Say the Words

The road to answers runs through a swamp. Croaking voices from every direction demand that the party say the words. Instead of an ambush, it's a delegation: bullywugs, who need a ritual scroll back from an old woman who travels with a moving tree. The party promises to get it.

Then comes the warmest night Barovia has ever offered them: the Vistani camp at Tser Pool. Firelight, wine, a fiddle duet between Fiadh and the camp musician Eliza, children laughing again. Then Madam Eva starts talking, and every kindness grows a price tag. The Vistani serve the master; they found Strahd dying in the mud once and have served him since. He was in her tent minutes before the party arrived. Helliax's missing family didn't vanish into the wilderness. They walked into Castle Ravenloft.

The cards come out: The Mists, The Tempter, The Marionette, The Executioner. Four futures, none of them kind, and the promise of a fuller reading if they return: five things they'll need if they ever mean to face the devil of Barovia.

By morning, the fiddler is gone. Wolf tracks circle the wagons, one wolf, no blood, no struggle, and the trail turns human before it vanishes. The party leaves the three rescued children in the seer's keeping and heads west, past a silent armored guard on a bridge, into dead woods where a man-eating giant guards a well full of things that used to be people. Cassius is paralyzed in its jaws, tears himself free, and kills it. And an old woman's laughter rolls through the dead trees. She knows they're here.