A Dread Mist: Session Five

A Dread Mist: Episode Five

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
             - W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

Silence settled on the manor like sackcloth. Warm blood pulsed slower and slower through the grey hair of the burgomaster. As his heart died, the hilts of the daggers embedded in his back ceased pulsing. Ismark gaped. Ireena sighed.

Outside, skeletal archers un-nocked their bows. Wolves at the perimeter padded softly into the dark. At the very edge of the light a great black beast of a wolf with a harsh white slash of fur over his right eye. He watched you knowingly for a moment, before turning away and fading into the night.

As the mansion burned, you had your first moments of peace, since this whole nightmare began. In the flickering light, Ireena gave you an old map of the valley. Karrn recently took down the gallows at the crossroads in order to make a new road leading to some project atop Mount Ghakis. The mill whose deed you now have, Old Bonegrinder, sits along the road to Vallaki, where the refugees are headed.

As Adoril slipped into sleep, his belly full of Granny Sophie’s dream pasties, his dreams filled with the warmest memories of his childhood. He awoke with a singular thought: “Another! I must have another!”

Dawn the red and purple hue of a fresh bruise crept over the broken village. Atop a cliff-face far above the town glowered Castle Ravenloft, a poisonous looking fire raging from one spire. A long tendril of smoke the color of infected pus snaked into the sky. Beneath, the bell tower of a small wooden church kept watch, warm light flickering from within. At Ireena’s behest, you agreed to lay her father’s corpse to rest in the graveyard of the town he loved.

On the way, an empty shop called “Tengrave’s Mercantile” reminded you of the spectral bard you met a few days ago near the waterfall. He had cursed his father become murderer as “a backwards knave by the name of Tengrave.”

As you approached the church, you spot Father Donnelly emerging from a cellar and shakily locking the doors behind him. Inside, the priest knelt at the altar praying in a language none of you understood. Frustrated with his evasiveness despite obvious distress, you used thaumaturgy to present Shera as diving. Alas, the din drew the attention of a creature in the undercroft that cried out for blood.

The monster turned out to be the priest’s adopted son, Doru. Inspired by his father’s teachings about liberation, the young man had joined the Mad Mage’s revolt against Karrn. Father Donnelly thought his son dead, but he came back – hungry. After days of hearing his son wracked by starvation, the priest chose fed his son from his own neck.

While you debated how to deal with the creature, Doru broke through the undercroft doors. Hoping to sate his thirst, Shera exposed her own jugular offering herself. With frenzied bloodlust, Doru tore into her. He ignored blows and spells to feast, until the frigid blast of Zenbis’ dragon breath and a undulating bolt of chaotic fire awoke fear in his eyes. With Shera still in his grasp Doru fled up the side of the church, where a well-placed arrow knocked him down. Shera, barely clinging to life, called forth the radiant power of the goddess Suun on Doru, utterly destroying him.

Safe, Shera slid down the bell tower rope until her feet touched the hastily-tied noose that Father Donnelly used to take his own life during the fray. Then a man on a charcoal horse erupted from amidst a cloud of fire in the sky above the church.