Chapter Text
Strahd doesn’t remember which group of adventurers it was that dragged the tradition of colored Wintersend candleglass along with them when they were pulled into her lands.
She doesn’t care for it, she muses as she stands at the parapet of her castle, watching colored lights spread through the valley below like a million rainbow-hued fireflies. She much prefers the traditional white lights, casting their glow over the snow and driving back the darkness.
Ironic, really … given that she is the darkness.
Sergei would have loved them, though. Tatyana, too. Always taken with the beauty in life, those two. Free to flit around and do whatever their little hearts desired, while other people tended to their duties and made sure the country ran and all the little people that made the castle run did their jobs.
Her grip tightens on the edge of the fine stonework. Cracks appear in the stone underneath her hands.
She didn’t come up here on Wintersend Eve to be angry about ancient hurts, ancient pain.
She came up here on Wintersend Eve to watch the lights spread through her beloved Barovia and remember a similar time … a happier time.
***
The snow has finally made its way down from the mountains that surround the Barovian valley, blanketing the land in powdery, soft snow this Wintersend Eve. The crisp winter-blue sky is hidden behind clouds, snowflakes swirling in the air with each gust of wind. Ever-present fireglow turns Sergei’s hair into spun gold, his bright smile a match for the dancing flames as he puts yet another present under the massive tree in the greatroom of Castle Ravenloft.
“Just a small thing, sister,” he says, catching Strahd’s raised eyebrow. They’ve quarreled about money more than once – he is of course free to spend his portion of the birthright if he chooses to be so profligate, but he has a tendency to also hand out the tax money to every person that gives him so much as a quivering lip, and at the rate he’s going will run Barovia into the poorhouse in a fortnight. And then the peasants will turn on him, when he has no more handouts.
But Wintersend is no time for such arguments.
Wintersend is the time for the lord of the land to play proper host to every noble who comes to call. To have the largest tree, overflowing with presents for all and sundry. To smile benevolently at her younger brother - he of no actual duties whatsoever now that he has stepped away from the priesthood, the one simple thing to which the youngest child is bound - and find joy in his joy.
Strahd always does her duty.
Indeed, she has done her duty ever since the age of seven, her life not really hers, and oh how it galls her to watch others cast duty aside as though it means nothing.
And the one thing she wants … she cannot have.
She returns Sergei’s smile – if not quite as brightly, but when does she ever smile brightly – and gives the expected chuckle. “It is my place to spoil you, little brother. After all, what does it say about me, if my offerings for my brother are meager? No, it just wouldn’t do.”
“You’ve welcomed me into your life, my dearest sister,” Sergei says, taking Strahd’s hands, “and you have welcomed my beloved into your life, and that is gift enough for me.”
He really is just like an excited puppy.
***
That Wintersend was like any other – Strahd as ever the proper host, as though Strahd would be anything less than proper, songs around the fire, Sergei and Tatyana with their heads bent together, making wedding plans and life plans. The castle full of people, light, hope.
Full of life.
But those white Wintersend lights didn’t stave off the darkness for long.
A mere four months later, a coup would leave the castle awash in blood and corpses, the treasonous bastards’ slaughter of Barovia’s nobles – though unexpected – providing excellent cover for Strahd to plunge an assassin’s blade into her perfect, innocent brother’s heart before catching his life’s blood in a chalice and lifting it to her lips, sealing an ill-considered bargain made in the heat of desperation.
Those treasonous bastards paid for what they did to her people, and so did their family lines.
Well … one of them remains alive.
Let no one say Lord Strahd von Zarovich is without mercy.
The ringleader remains, driven mad in his now-immortal existence (that itself a gift from Strahd), bricked up in a mausoleum and held by unbreakable magic.
Sometimes, on quiet winter nights, Strahd can still hear him desperately scratching at his prison.
It makes her smile.
Sergei – beautiful, too-generous, too-naive Sergei – is long since dead. She has not seen his eyes in another Barovian in all these 400 years.
Sometimes she wonders about this. Souls cannot leave Barovia, after all.
They all return.
All except Sergei.
Tatyana – her Tatyana, the one thing that Strahd has ever wanted for herself – will always dance just out of reach. Or come close enough to touch and then be yanked away, depending on how malicious the dark powers that hold Barovia in its grip feel like being with that reincarnation.
But Strahd was not a conquering general for decades to lose. She did not reclaim her ancestral homelands to be stymied by duplicitous, deceitful magic, no matter how strong.
She will find a way to have Tatyana – or whatever name she is going by in this reincarnation – and she will find a way to escape this prison.
Lord Strahd von Zarovich is the Ancient.
She is the Land.
And she does not capitulate.