Chapter 41

The Abbot

Elsie took her seat at the table and quietly began sipping her pea porridge and steamed potatoes, as Dimitri poured each of them a small cordial of wine, and asked his guests to introduce themselves truthfully to his family. Each did in turn: Erros with embellishment, Dyson in no more than three words, and Pieron gave a characteristically polite and analytical description of herself. Fabian was distant however, troubled by uncertainty from their dealings with the forest folk and her failure to kill Wintersplinter in the moment her friends needed her the most. At the last name from his guests, Dimitri raised his wine glass in invitation for a toast, thanked them each for dinning with his family, and said a set of words that judging by the cadence and Elsie's subtle eye roll were an oft heard tradition: times are tough ahead, but tonight we are safe. By the time they'd finished Ilya had emptied his bowl and was begging his mother for seconds, to which she silently obliged, and Erros, bobbing his head in drug induced exhaustion, thanked the Krezkov's for their hospitality, pushed back his untouched bowl of porridge, and bid he retire. Dimitri stood, walked to Erros and clasped his arm to wish him a good rest, but whispered in his ear that he'd best visit the abbey in the morning. As Erros stumbled out of the room, Fabian rose from her seat and followed. She clasped an arm around her friend, and walked him gently up the stairs and into bed. She wrapped him in furs and told him to get some rest. He was already snoring by the time she stood up, so she checked about the room for any hidden dangers, or lurking secrets, before rejoining the dinner below.

Elsie could not contain her curiosity any longer and asked why the travelers had come to Krezk. Pieron and Dyson remained silent, unsure of how truthful to be, but Dimitri offered up the honest answer, that Erros was cursed with lycanthropy and they had come to see it cured by the Abbot. Elsie and Anna both looked somewhat uneasy, but seemed to trust Dimitri's judgement in letting Erros into the town, but he did also ask it not to be told to anyone else in the town. He jokingly prodded Elsie to ask more, embarrassing her by revealing the intrest she was so desperately trying to play down, and for a while they spoke of some of their recent escapades in Barovia, their ultimate goal and current endeavors. Dimitri scoffed at the thought of killing Strahd, explained that the Krezkov's had protected Krezk since it's inception when Strahd took power, and for a hundred years they plotted rebellion, led by Saint Markovia, before it ultimately failed. All anyone can do is hunker down and prepare for winter, he explained, and to that end he asked the party to stick around a while to aid in delayed preparations once their friend was healed. Pieron agreed, and they finished their meal and retired to their guest chambers.

As Ilya groaned and begged for his forth bowl of porridge, the seemingly despondent Anna finished tiding up, and Elsie approached her father Dimitri with a request. She asked his permission to join the party the following morning on their ascent to the Abbey. He vehemently refused, and explained that there was a secret reason he stopped allowing pilgrim's into the city when she was a young child: that some of them disappeared, and he stopped himself before revealing more. But she pushed and swayed his mind to allow just a day trip, she was to be back by nightfall.

The next morning Erros awoke with a groggy sense of hangover, the belladonna root turning his stomach into nots. But with Fabian's help he readied himself and joined his companions for a cold breakfast. Each had readied their gear for another journey as they had so many times before, but beside them now stood Elsie in her makeshift adventuring harness, deep bags beneath her eyes. She'd spent too much of the night awake, gathering her equipment about her and visualizing the adventure ahead, and it was clear to all of them just how green she seemed. Dimitri led the five of them across the town a short ways to a small wooden gate along the side of the cliff, chained and padlocked shut, and produced the key from a pocket in his shirt. Beyond the gate was a rocky path that switched back and forth a thousand feet up the side of the hill to the abbey far above, and he bid each of them a safe journey and good fortune in their dealings with the Abbot. At Elsie however, he pulled her aside, and whispered to her a reminder to run at the first sign of danger and let them do all the talking to the Abbot.

As they began the two hour climb they saw an impressive view of the valley open below them, the houses and citizens of Krezk disappearing beneath a canopy of trees, but far out on the hill surrounding the town they could see a sizable herd of sheep grazing on the stony grass. Alongside them a compentent shepherd looked out, but he was flanked by two guards bumbling about the herd. Elsie explained that recently 3 sheep had dissappeared, they'd no idea where, and someone had decided on the silly precaution of posting guards with Luca the shepherd when he took them out beyond the wall. She waved her arms above her head in greeting and Luca down on the hill below did the same, a flailing full body'd wave hello. Erros thought for a moment that perhaps he'd killed the sheep, but shook his head at that impossibility. For the rest of the walk the four adventurers shared stories of their travels throughout Barovia with the impressionable Elsie, who despite picking up on Erros's embellishments, seemed to full-heartedly enjoy the revelrous regailment.

