The staff of frost whispered to Aleksander before the fight began. Vilnius doesn’t deserve this staff. Kill him and take it for yourself. He knew the voice. It had whispered to Varushka in her nightmare, and to Vladimir Horngaard with a sword in his hand. Something in Barovia speaks to a great many people. He put the staff away in his box and said nothing yet.
The lecture hall
Vilnius thought his little secret was safe on his shoulder. Aleksander’s lantern found it first: a shimmer, a small winged shape, the quasit Jakarion. Spear throws ended it before it could flee, and with it went any hope of the wizard coming back.
Vilnius called his shield guardian. Ireena carved it apart. Ezmerelda’s blade broke his last spell mid-word. He died spiteful, the way he had lived.
“I didn’t like them either. That’s why I poisoned them.”Vilnius
Altair’s morningstar came down, the wizard dissolved into mist, and the barrier that had trapped souls in the temple burned away with him.
Two who were lost
Dorina’s ghost trusted the company because Aleksander told her they were honourable people, and he said it with a perfectly straight face. They led her to Khirad’s sarcophagus. She touched the stone and heard her answer, “When the stars align and the veil grows thin, the door you seek shall be laid open,” and faded, her business done.
Meda was harder. The gift she had taken had made her a nothic, riddling and hollow. The company argued over her in earnest, and Fergus, who carries a gift of his own, listened more quietly than the rest. In the end Freyja made the call. Altair’s lightning went through the gap in the door, and it was over. Freyja wrapped the body in Meda’s own mountain coat and carried her out herself.
Exethanter’s warning
The old ghost gathered them, agitated, and told them what Strahd means to do. A heart of crystal. The valley’s leylines. Thousands of living souls spent as a shell for his escape. The Grand Conjunction begins tomorrow night and peaks three nights after, and if one leyline is still his at the zenith, every soul in Barovia is lost.
He gave them back the Tome of Strahd. Asked whether he might become the Sunsword’s spirit, he declined.
Diona received both bodies in the Southwest Annex. She knew Duras at once. Meda staggered her. “At least we have closure,” Coryllus said, and she thanked the company, and told them Soldav knows the fastest way down the mountain.
Heinrich
The steward met them at the fissure and asked, very politely, for an account of everything they were carrying out of his temple. Freyja said no. Aleksander talked him in circles until he stopped pretending.
“You may as well call me Neferon for the rest of your short lives.”Neferon
Three flameskulls came through the doors with fire. Neferon unmade most of Aleksander with a single word. Freyja leapt and caught the fiend in midair and held on until he tore himself away. Kasimir walled the skulls up in wind. And from a hundred and twenty feet away, Fergus found the gap and put one bolt through it, and the thing that had called itself Heinrich was gone.
Ezmerelda finished the last skull in Freyja’s grip. Among the ashes the company found Diona’s Stone of Good Luck, her “donation” to the steward. Four days remain until the zenith.