Olvenka

A hamlet the maps do not carry. A dozen houses in a fold of the valley that no chapter letter covers, settled generations back by strangers the mists took in from more worlds than one — dwarven, human, orc-blooded, elf-blooded and tiefling lines under the same handful of surnames.

Olvenka holds that mist-sent strangers arriving on a naming day mean the child will live long. When Taara, Mark and Yager arrived on the naming day of Tomas and Vera's daughter, they were ushered in, fed and put to work without a single suspicious question.

The corner game

Children in a corner of the square, chalk borders, a make-believe land called Ether. Taara went over and played with them, asking questions as she went. The game was taught to Olvenka's children generations back and has held on through a few retellings. The villagers were not evasive about any of it — their own account is that Taara is probably a descendant of the one who brought it.

Over the afternoon she pieced together the rest. The one who taught it, generations back, was Taara herself.

The naming

At sundown the village gathered, and by Olvenka's custom the mist-sent guests spoke first — a wish for the child, said over her, before the name. All three spoke.

The walk back, the re-entry into the castle, and what the three choose to tell the others have not been played. All three woke in Castle Ravenloft with the day's gifts real in their pockets, having never physically left.