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Hey there. Name's Romo Slender. 'Cause I'm thin, right? I'm writing down some of the s**% I've been through since it's possible I die horribly and someone needs to know what I've seen. And they might like to know that the world didn't use to be snowy.
You could say it all started when I was first thrown out into the forest, but I think a better starting place is when I met Sterris and Elder Natharen Sifander. They were heading south, I was heading south – we figured banding together would make us safer. It was very odd to have snow in Barovia, but there was nothing too odd about our trip until we came to a frozen stream and heard whizzing arrows and the clash of weapons. Some folks were fighting a strange water spirit, so Sterris and I joined in killing the creature and talked to 'em.
I made introductions. There was a strange short man with a high-pitched voice whose name I didn't catch but who I later found was named Tengezil Frimbocket, as well as one ”Mynama Kyneburg” who was the one making all the noise with a big sword I later found was named Aeglac. She didn't speak Balok, unfortunately. The last in the group was a woman named Armillia Fex, who'd been shooting the bow. There was also a gigantic clawed bird with them that seemed half-trained at best. Apparently they were looking for some lady who'd gotten grabbed by some bandits as the storm was coming on. I figured, a noble'd have good money, so why not go along with these folks and help?
We headed west, but were ambushed by a group of bandits with bows. We killed them without compunctions. The big strong fighter Kyneburg had gotten wounded so we went back to a hunter's shack owned by Armillia's mentor. Apparently, the man had wandered off into the woods looking for some sort of oversized ferret. The people looking for the noble (who was named Argentea Malassene of Dimentliu) had previously found some warm magicked tea waiting for them in the shack, but no such boon was waiting for us that day. We slept in the cold single room and the small man healed Cyneburg. The priest Sifander heard creepy noises in the night, and we suspected the shack to be haunted. I did succumb to the urge to see if I could take one of Armillia's arrows that night, but she shifted in her sleep and I managed to scare myself back to bed. That morning, I was all out of spells, so I had to go out into the forest to find it.
Sifander is an old man so we told him to stay at the hunter's shack to try to cleanse the place of spirits; there was also the side benefit of him not needing to hike in the snow for 6 hours and maybe die of cold. We returned to the ford where we first met, but something very strange was there. It was a figure built out of woven stems and grass, from which a terrible stench emanated. Kyneburg chopped off its head, discovering that a corpse had been trapped inside it. It was someone Armillia and Tengezil knew, called Old Man Dansby – a native of their village, who always worried about the fey of the forest. His fear was well-founded, it seemed. We burned his body in its wicker casing and hopefully cleansed his spirit for the Morninglord or whoever it is that'll take him.
After a hard day of hiking through the snow, we reached the High Sentinels' Lodge. Sterris stumbled over a tripwire, though, and suddenly we were mobbed by more bandits with weapons. Some of them seemed very sick. We quickly killed them, too, and entered the lodge to look for Argentea Melassene, the noble that had gone missing. We didn't find her immediately, but Kyneburg found a caliban woman in the kitchen who called herself Ten-Penny Tacey and spoke the same tongue. Tacey said she'd been kept there against her will, and she didn't like being around people so Kyneburg helped her escape – into the woods, I guess. It was when we were heading up the stairs to the second floor when we heard a thudding outside – and saw two zombies reel out of the room at the top of the stairs. Each zombie was wearing little onyx charms around their neck, which we worked out were used for reanimating them. We tried to cut down the ones inside and shut the door, but they kept coming, and we bolted out the back. Where it turned out there were plenty more undead. I tried to use some frost magic on some clanking horror, but it was just my luck that it was immune to cold. Tengezil's feathery companion was getting beat up by a group of zombies while I shouted encouragement to him and Kyneburg, but then they both either went inside or went around the side of the lodge. When I didn't hear anyone else fighting outside except Sterris, I attempted to run back indoors as well. But my good friend Armillia shut the door in my face.
Now, it turns out Armillia felt really bad about it later, but that didn't matter in the moment. What mattered was that she, a skilled fighter, shut the door on me, a very unskilled one, as well as a little less than half a dozen freezybone skeletons and zombies. And Sterris, who from the commentary of the others I gather had been running around in what looked like a prison smock the whole time since I met him and Sifander – he was certainly faring poorly. Sterris ran off north while I ran off east.
