26th September 2025 - The Amber Temple's Secret

The silence in the Amber Temple was complete, thick and waiting, like a held breath that had lasted for centuries. Every step Marcus took stirred the dust of forgotten ages. The corridor they followed was narrow, half-collapsed, and slick with ancient frost.

Then, at the end of the passage, they found it, a chamber of scattered scrolls and broken inkpots, the air heavy with the scent of old parchment and rot.

And in the middle of it stood a skeleton.

Tattered robes hung from its frame like cobwebs on bones, and in its skull burned two faint red lights, steady and knowing.

“Do I know you?” it asked, its voice dry and brittle, like parchment being torn.

Marcus hesitated. Lars’s hand drifted to his weapon. Aeli stepped forward, her light-bright blade lowering slightly. The creature did not move to strike.

Thus began their strange conversation with the one Lars would later name Mr. S.

Mr. S did not know who he was. He only knew that he had been here, in this place, for a thousand years. He remembered study, sacrifice, and a pursuit of eternal life. He remembered the promise of knowledge that would not die. But the rest… the rest was smoke.

He was neither ally nor enemy. Only a keeper of the arcane, bound to the temple by obsession and memory half-eaten by time.

When the party spoke of their mission, of Kasimir’s fallen sister and the shadow of Strahd, Mr. S regarded them with faint amusement. “You play at heroism in a land that devours heroes,” he said.

Then, he told them what the Amber Temple truly was.

The sarcophagi that Marcus had been so eager to touch were not mere relics of power—they were prisons. Ancient, malicious entities known as the Dark Powers were sealed within, each whispering temptation through the amber walls. Strahd had not created them. He had freed one, Vampyr, and been rewarded with his curse.

Marcus’s stomach turned cold.

Still, knowledge had its price, and Marcus was willing to pay it. He wanted Mr. S’s trust. He wanted access to the library.

Marcus smiled, the weary smile of a man long past restraint. “You wish to see power?” he asked.

Then he pushed himself too far.

The air cracked. Power roared through the room like a storm breaking its cage. His voice trembled with strain as he shaped the Weave, his body shaking with exhaustion, blood dripping from his nose. And then, Lars was gone.

In his place stood a giant ape.

A very large, very hairy, very confused ape.

Aeli stepped back, sword raised. Mr. S tilted his skull. “How… is this powerful?” he asked, unamused.

Lars-beast only sighed, shoulders slumping.

Marcus nearly collapsed, four levels of exhaustion threatening to bury him. Still, Mr. S seemed, if not impressed, then intrigued. He offered a word in exchange: a command that would open the path to a tome hidden within the temple’s grand library.

The library was vast, a cathedral of knowledge. Shelves reached high into darkness, the air dry and electric. Marcus used the command word, and the glow of amber light pulsed across the walls.

The Spellbook of the Umbral Dawn slid from its resting place. Its cover gleamed with trapped shadows, pages humming with power that promised to bind Strahd and purge his corruption.

Aeli, in her own search, found a weighty tome bound in silver scales, the Manual of the Argent Worm, a guide to ancient techniques of holy warfare.

And Lars… Lars noticed something else.

A story from his youth whispered in the back of his mind, of a skeletal wizard who had traded his soul for eternity. Of red eyes burning in a skull.

He realized, with a chill that spread down his spine, that the story had been standing in front of him all along.

Mr. S was not a scholar. He was a lich.

When they tried to leave, things turned strange.

“Do I know you?” the lich asked again as they re-entered his chamber.

“Yes,” Marcus said carefully. “You gave me your name, Mr. S.”

The lich’s eyes flared. “How do you know my name?”

Aeli took a cautious step back.

In the end, Mr. S allowed them to borrow the books, though he made it clear that to remove knowledge from his temple without permission was theft, and theft was punished by a “terrible, terrible curse.”

Lars didn’t need convincing. “We’re not testing that,” he said, tightening his grip on his pack.

Outside, the mist was waiting.

It was dense and cold, curling around the crags like smoke from an unseen fire. And within it came the slow clap of gloved hands.

Strahd von Zarovich emerged from the gloom as if the fog itself parted to obey him.

“I see you’ve visited my master’s home,” he said. His voice carried a kind of weary amusement, the tone of a man long past mercy. “Tell me, did you learn anything useful?”

His words were a knife wrapped in silk.

He offered them a chance to leave Barovia. To walk away. To abandon Ireena to her “destiny.”

Lars stepped forward, defiant. “And what if she doesn’t want to marry you?”

Strahd smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. “People rarely understand what is good for them until it is too late.”

The fight that followed wasn’t a fight, it was a demonstration.

Marcus’s spells sputtered. Lars fell asleep under a wave of magic. Aeli stood alone for a few desperate seconds, blade raised, until Strahd’s hand closed around her throat. When darkness took her, it was almost a mercy.

They awoke to Kasimir shaking them awake, blood streaking his face.

“Ireena,” he gasped. “He took her. He came for the carriage, he took her.”

Guilt hung in the air like smoke.

They argued, Marcus desperate to act, Aeli demanding rest, Kasimir pleading to enter the temple again to claim the power to resurrect his sister. In the end, reason won over desperation. They sheltered within a Tiny Hut, the world outside howling with snow and ghosts.

Aeli read of hags. Marcus studied forbidden spells. And somewhere beyond the firelight, the mist moved.

By morning, Kasimir was gone.

Lars tracked him back into the temple, to the amber vaults. They found him before a sealed door, his face wild with obsession.

“I can save her,” he said. “You don’t understand. I can fix this.”

Mr. S’s disembodied voice guided him to a name: Zhudun, the Corpse Star.

Aeli and Marcus shouted for him to stop, but Kasimir pressed his hands to the sarcophagus. Black smoke erupted, and when it cleared, the dusk elf stood transformed, his skin pale and corpse-grey, his breath cold.

“I feel fine,” he insisted. “It’s a small price to pay.”

Marcus turned away, shaken. He reached for another sarcophagus, drawn by whispers of his own, the promise of lichdom from a voice called Tenebrous.

The voice sneered. “You bring me nothing of worth, mortal, and yet you ask for eternity?”

Even ambition can taste like ash.

While the others faltered, Lars lingered in the library. Mr. S granted him one last word of command: Transformation.

It revealed a bloodstained book, The Predator’s Testament. A hunter’s journal, thick with lessons written in madness and obsession.

When Marcus offered it to him, Lars accepted. Reluctantly.

Kasimir, now something less than mortal, stood at the threshold, his eyes fixed on the distant spires of Castle Ravenloft. The mist swirled like smoke rising from a battlefield yet to be fought.

They were bruised. Exhausted. Haunted.

But not broken.

And Barovia, dark, hungry Barovia, waited for the war to begin.