Session 28 — The Test at the Gate

Area: S — Abbey of Saint Markovia

Context

Mark came back on his own. He walked down from the abbey by himself and rejoined the party at Krezk. Nobody brought him, nobody sent for him, and nobody in the party knows he had ever been up there — they believe he stayed behind at the castle and simply turned up. He came down carrying the grown cleaver.

Nobody asked him anything. Not where he had been, not how he got to Krezk, not what the thing in his hand was. He rejoined a party that had left him a valley away and it went unremarked — the same silence that met Vess's missing ears and the stag walking out of Castle Ravenloft.

Before nightfall, Taara, Mark, Logi, and Khione left Krezk for the Abbey of Saint Markovia. There was no errand. They had arrived in a village nobody had ever been allowed into, there was an abbey on the mountain above it, and they went to look at it.

Yager and Kyra stayed in Krezk with Myra, at the burgomaster's mansion, while the moon came up.

The Full Moon

Myra did not go. She stayed behind at Burgomaster Krezkov's mansion and shut herself in the bathroom attached to one of its bedrooms, afraid of what the full moon would do to her. Yager stayed in the house with her — the only one of the party who did not climb.

The change did not come. The moon rose, Myra waited behind the locked door, and nothing happened. She was afraid all night for nothing — or something held it off, and she does not know what.

The Carts

The four followed a line of carts making the climb up to the abbey. The carts carried dead bodies, hauled by two heavy orcs.

The bodies are the mongrelfolk. The carts were coming from the madhouse — the forty Mark killed the night before, being moved while he walked up the road behind them with a party that does not know he was ever there. Like the slaughter itself, they were Strahd's illusion. Mark did not know that yet.

Nobody else on that road could have known what they were looking at. He could.

He said nothing. He followed them up the mountain without a word and without a tell. There was nothing for anyone to notice, and nobody did.

The Gate

The carts passed through the abbey gate. The party went in behind them — and the gate closed before Mark reached it. Taara, Logi, and Khione made it through. Mark did not.

The mongrelfolk guards shut it on him. The abbey's gatekeepers — Otto and Zygfrek Belview, or Strahd's illusion wearing them — barred the way to the one man in the party who had spent the night before killing their kind. The others were let through. He was not.

He forced it. He stood outside for about twenty minutes, and then he broke through.

Inside, he reached Logi and Khione and started back with them — until Strahd asked him to meet at the abbey's west gate.

The Repair

Inside, the three found a ritual at work on the bodies from the carts: they were being taken apart and put back together. Mongrelfolk being made.

The working demanded three things:

• Something existing — the bodies themselves.
• Something borrowed — Logi's flame.
• Something new — a baby.

They tried to stop it. Taara, Logi and Khione moved against the ritual rather than feed it.

Vasilka snapped the baby's neck. Before they could get to it, the woman working the ritual — the Abbot's flesh-golem bride, stitched together for Strahd — broke the child's neck.

Logi brought it back. He cast Revivify and it took — the baby lived.

And the ritual went on anyway. A living baby was still something new. The working finished, and a new mongrelfolk was made out of what it had been given.

When the illusion dropped, the revivify went with it: it cost Logi nothing. The slot and the diamonds were still his.

The flame was borrowed, not taken. The ritual drew on Logi's fire for the making and gave it back. He came down the mountain with it.

What It Was

By the end, the whole of it — the madhouse the night before, the carts, the gate, the repair, the three things asked for — was revealed as illusion. Strahd had built it to test Mark, and see whether he was worth keeping as a follower. The dead on the carts were his, the gate was shut in his face by their kind, and Taara, Logi and Khione were never on trial — they were the witnesses, and the ones who fought a ritual Mark never got to see.

He did not deem Mark worthy. Being shut outside the gate before the test even began was already the answer.

The reason he was not worthy was the madhouse. Mark killed about forty of the mongrelfolk there without being told to, pushed by nothing, with a knife that had only ever asked for one cut a day. Strahd had put him there at Taara's request and left him to it — and the madhouse was illusion too. No mongrelfolk died. What Strahd judged was the choice.

Nobody saw the verdict. Strahd asked Mark to meet him at the abbey's west gate. Before Mark, he spoke with Taara, in private. Logi and Khione had already started back down to Krezk. Then he spoke to Mark alone, and told him the truth: the madhouse had been an illusion, none of the forty had died, and the choice to kill them anyway was why he had failed.

He explained the test to her. What it had been and what it was for — Mark — and that she had never been the one being weighed. Taara knows the carts, the gate and the ritual were her husband's, and that they were a verdict on Mark. Logi and Khione do not.

Strahd took the cleaver. The sword he took off Mark is the Cleaver of the Last Cut — grown out of all recognition on the corridor it was fed, and no longer anything like the butcher's dagger Mark found in the castle kitchen. The bond says the knife cannot be disarmed from a wielder who is conscious and standing, and that it returns to his hand at the next dawn. Strahd took it anyway.

The bond broke. Strahd broke the curse in taking it. The cleaver will not come back to Mark's hand at dawn, and he is no longer attuned to it. The knife he could not put down, sheath, or give away is gone, and whatever it was teaching him has stopped.

He took it from a standing man. No fight, nobody down. Strahd reached out and took it from a conscious hand, and the curse that should have made that impossible did not argue.

Where It Stands

• Myra stayed at the Burgomaster's mansion, locked in a bathroom, afraid of the full moon.
• Taara, Logi, and Khione went through the abbey gate; the mongrelfolk guards shut Mark out of it, and he forced it after twenty minutes.
• The whole test — the madhouse, the carts and their bodies, the gate, the repair ritual — was an illusion of Strahd's making. No mongrelfolk died.
• Strahd judged Mark unworthy and took the grown Cleaver of the Last Cut off him.
• The bond is broken; the cleaver will not return to Mark at dawn.
• Vasilka broke a baby's neck, Logi revivified it, and the ritual made a new mongrelfolk anyway — all of it illusion, and the revivify cost nothing.
• Myra's change did not come. Yager was with her in Krezk.
• Mark forced the gate, reached Logi and Khione, and started back with them.
• Strahd explained the test to Taara alone, then met Mark alone at the abbey's west gate and took the cleaver. Nobody saw it. Taara knows the test was about Mark; Logi and Khione do not. Strahd told Mark himself that the madhouse was illusion and nobody died.
• The session ended in Krezk.