Unfortunately, I ran into the zombies. They encircled me, and I felt a brush of air as one swipe missed and then this impossible pain when they stuck me in the stomach.
–
I woke up with it standing on my chest. I saw myself through its eyes for a moment before I shoved it off. I was lying on the ground, my robes soaked with blood, my glasses askew. Outwardly, I was mostly the same. What changed was inward – I felt a new hunger, kinda like regular hunger where you think ”Morninglord, I really wish I had a pie just about now” but it was now like ”I want to inflict pain and horror on my enemies.” Fortunately that was directed at whoever made all those undead attack in concert, not Armillia.
Carving it into stone feels super wrong in terms of acknowledging what I saw but hey, if you're reading this that probably means you're caught up in my curse, right? In third person, I saw ribbons of blackness wrapping around me, felt them sapping all the heat from my bones, heard the sound they made like knives cutting through grass. The pain in my gut spread to my heart and my neck. I couldn't move a muscle.
The zombies had moved on to other targets – I later learned that they'd seriously injured Kyneburg, and that there was a well-dressed a+#~$$#-looking man in proper cold weather furs who was the one animating folks. I limped back to the front of the lodge and gave encouragement to the warriors, though the way my luck works I don't get to do it on the same people more than one time in a day. We killed the last zombies and that scared off the animator, and then we dumped all the bodies into the well so he couldn't come back and use them. The rest of the folks started going on about oh, how cute was ”Romo's cat” - did it have a name? I tried to warn them but they would not listen.
I went to ask Armillia why she uh, tried to kill me (and maybe succeeded?), but she locked herself in the kitchen and wouldn't come out. Started piling stuff up to barricade herself in. I think I heard her crying. I decided to leave her be.
We finally found Argentea tied up in the cellar, and also checked out the rest of the rooms in the lodge. There was a sick room and a bunch of other bedrooms downstairs, while the upper story just had two rooms. Argentea was whiny, like a typical noble I guess, but she got along alright with Kyneburg and me. I think Tengezil was weird-looking to her. We moved as many beds as we needed upstairs, and eventually Armillia came out. She might've apologised; I don't remember.
The first upstairs room, the one we decided to camp out in, had one advantage in addition to the elevation. It had good glass windows oriented in a way that the others could watch the whole yard to the south of the lodge. It also had more of those onyx charms hanging in those windows. Armillia and I debated selling them, but we decided it would be best to give them to Sifander and see if he could destroy them.
The second upstairs room was like a little closet and had a cache of goods inside. No food, but a blanket or two, as well as a cage holding some sort of little sprite. We released it, but I don't think any of us felt particularly good about doing so – what if it reported to the animator?
Then we ate some porridge made from leftover flour in the kitchen, and some food we'd all brought along, and settled in for the night. The number of groans and complaints I heard from Argentea over the cramped conditions was higher than I could track.
The next morning we went back to the hunter's shack, spent another night there. Argentea was even more displeased with those conditions. A strange flying creature with both feathers and fur slithered in through some crack during the night – it was a witch's spy, undoubtedly, and we killed it.
I tested my stealth again, rifling through Kyneburg's pack (she was a much heavier sleeper), but the small man caught me and sounded the alarm. Then Kyneburg threatened to chop off my hand if I did it again . . . lord. I tried to explain I wasn't taking anything important, nothing she'd miss, that I couldn't control it, but none of them were willing to listen. Gotta control myself. I'm not proud of this.
We made it to the hamlet of Heldren without meeting any more bandits or monsters. (I think we mighta killed the last of the bandits when we raided the lodge. It's too bad we didn't keep any to ask about why they killed the rangers and raided Argentea's caravan. But it's also fine because we found a map in the lodge showing that they were planning to attack Heldren.) We got Sifander home and Armillia went to her mom's house and got Argentea a room to stay there. Apparently the noble actually didn't have much money. We did get some money by selling the bandits' equipment to the general store owner, Vivialla Steranus, and I went and bought us bottled flame from the uber-nervous apothecary Tessarenea Willowbark. Armillia and I took the onyx charms to the spiritual leader of the place, Old Mother Theodora, who said she'd get them destroyed. Tengezil had a house in the village, while Kyneburg, Sterris, and I got spaces on the floor of the Silver Stoat Tavern.
