24th October 2025 - The Broken Saint

The iron door groaned and the hinges protested like old men unused to motion. When it opened, it revealed not a body, not a coffin, but air — a void where a life should have been. Mist poured from the chamber, a cold, hungry breath that spilled into the catacombs and crawled along the stone as if it, too, wanted to know what lay beyond.

Aeli’s hands tightened on her sword. The nameplate on the door read, clean and final, Ireena Kolyana, Wife. The letters had been carved fresh. They shone in the torchlight like an accusation.

An empty tomb is not mercy. An empty tomb is a clue.

They moved from crypt to crypt, eyes scouring for anything left behind. One slab stood sealed and stubborn, the stone smooth as the men who had forged it. When Kasimir read the name, his voice went thin. Petrina Velikovna, Bride.

He pressed his palm to the marble as if he could warm the letters with his grief. “She’s in there,” he said, and the sentence had lost the shape of hope. They tried crowbars and heave after heave; the stone would not yield. Kasimir put his ear to the cold face and listened. From within came the faintest sound, not words they could make out, but the rhythm of breath. She was inside. This much they could not deny.

It was curiosity and fury that made them break another crypt. Curiosity because every block of masonry might hold a lie or a truth. Fury because in a place of graves, any secrecy feels like cruelty.

When the slab fell away, a woman rose from the black as if the earth itself had vomited her back into light. Her face was the face of a girl Kasimir had loved. Her eyes were hollowed into moons of grief. Her voice tore at the air and at them.

She screamed.

The sound took Marcus to his knees; it pushed through bone and air and left a raw wind inside his chest. Aeli moved first, then Lars, then Kasimir, who called the name that had kept him alive through worse things than this. The creature, Petrina, and not Petrina, recognized him in some broken halffire of memory. “Kasimir! You found me!” it cried, and that recognition was a knife.

They fought like people who have been given no other recourse. Lars beat at it with his mace; Aeli drove the Sun Sword until the blade sang with radiance; Kasimir reached and called the rituals he now knew. As the thing tried to slip through stone and shadow, Lars met it with one last strike. It dissolved into smoke and a cloud of raw, keening noise, as though a mind had been torn from a body and found no place to land.

In the ruins of the crypt they found coins stamped with a profile none of them liked to see, Strahd’s seal, and a small, carved wooden spellbook, heavy with the smell of damp wood and older things. Worse than the money, worse than the book, were Petrina’s own written words. The pages trembled in Kasimir’s hands as he read the account: dragged by her own people, pleading, the breaking of bone, Strahd’s silence. The script described betrayal with a casual cruelty that made Kasimir stagger.

He went very still, then spoke in a voice that had been tempered in grief and made sharper. “She is more broken than I believed. But the thing we sought in the Amber Temple can bind the split places together.” He told them what he had given up to Zhudun, the name of the power, the price. He would not hide that price from friends.

He placed his hands on the bones. The cathedral of the catacombs stilled and breathed. A green light cracked open the darkness like a wound. Flesh knitted. Tendons eased. Petrina rose, a living girl where only bones had been a blink before.

Life, in Barovia, is always paid for. This time the coin was Kasimir’s own warm color. As she took her brother in trembling arms, the man who had called her back changed; the warmth left him slowly like air escaping a bellows. His skin paled. The vigor in his jaw slackened. Life for life, an honest trade, if such things can be called honest.

They left the catacombs carrying a sister who was whole and a brother altered. The rescue was exacting and absolute; the costs laid themselves bare the instant they stepped into the stairwell toward the surface.

They climbed until the castle seemed to lift them on cold hands. Storm tore a hole in the roof overhead and rain made ribbons down the broken parapets. In the rafters lurked a jack-o’-lantern contraption, a thing fashioned for mockery, a scarecrow with a grin like a blade. It watched and reminded them that even a distracted castle was a cruel one.

A familiar corridor and a hidden door took them into a study that smelled like hearth and memory. Over the mantel hung a portrait: a likeness of Ireena so precise it felt like treachery. The room was arranged as if for comfort, a lie worn as domesticity. In a corner a narrow staircase, secret as a confession, spiraled down to the brazier chamber.

They remembered the poem, the lines that matched stones to places. The brazier sat, cold and obedient, full of seven fist-sized stones. Marcus’s hand found the indigo one, the line in the verse that had read “Indigo to the master's bride.” His fingers were steady. He threw the stone into the smoldering ring. The fire flared, cold at first, then deadly bright. They plunged their hands into the heat and the world unraveled.

Light folded and they were not in Ravenloft any longer.

They found themselves on a stone path outside the Abbey of Saint Markovia, an impossible shift that had a cruel, logistical clarity to it: the brazier’s magic moved them to the place meant for the bride.

They made haste to the restorative pool. Aeli drank and felt the wound inside her shoulders ease like a tide pulling back. The pool’s water was clean and true; it repaired and it revealed. Marcus went in next, cautiously. For a moment the water was mercy: it pulled cold fingers along him and began to mend where the castle had broken him. Then something, an image, an echo, grabbed at him from the depth. Lars-shaped iron hands clutched his leg and the eye in Marcus’s cheek darted about like a startled thing. The sensation was real enough to make his breath come raggedly. Even here, sanctuary exacted a price.

They set out from the Abbey into a Krezk that felt wrong, the houses asleep and shutters drawn, a hush that smelled like a held breath. The trees watched rather than swayed.

Then the eyes appeared in the gloom, pairs, small and feral. They were not the tall, seasoned wolves they had broken before but smaller, more urgent. The fight started like a stone cast into still water: sudden ripples that became roars.

Marcus loosed a Lightning Bolt with hands that moved too fast, and the air cracked with sound. Lars met the beasts with bone-breaking blows; Aeli carved starlight and sun into hide. When the last of them fell the truth unrolled like a sleep-shadow: the bodies did not remain wolf. They reverted to smaller, human shapes, the children they had once freed from a worse pit. Their faces were small and bitten; their eyes slid shut like windows being closed.

The town’s dark hush made sense then: the sickness had not come from outside but had been kept inside, hidden among the innocents. Mercy was a knife in such places. The cost of saving some was the entropy of others.

They stood over the little bodies, each beat of silence like a tally. Kasimir bowed his head and did not ask whether vengeance or sorrow would come first.

As they stood over the bodies of the children they were forced to kill, contemplating the grim task of searching for more survivors, or more threats, Lars spotted a familiar figure watching them from a shadowed path. Sorrow, the treacherous Tiefling, with a devilish look in her eyes, her motives and allegiance more unclear than ever. She did not hurry. Her eyes flicked across them, amused and appraising.

She did not wait for argument. Without another look she faded into the night like a grim echo. Behind her the village breathed, and the wind carried the soft sound of distant bells and the promise of struggle yet to come.