'dem Bones

    After an uneasy nights rest at the new rest area; the Vistani camp west of Vallaki, the party woke to the beating of the continuing storm. The storm had gotten worse and combined with the fog, limited visibility for the trip south. Beginning their journey to Argynvostholt, leaving Ireena to remain at the camp, the group began to slog through the rain and onto the muddy trail leading to their destination. After scaring off a pack of wolves, a figure came down the road, a decayed woman with shrunken skin. Curious of their intentions she lowered her sword and spoke with the group.

    She introduced herself as Fatima, a revenant longing for release only reachable by the destruction of Strahd. The party asked her to lead them to her home, Argynvostholt. As they arrived at the mansion, a Vistani, that Victor recognized as Randu Strazni from the Vallaki Vistani camp, unhitched his horse from a wagon and rode by. The wagon contained a coffin.

The cart contains a plain wooden coffin, like the ones found in the coffin makers shop. A cross shape is cut out above where the head would lie and below it, chiseled into the wooden lid is the name "Macabre."  You creep closer to the coffin to get a better look and through the cross shaped opening you see him, Macabre, eyes open staring back at you.

    Opening the coffin revealed three swarms of bats, that were quickly dispatched, and nothing else.

    The group was escorted through the the mansion and found another hallucination, this time of Roland the cleric's head. This turned out to be only the bust of someone unknown to the adventurers.

    Fatima led them through a secret door and into the audience chamber of Vladimir Horngaard, current leader of the now revenant Order of the Silver Dragon. Convincing Vladimir to aid in their quest it was agreed that they would sneak into Castle Ravenloft and reclaim the skull of the silver dragon Argynvost.

    Fatima informed the party of the power of a revenant to always know where their adversary is, a skill that would prove useful to sneak into the castle.

    Making a small camp near Castle Ravenloft, they lay in wait for Strahd to leave his castle. Upon his leaving the group moved toward the castle with little delay. Crossing the old, creaky drawbridge, Criella nearly fell through to her death 1000 feet below. Entering through a service entrance, the party decended to the castlr larder. Afyer an encounter with an insane servant, they made their way to the mess hall. The mess hall had been redecorated, changed into a hall of bones.

Dark stains cover the door of this area. Large oak tables, scarred and beaten, lay scattered like toys about the room, their wood crushed and splintered. Replacing them are furnishings made entirely of human bones. The walls and the twenty-foot-high vaulted ceiling are a sickly yellow color, not because of faded or timeworn plaster but because they are adorned with bones and skulls arranged in a morbidly decorative fashion, giving the room a cathedral-like quality. Four enormous mounds of bones occupy the corners of this ossuary, and garlands of skulls extend from these mounds to a chandelier of bones that hangs from the ceiling above a long table constructed of bones in the center of the room. Ten chairs made of bones and festooned with decorative skulls surround the table, resting atop which is an ornate, bowl-shaped vessel made of yet more bones. The doors to the north and south are sheathed in bone, but the steel-banded double doors in the center of the east wall are not. Above these eastern doors is mounted the skull of a dragon.

    The party split up and on the way out so as Victor and Ront, the half orc, would not hold them up. Alar, inspired by his patron and the reading from Madame Eva, led the others to investigate the church finding a statuette, a black mace and a sword hilt that's blade extended into a blade of light.

    Crossing the drawbridge was done with more safety this time; Theos used rope to span the distance and through the skull of the dragon. Caring more for the skull and less of himself, the half orc broke though the planks and began his descent to the rocks below. Thinking desperately for a solution, Alar moved through a silvery mist and grabbed the half orc before he fell.

    Victor asked where Strahd was, Fatima warned he was traveling toward them, coming from the Vistani camp outside Vallaki! Faster than she could track he appeared, as if out of a strike of lightning, atop one of the stone turrets, staring at the party like a scornful father betrayed by his children.