By mid morning in the chill mountain air, a light flurry of snowflakes falling around them to melt on the yet frozen ground, they arrived at the end of their path and a small gate house to the abbey grounds. The woods continued to climb up the rock around them, with the Abbey perched along a wide plateau near the top of the rocky hill, and strangely enough the gate stood wide open and unattended. Fabian called out that they were here to see the Abbey and that they would happily enter without an invitation, but no one responded. Two guards stood atop the walls of the abbey itself a few hundred feet past the open perimeter gate, but they didn't move. Elsie scrunched her face at the strangeness of requesting they not be invited in, and despite the group's explanation that it was her father's test to see if they were vampires, she still found it odd she'd never heard of that before. Fabian called again, and in the following silence heard the soft murmer of snores from the rightmost guard room: no doubt the gate attendant. Erros was the first to march through, and in turning did see a form curled up on a bed of old stray in the guard room. He beckoned the rest to follow, and together the group walked through the grounds to the Abbey itself. They passed a graveyard so weather worn that its occupants were likely dead for centuries. At the closed door to the Abbey above which stood the two armored guards as still as statues, they could finally see that they were just that, scraps of armor and clothing propped up on stakes, a disonserting sight. The door to the Abbey was imposing but unlocked, and Erros pushed it wide and stepped into the inner courtyard to find the man who could only be the Abbot. His turned back was clad in ornate robes emblematic of a friars clothes, though he towered almost eight feet tall, hundreds of pounds of hardened muscle stretching the brown fabric. His hair was white as snow, and as he turned and lowered the book he'd been reading, he maintained a perfect posture and elegance, his golden yellow eyes practically glowed in the soft gray morning light. He spoke in a clear and even voice, asked to know why they'd come, cold and disinterested, until Erros explained that he was a werewolf and heard rumor of the Abbot's supernatural healing. The Abbot looked Erros up and down, weighing his worth with a discerning eye, then turned and commanded they follow.

He led them across the inner courtyard to the smaller of two buildings and stooped and twisted through it's small door. Inside the room was large but impecably tidy and neat. In one corner a set of chairs, in the other an impressive library of books behind a desk stacked with papers arranged in geometricly pleasing piles. At the far end a fire burned in the hearth, a stack of sawn firewood, each identical in length to the width of a hair, and in the center a single small table, and a man slumped in an over-large chair. At least it was perhaps a man, for the creature stood only 3 and a half feet tall, sprouted a second smaller head, had a bear's paw for a foot and a lobster's claw for an arm. He sat deep in his cups, broken bottle strewn about the floor around him, absent-mindedly turning a scuffed up viol. The Abbot merely walked up to the creature and began tidying around him, as he slurred a drunken greeting to the party. With stern patience the Abbot bent down and spoke loudly into the ear of the man's larger head. "Clovin do you not have chores to attend to?" The man grumbled and slid from his seat to leave the way they'd all come, but not before Erros asked to see his viol, and strummed out a small diddly to check if it was in tune. It was, perfectly in fact, and he handed it back to Clovin, but the Abbot's interest was picqued, and as the strange creature left he proposed his offer: he would heal Erros's lycanthropy if he gave him his fingers. The group felt whiplashed by the strangeness of it all and asked questions to get at this entity's peculiar nature, though he proved cryptic and obtuse. They got the sense that the Abbot was old, not from this realm or any they'd known, and thought little of their opinions or experiences. They asked after Clovin, and it was clear he'd made similar deals with that man, replacing piece after piece, taking parts of him he needed. For what they asked, he offered to show them, a great project he'd poured so much of his purpose into. But as he walked out the door to lead them to their project, he paused, and requested they fetch another guest who'd asked to see it too a short bit ago. He pointed up the stairs to the second floor, and hesitantly Erros ascended the steps. Up there, he saw the guest, a lithe form rising from a chair across the room shrouded in darkness. For a moment he thought, Ireena? but as she turned he saw on a table before him a revealing piece of equipment, a familiar looking six-chambered pistol. Erros? Eliza asked, and the two ran to embrace each other after so many weeks apart.