left.

Krelldutt fells another and, with it, the dread that has been sitting on his chest. Fiznik's gauntlets, covered in runes, speak in thunder. They rattle a cluster of scarecrows so badly their claws find nothing but air. Orbart lays a hand on one and lets death travel down his arm.

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A black shape, large and amorphous, resolves from the trees into something woman-shaped, but far larger than anything most of the group have seen. Baba Lysaga is furious, waving a quarterstaff and is bellowing orders at her scarecrows like a general. “Take the intruders alive! My son will be pleased to have them as hostages!”

Komzin has only recently learned that the Great Hag considers Count Strahd to be her son.

Vincent, frozen and crouched in the undergrowth, hears every word of it. Losing his arcane focus has made him an excellent listener.

Lysaga points at Fiznik with her staff, commanding, “General Komzin, Kill him! Kill that one! He has magic!” 

Komzin, eyes narrowing, does not respond to her. He steadies himself, draws on something deep and stubborn. Slowly, intentionally, Komzin curses Strahd, and the witch rears back as if he’d struck her. 

She screeches in rage, “Get my son’s name out of your filthy mouth, you traitor!”  Baba Lysaga summons a large swarm of wasps, which engulf the knight, stinging him painfully dozens of times.

Relentlessly, Komzin answers with a run of blows that would fell a lesser witch. Lysaga is not a lesser witch. She bursts into a cloud of mosquitoes, whines away across the clearing, and reassembles herself at a safe distance, still scowling, cursing Komzin’s name.

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The ground begins to shudder.

Krelldutt, whose eyes are made for the dark, picks out three shapes ahead: Lysaga, and two daughters standing seven feet tall apiece. Behind them, something enormous is coming through the forest. It is a ragged shack, gray and slumped, and it walks on a pair of colossal legs, snapping vines and saplings like kindling. It waves thick roots around itself, pounding them into the swampy earth and sending up sprays of mud.

Krelldutt answers by seeding the ground in Lysaga's path with thorns, one that will also impede the path of the magicked hut. A broad patch of bristling spikes . Lysaga could unmake that kind of magic if she were close enough to protect her hut. She is not close enough. Krelldutt retreats.

Meanwhile, Komzin is still inside the swarms of wasps Lysaga left behind as a parting gift. They have continued to sting him with real dedication. He hacks into the cloud and scatters half of it. The remaining wasps keep attacking him

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Vincent, holding Komzin’s sword gracelessly, takes stock. His magic items are almost certainly inside the hut. The hut is walking toward him. There is a plan in there somewhere, but it is the kind of plan that generally ends with someone being killed.

Fiznik finishes off a scarecrow. Then one of Lysaga's daughters, Offalia, flings a bolt of lightning across the clearing. It misses Vincent by a hand's breadth and incinerates the wasp swarm, which is the most helpful thing anyone in that family has done all night. She screams her rage.

The party suggests, gently, that Vincent might want to run. He has no argument. The hut keeps coming. It has, after all, a very long stride.