A vampire. The man who stole me from my hunt and brought me to this dark realm is a vampire lord. I can’t help but growl at the statue of Strahd. It didn’t matter if he was lord or a fledgling. A vampire was a vampire and I needed more fangs to add to my collection.

“You alright, Mwezi?”

Vayne asks, but I can’t reply. I can’t get over the way Strahd’s hand lays on the wolf’s head. It was like he stopping it. Controlling it. Did Strahd think himself better then the wolves? Did he think he ruled them?

The thought ticked me off. I grab my morning star and cleave Strahd’s head straight off the statue. The same moment, Bree grabbed the orb in the statue’s other hand.

Vyke groans. “Was that really necessary? Look, I get it. I don’t like the guy either, but don’t you think we risk ticking him off by desecrating his statue?”

I smash the statue’s head into splinters on the ground. “Let him know we’re coming. Then he’ll know what I’m going to do to him.”

“Uh, guys…” Vayne points a claw at the headless statue. Shadows were bubbling out of the top of it like blood from a wound. We back up when they spill onto the floor. I catch the orb in Bree’s hand flash black.

Vyke rounds on me. “What did you do?!”

I scoff. “Me?” I point at the orb. “How do we she didn’t do it? That orb’s probably magic.”

Vyke sniffs. “I’m blaming you.”

The shadows start collecting together and form five skeletal spirits. We draw our weapons.

Already weakened by the ghouls we fought earlier, I’m not much help to the others. Since I desegrated the statue, I’m the main target. One sinks its claws right into my chest and the familiar sensation of draining lifeforce rushes out of me. Bree comes to my rescue, dicing up the spirit with her daggers like it’s made of cheese. Blue Onesie covers my other side, pulling out his strange weapon and firing shots through the skull of a different spirit. At the last shot it falls apart. Vyke and Vayne finish off the others.

Vyke turns on me while the remains of the spirits dissipate through the air. “How about no more destroying statues?”

I grunt and drop to one knee with my weakened strength. “I can’t make any promises.”

We silently agree to remain here and rest until our strength returns. Blue Onesie found a chained skeleton in the corner and cuddled against it for a nap. Bree checks out the room, but caught her stumbling over some debris. Vayne stands guard while Vyke scouts ahead.

When I get some of my strength back, I return to the headless statue of Strahd. It’s made of wood, which I feel is fitting. Without checking in with the others, I start smashing it, leaving only the wolf, free of the hand that held it. Out of the statue of Strahd, I’m able to make five decent wooden stakes.

Vayne walks over to me. “Couldn’t help yourself, could you?”

I shrug. “What can I say? I hate vampires.” She raises an eyebrow and I can tell she wants the story behind it, but I won’t give it her. “I need a nap.” I toss her one of the wooden stakes. “Wake me if something interesting happens.”

I don’t know how long I slept, but Bree shakes me awake. She motions to Vyke. “He thinks he found the cult leader’s den.”

Gathering our gear, we continue on through this creepy crypt. Vyke leads us to the cult leader’s den and it’s not as impressive as I thought it would be. There’s a rotten desk. Broken furniture. Nothing too exciting. Bree checks for clues, but there’s nothing to indicate what’s going on this freaky place. While the others poke around, another rotten scent catches my nose. It leads to a door on the other end of the room.

I call to the others. “Hey, something ain’t right over here.”

Blue Onesie raises an eyebrow at me. “You mean with that freaky strong nose of yours?”

I ignore the insult and nod. “There’s another rotten smell. It’s different from the ghouls, though. I can’t place it.”

Vyke walks up to the door and points at it. “From behind there?” When I nod, he draws his weapon. I back up and pull out my crossbow. The other prepare themselves. Bree slips her tiny self into Vyke personal space with daggers in hand. Vyke grabs the doorknob, but when he pulls it, it comes with him. The door morphs over his hand, grappling him.

I curse. “It’s a mimic!”

Moonlight’s haze. I hate mimics almost about as much as vampires. They’re monsters whom no one knows what their true form looks like. Many a adventurer has lost their life to mimics posing as treasure chests, furniture, or–in this case–a door.

Vyke curses and raises his free hand. It glows with a reddish aura and the same color aura surrounds the mimic. He managed to hex it. Bree tries to cut Vyke free, but her daggers don’t penetrate deep enough. One of my crossbow bolts pierce into the mimic’s wooden shell and it lets out an ear-piercing screech. Blue Onesie rushes forward with a machete, trying to help Bree cut Vyke free, but his weapon lodges into the wood. The mimic screams again. It dislodges from the passage it guarded and horror drops like a stone in my gut when the mimic swallows Vyke whole.