By the next morning, we had left the smoky village and were journeying back towards the High Sentinels' Lodge. Armillia still wanted to look for the old hunter who'd gone missing in the woods, and I and the others wanted to track down the man who'd sent the zombies after us. We made it back to the hunter's cabin and then all the way up to the lodge, though we encountered the frost-burned bodies of several wolves and deer along the way. Kinda worrying, those.
We slept in the high room at the Lodge's top that night. The next morning, we checked out the stable adjoining the Lodge and discovered that it had four hungry horses. The fourth one I identified as a nixie, a kind of fey spirit known for inviting riders onto its back and then flipping them off into rivers. As we were quite close to a river at the time, we decided not to mount it, and took the other horses out. We didn't want someone else to get fooled by the fey horse, so we tried burning down the stable with it inside – but it broke free of its shackles and charged us. The real horses bolted, but Tengezil (who claimed that the horse was actually a ”blood mare,” some sort of demon cannibal – probably false) got his bird in and Kyneburg and Sterris surrounded the fey and slowly chipped away at it, with myself providing support. It was much stronger than I'd expected, but we managed to kill it without losing anyone. Then we gathered up the horses, got them some fresh food and water, and put them back in the stable. We went to the river's edge. The bridge there was apparently slippery-looking (though I could walk on it just fine), so we sent Kyneburg across first to check it out, with a rope around her waist.
It turned out the greatest danger of the bridge wasn't the ice, but a flying fey creature that haunted the crossing and tried to attack us. I tried to reason with it, learning that it was called Isoze and was some sort of mephit, but it seemed to serve someone else. Kyneburg fell off the bridge after a powerful gust of wind, and since I was holding the rope, I started getting dragged down after her. Thinking fast, I jumped off the cliff – but so that our rope wrapped around one of the bridge's posts, helping me use my full weight to counterbalance Kyneburg's. It still wasn't enough, but Sterris helped pull the two of us up and then made his sling sing with the Morninglord's power, throwing magical rocks at the fey. That was kind of the only thing that hurt it – we needed something either magical or blessed. It got Armillia with a burst of some sort of visual illusion. I kept everyone mostly conscious and we eventually seemed to either bore or tire out the fey, which fled upriver away from us. Armillia got back up and we picked our way across the bridge. We'd pick the horses up on our way back.
At the crest of another hill, we found a patch of cleared earth with three tree-like monsters growing in the center. They were frostfirs from the Breathing Forest of north Irrisen, which would be knocked unconscious by the blood of a divine caster. Irrisen is a country I am not very familiar with. I recommended that Tengezil throw some of his blood at them, but he told me to use mine, instead, and so no one threw any blood in the end. Kyneburg chopped the monsters up and we uprooted them to find the body of a human man who was even more poorly dressed than Sterris – it seemed he'd been stripped.
Later on, we found a large metal trap partially ripped out of the ground. Armillia identified it as a weasel trap, but sadly it appeared the thing had gotten free. We followed the trail of its blood westward.
Towards evening (it was colder, which is how I can tell), we reached a strange little hut perching on top of some trees on top of a knoll. The trail of blood ran past the hut, but we decided to investigate when a young girl ran past us into some boulders below the knoll. She looked frozen, according to the others. When we tried to follow her, she called, ”I'm sorry, don't hurt me – I never meant to call you names!” And then she said, ”I don't want your stupid doll!” I noticed that she didn't seem to be making the snow crunch with her movements, and right at that moment the others said she disappeared. When Kyneburg climbed up to the hut and found a strange doll sitting at the top looking down at us, I realized that this was a soulbound doll, a horrible invention that used the spirit of some person to power a magical construct. But it had fragmented in some way, so that the construct in the doll was separate from the spirit of the little girl that kept trying to escape and hide. We destroyed the doll, Tengezil making Kyneburg large with a spell and Armillia and Sterris and I using bottled flame to set the hut on fire. Then the rest of the party went down to where the girl had been moving, and saw no sign of her except for some shadowy faces beneath a patch of ice; the faces melted as they watched. The girl's name was Thora, and that was her and her family they glimpsed under the ice, we somehow knew. We followed the blood trail past the burning hut.
We hiked all the rest of the day. That evening, shortly before camping, more frost skeletons attacked, and I apparently set a tree on fire with my last bottled flame in my haste to destroy them. We cut down boughs of fir and pine and built a little shelter next to the burning tree, but my companions all complained terribly about the cold. Made me feel a little lucky to have my curse of cold resistance.
