The dead kept coming out of the trees long after anyone had stopped counting them. Mohrgs with lashing tongues, a battalion of wights, a troop of ghosts pouring in over the burning wagons. The company did not have to win. They only had to stand until the last of the Radanavich caravan was ash.
Van Richten fell paralysed and rose again by his own will. Ireena split a mohrg in two. Altair’s held light went off like a struck bell and the last of the horrors crumbled in it. Then the final wagon folded into embers, and the old hunter turned to face the forest.
“Go back! There’s nothing for you here anymore.”Rudolph van Richten
And the dead went. Somewhere a dove called. Arturi and Van Richten, enemies for fifteen years, sat in the ashes and laughed like children.
A father and a son
A silver light gathered in the hollow. A boy of about fourteen stood in it, fidgeting with the buttons of his coat. “Father?”
Van Richten crossed to him as if in a dream and fell to his knees, begging forgiveness. Erasmus told him there was nothing to forgive. Over his son’s shoulder, the old man mouthed his thanks to the company. No one spoke. Nothing needed saying.
The night road
Yester Hill lay eight miles south, and the light was already going. Krezk was close; a bed was close. Freyja said what all of them were thinking: there was nothing left in Barovia’s dark they needed to fear. They walked the Svalich Road by night with shapes keeping pace beyond the tree line, and nothing dared come closer.
The grove
At the hill’s crown the Gulthias Tree wept red sap over a skeleton and an old axe, ringed by eight carved stones. The blights came out of the undergrowth before the gem was halfway to its roots: needles, vines, gnawing swarms, healed by the sap wherever they stood near the tree.
Then the Sunsword woke, and they flinched from it. Altair hung fire in the air above the stones. Fergus kept Arturi standing through wounds that should have dropped him. Freyja, the blade grown to a great two-handed sword, cut the last swarm apart, and what was left fled the light.
Reconsecration
Arturi and Van Richten knelt together among the roots and buried the emerald. Eight beast spirits stepped out of the mist, one beside each stone. The tree’s black sap rose into a winged shape that looked very like a certain count, and green fire took it, and the tree, and left behind a single oak sapling.
“The False Beast’s pride is the hunter’s prize. Accept my boon, champions of the Forest Fane.” Each of the company carries one: once, against the undead, roll damage twice and take the higher.
One Fane of three. Two nights until the zenith.