“Oh my god!” Vayne’s as frozen as I am. “Vyke!”

Blue Onesie and Bree back away from the mimic as it lashes out and I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to get grappled and eaten either. I raise my crossbow. “Don’t stop fighting. He could still be alive in there.” If we can kill it soon, we could gut Vyke out of there before the acid of the mimic’s stomach boiled him alive.

I was waiting for to fire my shot straight into the mimic’s mouth when it suddenly stopped. A burp of smoke escaped its throat. I exchanged a confused look with Vayne. The mimic began whining and stumbling about, more and more smoke spilling from its mouth. A loud pop echoed through the crypt as fire flared from mimic. It exploded and pieces of the monster scattered about the room. Vyke stood in the middle of it all with magic cast in hand and his eyes widened. “I. Got. Eaten!”

I chuckled. Bits of flames were still flittering about Vyke’s red skin. “You okay?”

Vyke shook his hands, ichor from the mimic flung off them. “I’m covered in goo!”

Blue Onesie walked up to Vyke and swiped some of the mimic guts off him with one finger before sticking it into his mouth. “Mmm.” Blue Onesie smiled. “Who knew? Roasted mimic tastes pretty good.”

Vayne and I exchange a disguised look at his actions. I walk to the passage the mimic was guarding. It extends to a fancy bedroom–which wasn’t what I was expecting to find in a crypt. The others and I slowly enter, Vyke grumbling about the mimic as we go.

I nod to myself as I get a look around. The fancy bed. The footlocker. A table. Leather sacks. “I bet my fur this room belongs to the cult leader.”

Blue Onesie gives me an odd look. “That’s a strange thing to bet.”

“Let’s see what’s hidden here, shall we?” Bree slips past us and heads straight for the foot locker. Before she can even touch it, two ghosts appear before her. Everyone grabs their weapons, but I stop them. One of the ghosts was a man. The other a woman. Their spirits were dressed with nice attire. Their postures were straight. Yet, their faces were tired and filled with sorrow. Much different from the painting of them upstairs.

“Lower your weapons,” I tell the others. “These are the spirits we’ve been looking for. Elizabeth and Gustov.” I nod to the ghosts. “They’re Rose’s and Thorn’s parents.”

There’s a hollowness in the air as we stand in front of Rose and Thorn’s coffins. None of us want to open them. They are–or were–just kids after all.

Vyke lets out a heavy sigh. He’s holding his hand out toward the coffins. “I’m detecting a lot of necromancy magic, but its coming from everywhere not just from the kids.”

Blue Onesie backs behind Vyke. “If we open them, they could be trapped.”

I take a step forward. “I want to know what happened. The nursemaid’s body I found upstairs was freshly killed. The parents of these kids have been dead a long time. We saw the kids’ spirits. They need to be reunited with their parents if they’re going to have peace. I want to know how long their spirits have been tormented like this.”

Vayne and Vyke nod in agreement. No one protests when I push the stone slabs partly off the coffins. The air feels colder, but that was due to my dread of looking inside. The bodies of Thorn and Rose are there. They’re nothing but bones. I sigh. “These poor kids.”

Vayne shakes her head. “So, they’ve been dead a while and the nursemaid is freshly dead. I guess she left at some point, tragedy befell the family, and when she returned, whoever hurt the family killed her.”

Bree nods. “That’s my best guess, but who hurt the family? Why?”

I shake my head and look around. If necromancy magic is everywhere. There’s no telling what we’ll find down here. “I get the feeling we’ll find out soon enough.”

Vyke steps over and grabs the stone slabs. “We should leave them to rest.”

“Wait.” I stop him before he can pull the covers back over the coffins. I dig through my pack and pull out Thorn’s favorite toy. Thanks to it, we found this crypt in the first place. I lean into Thorn’s coffin and lay it by his hands. “Thank you for help,” I whisper softly.

Vyke gives me a soft smile, approving of my actions, before I help him cover the kids back up. “We should keep moving,” I mutter.

“Ugh!” Vayne throws her hands up in frustration. “I swear, I’m going to kill him.” When the rest of us look at her in confusion, she motions around. “Where’d the guy in the blue onesie go?”

I try not to groan when I realize she’s right. Blue Onesie is gone. “Forget him. If he wants to get himself killed, he can. We need to find the spirits of the parents so we can free the kids from this limbo.”