The next day we kept hiking. It was probably around noon when we happened upon a shredded frozen corpse. Armillia identified it as that of her mentor, the hunter and alcoholic Dryden Kepps. When she touched his quiver, some of the arrows whispered something to her – a remnant of the hunter's ghost, I think. Kepps was infatuated with the idea of fighting a gigantic weasel he claimed haunted these woods, but no one apart from Armillia had believed him while he was alive. Judging by the wounds on his body, he had been at least half-right: there was something huge and clawed roaming the forest. And judging by what those arrows did later, he'd either prepared well or his spirit had enhanced their power, because they tore into that weasel like a hot poker into a block of lard.
We took Dryden's most useful possessions – Sterris took his winter furs, so he was finally dressed appropriately for the weather. Kyneburg took the dead man's snowshoes and bow, and then we built a cairn over Kepp's body and let Armillia have a moment. Kepps had been carrying a flask of something that smelled like whiskey, and Armillia poured that out over his body. Kyneburg made an odd symbol by tying two pieces of stick together in a cross shape and sticking that into the ground at the head of the cairn. I'd been working on learning her language, and I think she said that the cross represented sanctifying the body.
When we continued westward, we discovered the frozen Soulmere Lake. And far out on the ice, Armillia spotted something horse-sized, furry, and snakelike: the dire weasel Kepps had spoken of. Kyneburg charged across the ice towards it, but before she ever reached it, it fell, the two spiritual arrows sprouting from its eyes. Armillia lowered her bow.
In its death throes, the weasel broke the ice, but Kyneburg pulled it out of the water and back to shore. Armillia severed the weasel's head to later have mounted in the Silver Stoat.
We constructed more shelters near the lake that night. I slept soundly until Armillia heard something rustling in the underbrush and yelled out to us. She started talking with something whose voice was guttural and groaning. I was dragged out of bed and went to help her talk.
As it turned out, the creature was some sort of abominable snowman, like that which the legendary Bardo the Greatfoot Hunter had searched for. It was speaking in the language in which I now write. With Armillia translating, we understood that it did not like us resting in its territory, so we offered it the corpse of a deer as payment. The creature was somewhat mollified and agreed to let us spend that one night there – but that would be our last such opportunity. The next time, it wanted our own blood.
I had to sleep a bit longer before I could muster up the strength to go and commune with the monster. Armillia went down to the lake to check on the weasel corpse (perhaps the snowman had taken it as food?), only to find the bloody place where she'd severed the head empty. A trail of weasel tracks led away over the snow. We still don't know if that a$#!##% in the furs reanimated the weasel, but that's my theory. Gotta kill that guy.
Despite our late start, we made good progress along the path deeper into the cold. Along the way, I got Armillia to teach me some of what she knew about the Aklo language. We were drilling on grammar when, suddenly, the wind picked up, and a horrific combination of wolf and deer was revealed from a flurry of snow in our path. I heard the angry malefic winds condensing behind us, and realized it was some sort of elemental mist being. The wolf-deer named itself Hommelstalb, and we discovered that it was a tiny monster ”riding” the corpse of its victims, something we called a puppeteer. Or puppedeer, you might say. I think Kyneburg was the one to notice the monster and kill it, and then the rest of us defeated the wind creature, which was named Squalb.
That same day, we arrived at the base of a tall cliff and what seemed to be the nexus of the winter that was blanketing this area of rural Barovia. I could feel the wind streaming out, the icy mist collecting on my stubble, the intermittent sting of hardened snow hitting my nose. The others described it as a ring of inverted icicles (some 30 feet high), at the center of which was a globe of whirling whiteness. As we came out of the forest, they saw a group of igloos gathered around the nexus, as well as a cave up to the north. We met another small man (like Tengezil) named Foefane, who was somewhat creepier than Tengezil if I'm being honest. He talked about bringing Tengezil over to his side and about ice in his heart, and seemed to already have ice for hair. When Tengezil refused he threw a thunderstone at us and summoned a bunch of sprites, and we had bitter combat. I think Kyneburg had killed Foefane by the time we heard something else, larger than him, moving in one of the trees. It was singing in a high-pitched voice, in a language none of us recognized. We went around the igloo there and tried to find the new threat, but could not accurately track it. It attacked at the worst moment, surprising me and Sterris all alone (kind of a trend) with Armillia still fighting one of the sprites further off.
