The Price of Letting the Light In

The blood test in the cellar ends the only way it could: with a father paying for it. Father Donavich gives his life to buy his son back, and Doru walks up out of the dark human again, orphaned, filthy, and suddenly the priest of Barovia. To get there, Helliax did something no one in this valley has done in a very long time: he called Selûne's light down and bridged the night into morning.

Then the sun goes down, and the village finds out what a miracle costs.

The nightly siege comes early and comes worse: thinking ghouls that eat while you're still standing, and something riding its own cloud of rot that kills the grass where it drifts. The east barricade holds. Parriwimple, the armorer's enormous, delighted nephew, who calls the party's kobold paladin "baby dragon" and means it as the highest compliment, does not.

Into the aftermath rides a man named Rahadin, who speaks for the master of this realm. He explains, politely, that a god reached into Barovia last night and Strahd noticed. The party is marked. But there's a way to make all of it stop: hand over Ismark's sister Ireena. She'll live as a queen. His word on it. Then he looks at a portrait of Helliax's missing son and says the boy's name out loud.

The episode ends in a house with a broken window, a burgomaster in pieces on the floor, two puncture wounds behind a young woman's ear, and howling somewhere out in the dark.