Vayne grumbles incoherently, but we move on. A few corridors later, we come across a little dining hall. Blue Onesie is over by the corner with a sword in hand. Just as I step into the room, I catch him stabbing down at something.

An ungodly scream echoes through the crypt and a grick jumps out of its hiding spot. Blue Onesie’s sword stabbed into it’s tail. The beast is worm-like with a beak at its head and four tentacles surrounding it. Vayne calls Blue Onesie an idiot before leaping to action. She scores her dragon claws across it’s body, Bree slips under her and stabs it with her daggers, and Vyke jumps from one of the tables to stab down at it with his sword. The grick lets out a screech and thrashes its tentacles at them, but each avoid it with a simple dodge. When Vayne backs up, I spot an opening. I run forward, and bash the grick right in the beak with my morning star. It’s beak cracks and it falls to the ground.

Blue Onesie places his hands over his heart. “Aw! You guys came to my rescue. I knew you would, but you could’ve come a little faster though.”

Vayne rumbles with a growl, but Vyke gets between her and Blue Onesie, he frowns at the elf. “Do you just go around stabbing random things for the fun of it?”

Blue Onesie perks up. “Yup!”

I roll my eyes and walk over to a corridor on the opposite end of the dining hall. A horrid stench caught my nose. “Something isn’t right down this passage.”

Bree raises her eyebrow. “How can you tell?”

“The smell. It’s…” I shook my head. “Foul.”

Vyke scoffs. “This whole place smells foul.”

“From this direction is different.” I glance back at the others and they’re all staring at me in confusion. I can’t blame them. A human having a nose like mine isn’t very common. “I think we should go this way.”

Vayne walks up to me. “We need to be careful about it, though. We don’t know what else is down here.”

I nod in agreement. Making sure Blue Onesie is with us, we continue on.

I take the lead, and I found out what the foul smell was when we reach a hair pin in the corridors. Four ghouls dig themselves up from the ground like zombies. One grabs me by the ankle and lashes out. Like the spirit of the nursemaid, I feel my lifeforce sucked out of me. I manage to smack it off with my morning star, but another lashes at me from behind. I grit my teeth. I should’ve been more careful, but I got myself surrounded.

I’ve lost sight of the others. Our fighting echoes through the tight corridors and I grow too weak to fight at my top potential. One by one, the ghouls hit me, and drain my lifeforce with each cheap shot. Curse this crypt! I swing my morning star at one of the ghouls but it bends it’s spine backwards in a direction it isn’t supposed to go. “Stupid thing, just die already!”

A bull-rushing blast destroys the wall to my left, and the ghoul blocking that direction gets buried under the rubble. Blue Onesie stands where the wall used to be with a kid-like grin on his face. “Ha! Now, I can fight!” He had two swords in hand, but he looked down to see the ghoul under the rubble, he slumped with a pout. “Oh…he’s buried.”

I let out a huff. It was about time I had some help even if it meant structural damage to the crypt. I raise my morning star to the last ghoul, wincing in pain from my wounds. Yet, a little blur shoots past me. Bree uses her daggers to cut the ghoul’s spine and when it’s torso lands on the ground, she stabs it through the heart.

“Is everyone alright?” Vyke and Vayne round the corridor, their own blood leaking from their wounds. Vyke gives the collapsed wall a frown. He looks at me.

I shake my head. “Those wretches got a lot of my lifeforce. I need to rest.”

Vayne points ahead. “There might be a room up ahead we can rest in.”

Vyke takes the lead. “As long as nothing else is waiting within it.”

Vayne’s suspicions were confirmed. We find a small room with an alter within. The statue on the alter catches all of our attention. It’s made of wood and finely painted. It’s of a tall man with pale skin. He wears a long black cloak and red buckled vest. His clawed hand rests on the head of a white wolf. His raven black hair is pulled back and shiny, and his eyes are red. A growl escapes my throat as soon as I see it, and the dominating way the man’s hand rests of the wolf’s head royally ticks me off. The man’s other hand holds a crystal orb.

Vayne steps up to the plague under the statue. “It says ‘Strahd, the Dark Lord of Barovia.”

Vyke pulls out the letters each of us received when we first came to this haunted land. “Like the guy who sent us these. Who invited us to dinner?”

I round on them. From their tones, I know they don’t realize the mess we’re in. “We are his dinner!” When I’m met with confused looks, I point at the statue. “Don’t you get it? Look at his skin, his fingers, and his eyes. Our generous host, Strahd, is a freaking vampire lord!”