Sterris and I attacked the new threat, which he described as sort of a big ugly man, a troll with a long boar spear. Trolls dwell under bridges, and cold iron hurts them. Kyneburg trudged through the snow and caught up with us, but even she and Armillia (who both had snowshoes, after finding Kepps) could not move as fast as Sterris when Sterris was calling on the Morninglord's power. I helped the injured Kyneburg hack the troll up, but the monster retreated, saying that he, Teb Nautumn, would not die the same way as Foefane. He climbed over one of the smaller igloos and then leaped off with its spear, horrifically stabbing Tengezil and pinning him to the ground, unconscious. Sterris and I hurried to heal our companion while Kyneburg slowly wore Teb down. Finally, she sliced off his arm, and he died.
Or so we thought.
We patched up Kyneburg and Tengezil as best we could while Sterris searched the troll's body for useful items. He noticed at the last second that Teb's arm had reformed, and dodged out of the way when the monster grabbed his spear back up and started fighting us again, somehow almost fully healed. It was a long, arduous battle, but now that the troll couldn't bound off into the snow or climb away onto an igloo, Tengezil's slow-moving pet bird was able to stay in the fight, and it helped a lot. We finally killed the troll, and then Sterris chopped it up and started feeding the pieces into a fire Armillia built. We learned:
Teb had been carrying some flasks of different fluids, a scroll, more thunderstones, a sickle, and a sling, in addition to his magical spear which resized to his height when Tengezil picked it up. We all agreed that Tengezil should take the spear. We investigated the igloos, finding a winter blanket and some piles of furs, which we took. Tengezil also found a pit trap! After joshing him a little for not looking more carefully, we helped him up.
We were still very wounded and tired, but we decided to check out the wintry orb. Maybe there was a way it could be shut down, to return Heldren and the rest of the region to normal? As we approached, though, a heavily armored man riding a horse suddenly rode out of the sphere – what we now realized was a portal. I backed away quickly from the threat, and the others neglected to tell me when the man collapsed onto the ground in front of them. Apparently, he was bleeding, was named Black Midnight, and was ”Baba Yaga's Black Rider, Harbinger of the Witch Queen's Return.” I reapproached partway through his little spiel, once I heard the unstrained voices of my companions and realized the warrior had not simply murdered them all.
Midnight had (apparently) taken the form of a white-haired balding man after removing his helmet, and explained that someone called Queen Elvanna in Irrisen had taken over the country and refused to cede power to her coming mother, the (something like an empress) Baba Yaga. Only Baba Yaga could defeat this Queen, but she was missing. If Yaga could not be found, then this ”demiplane” - ”the World of Mist and Darkness” that we all lived in, could be doomed. He gave us two ”keys,” which we were to put in a cauldron inside something called a Dancing Hut. The keys would be reactivated by the lifesblood Midnight spilled upon them, once he had died. He gave me one of the keys, something I recognized as a plague doctor's mask. The other was a lock of hair, which he gave to Kyneburg.
With his dying few breaths, Midnight set some kind of geas upon us – he called it the Mantle of the Black Rider. Each of us got a dark sigil on our necks (I can feel a raised welt, days later), and we were compelled to find Baba Yaga to stop Queen Elvanna. Personally, I would have been willing to save the world even if he hadn't given the Mantle, but I actually derived some benefit from it. When he cast his spell, I felt my mind expanding, and suddenly I fully understood both Kyneburg's language (Aengles) and the one in which I now write – Aklo, the language of monsters. I also knew where Irrisen was, roughly, and also that Midnight was right about the world being segmented into ”domains.” I even knew a little about the geography of the domains I had visited, something you don't typically pick up if you can't read maps (the fact that I had been in different domains, and not simply different nations, was also revealed to me). Midnight died just after giving us the Mantle. Good timing with that one.
We cleared out the cave to the north of the portal and settled in for a frigid, snowy night. The next morning we debated – should we go straight into the portal, or try to make it back to town and get some more supplies? In the end, the more cautious and more amenities-loving heads prevailed, and we began the long hike back to Heldren. During this journey, I began to carve these tablets.
