Diona would not take her stone back. She called it thanks, and Freyja promised to return it within a week, or leave it on the highest tower of Castle Ravenloft if they had to flee the valley some other way.
At the tunnel to Soldav, Como was waiting for news. Freyja told him about Meda as gently as she could. He took it harder than a friend would have, and then, being who he is, asked what they needed.
The Cavern of Lights
Elder Burebis opened a passage in the roots of the shrine. If the Ladies could be heard anywhere in the valley, he said, it would be here.
It was a chamber of green crystal with four carvings in its walls: a spider, a wolf, a raven, and a butterfly that nobody could explain. The mountain folk had not carved them. They had found them, made for four powers rather than three.
The company gathered amber dust, the crystal chime, and a relic for each Lady: the whistle of the Keepers, the Spear of the Huntress, the star knife from the spider stone. Altair led the rite. The walls shuddered, and aurora light rose from the crystals and settled on the wolf and the spider. The raven stayed dark.
The Huntress and the Weaver spoke in three-word phrases and shifting pictures. Two gems the company already knew. The third, the sage gem, lay at the peak of the mountain, in the nest of something like a giant raven. Then the visions came: two ravens ending a feud in a bog of standing stones; a silver fox driving rats from a weary sparrow, then becoming a sparrow itself; an old she-cat with three kittens, casting off the bat that covered her eyes and turning to the sunrise.
Asked about the butterfly, they showed a grave under snow.
“She has fallen, but he will try to use her.”The Ladies
Their last words were make haste. As the light faded, one beam fell on the spear, and green flame left it cleaner than it had ever been: the Spear of the Awakened Huntress.
A saint answers
There was no time to go to Krezk. So Aleksander built Krezk out of his pockets: a candlestick, feathers from an infirmary pillow, a vial of shrine water, all taken quietly on earlier visits. Freyja laid out a Tarokka spread with the Sunsword’s hilt at its head, and Saint Markovia’s ghost came.
She was not sure it was her place. Freyja told her that carrying the past forward means walking further than those who came before, not only retelling what they did. The saint agreed. The hilt grew a blade of true sunlight, the first the company had seen in weeks, and it broke into colour on every crystal in the cave.
The night he didn’t come
Burebis died as they left the shrine, having held on long enough to see them through. Chief Diegia took them in anyway, knowing Strahd would come now that the elder’s protection was gone. Freyja stood at the door in full armour until dawn.
He never came. Nobody was relieved.
Turul
At dawn Como led them to the true peak, a crater of uprooted pines and black feathers with the sage gem in the boughs. An illusion bought Aleksander the seconds to snatch it before the roc arrived, twice the size of any roc they had heard of.
They showed it the Keepers’ whistle, and Turul bowed. Freyja raised the burning Sunsword in the Seeker’s name, and the great bird agreed to carry them. The flight was not gentle. It took ten minutes. Then the company was standing outside the walls of Vallaki, and somebody on the road was already running for the gate.