It seemed that whatever predators there were along our path, we'd met and killed or bargained with, because the way back was free from fights. We did not encounter the snowman, and we made it back to the High Sentinels' Lodge in just a day and a half. We got the horses fresh food (though there's scarce little of it in the snow zone) and then rode on to Kepps' old cabin. The hunter's spirit had clearly passed on, and we heard no more tapping or rattling in the night. Then we finally rode back into the village.
The first thing Armillia did was go to the tavern and show everyone the head of the dire weasel. Folks were shocked, and Armillia was vindicated; she took the head to the tanner's to get it taxidermied. But when Armillia went home to talk to Ma Fex about how Kepps had been right all along, and maybe Armillia'd been right about the disappearance of her brother some 20 years ago, her ma wouldn't listen to a snatch of what she had to say (I was there; I can vouch for the woman's lack of reason). She started telling Armillia that she ought to settle down, marry this nice noble she'd met (Argentea was there too – I suspect at least her ears were blushing), and stop talking about fey and monsters and all that. Armillia cussed out her ma and then we all left, with Armillia offering Argentea the opportunity to come with her to whichever land we were going to enter. Argentea had lost her bodyguard Yuln Oerstag and all the rest of her retinue to the bandits, and she didn't really have anything tying her to Barovia, so she agreed.
Tengezil immediately set to work building a sleigh for the horses to tow. It would take him three days and most of his free time, plus some help from Armillia and Sterris. Several of us stayed at his cramped, messy house.
Kyneburg, who'd befriended Argentea's bodyguard and first learned the trail symbol Tralaks from him, arranged a funeral sans corpse for the man. She and Argentea attended, though I'm told Sifander's eulogy was lacking in details. Kyneburg spent the remainder of her time working at the tanner's, and apparently earned a small wage for her assistance.
Meanwhile, I cased the village – always important to do before you leave a town for a good while. If any of y'all are reading this, sorry, but I needed some cash, and none of y'all were chipping in any money for my sleight of hand acts. I figured out that the town hall only had one guard at night, so that became my target. The night before we'd leave, I snuck up to the front window, stuck my glue paper to the glass, and carefully cut a hole for my hand. When I tapped the glass out, it made a little tinkling sound, but I don't think anyone noticed. I opened the window and slipped inside. This is where having a frame like mine helps a lot. Then I carefully, stealthily crept up the stairs to the central counting desk. There was no money inside! I stealthed into a side room, where I knew the guard slept – and there, sitting out on a table, was a box of metal pieces that felt a hell of a lot like jewelry. I stuffed them into my pockets, listening to the guard snoring, and then stole back outside.
The next day, I visited the town hall again. They say not to return to the scene of the crime, but I've never been one to obey aphorisms. The guy manning the desk was the same as the guard. I asked how it was going, and he explained that he'd been robbed the previous night, but it was otherwise swell. I told him I hadn't heard of the robbery, did they find any clues? He seemed a little suspicious of my question until he realized I was blind, and then he was quite forthcoming. No, no clues except that someone had used a glass cutter, but he didn't even like the stuff he'd been robbed of, and he was glad someone had taken it off his hands, honestly. He asked me why I was in there, and I replied that I was trying to find a bathroom. I was sorry he'd lost that stuff. He said he felt like we had a real connection, and I agreed; we hugged. Then I went out back to use the toilet.
We left on one of the coldest days yet, and drove our new sleigh with our three horses through the woods. Tengezil's bird ran alongside, but the rest of us – Armillia, Kyneburg, Tengezil, Argentea, Sterris, and I – rode in the sleigh.
Unfortunately, along the way we were waylaid by more deer and wolf zombies! A bump in the road and an overly high speed made me fall off the back of the sleigh, and I was nearly lost until Kyneburg jumped down and pulled me back up. Sterris led the horses to the stable behind the shack, but suddenly the zombies had caught up. We hurried into the shack and to our surprise found the caliban Ten-Penny Tacey huddled inside. Sterris was trapped in the stable while the rest of us put furniture against the front door. We were settling in for a long siege when something called a ”mote” tumbled down the woodstove's chimney. It burst out and assaulted us with magic and cold. We shoved it back in and lit the fire, which killed it pretty good but also made the place stink.
We could communicate with Sterris through a knot in the wall between the stable and the shack's single room. Tengezil gave him a few prods with our recently purchased healing wand, and Sterris lit himself a fire in the stable-shed to keep warm. The rest of the group (apart from myself, who had no need) bundled up in blankets and furs and tried to put the scent of burning flesh out of their minds long enough to sleep.
We woke up when a wolf tried to crash through the window. Another zombie deer was doing the same to the door. We killed the wolf and then replaced the boards, but we now had another stinking body in the shack with us.
Tengezil woke us up again when Sterris heard something tearing at the door to the stable. The horses were whinnying nervously. It sounded like something was going to get in and get Sterris while the rest of us were helpless to do anything, and after a few hacks with her axe Kyneburg was uncertain if she could break through the wall between the two ”rooms” without bringing the whole structure down on our heads. And then we would have nowhere at all to hide.
Sterris said he was going to open the doors and try to make a break for it. I told Kyneburg and Armillia to run out and meet him as soon as the door opened, and Kyneburg did – but Armillia hung back. Sterris used the Morninglord's power to smite a zombie panther and a zombie wolf, destroying them, and then ran to meet Kyneburg, who was surrounded by more undead. But Kyneburg was already trying to retreat, and he couldn't make it to her without risking attack. He ran back to the stable and shut the doors. Kyneburg slowly cleared a path back towards the front door, taking scratches and bites and swinging around ferociously.
Just as she reached the entrance, Ten-Penny Tacey turned on us. She jumped off of the floor, apologized to Kyneburg, and started tearing into Tengezil and Argentea with long fingernails. Tengezil fell unconscious just as Kyneburg slammed the door shut on more zombies outside. I tried to get Argentea to help, but she had already been paralyzed by Tacey's first attack. Tacey said if only we hadn't tried to go outside, she could have waited out her commands from the man in furs, which were to attack if we went outside, obviously. She had been bitten seven hours ago, and as an undead was in thrall to the a!@%!*! in furs. Kyneburg apologized in turn, and together with Armillia (I and Tengezil's bird were by that point paralyzed by Tacey's claws) cut the woman down.
Now we had three dead bodies stinking up the room.
Fortunately, we were not attacked again that night. I slept well after the morning dawned cold and clear and silent, and went out to take spells from the monster. I've found that it carries more of them, now – perhaps influenced by the Mantle, or perhaps by the being that grants our shared powers. At least now the rest of my group, save Kyneburg, recognizes that the creature is dangerous.
We piled all the bodies inside and burned the shack to the ground. Hopefully the Morninglord, or Kyneburg's god, will take Tacey to the afterlife.
Then we hitched up the horses and drove them onwards. In the windows at the top of the Sentinel's Lodge we spotted another spying creature with feathers and fur, and quickly drove past before it could see us. We drove over the bridge, making it to Soulmere Lake very quickly.
That night, the snowman returned. This time, it approached closer to the camp – and got caught in a bear trap Armillia had laid out and lashed to a tree. It started trying to rip up the tree, bellowing obscenities in Aklo. I got up and made Kyneburg and Armillia lucky. Sterris invoked the Morninglord's power and tried to slay the beast, but he could not approach without getting harmed. Tengezil made Kyneburg big, and she joined the fight with her massive greatsword – but then the snowman's gaze caught her, made her stand stock still. Its eyes apparently bewitched those of weak will, which might have affected me but for my lack of sight. I made it unlucky, which made Kyneburg last a lot longer against its repeated slashes. Though the snowman was unnatural, resistant to our more mundane weaponry, we eventually killed it. Kyneburg slumped to the ground, and Tengezil healed her.
The next morning we slept in yet again (how do monsters always seem so bent on disrupting a regular sleep cycle?). The horses carried us past the place where we killed Hommelstalb and Squalb, and we arrived at the portal late in the day. I am currently begging Armillia and Tengezil to get the horses galloping and have us go through the portal flying, rather than just leisurely trotting through. We will see if they allow it. But for now, I will leave these tablets in the cave north of the portal. If you find them, it may be that we failed to fend off the winter, and the land is now coated in ice. In this case, it may behoove you to follow us into the portal – I will try to leave more caches of tablets in other caves, should caves be present in this new land. Or it may be that we succeeded, and this rural part of Barovia is enjoying its misty rainy winters and warm summers once again. Either way, I hope you have enjoyed the read, and that you remember our names, because we will likely not be returning.
With ”warm” regards,
Romo Slender
Adopted son of Pharila of the Vistani
Winter Witch