The Blue Rose Wedding
Roughly eight hundred years ago, in his mortal prime, Strahd married Taara in the great hall of Castle Ravenloft. For many years they ruled Barovia together. It was the happiest time of both their lives.
The courtship
On one of her long stretches of duty as a Defender, Taara's path crossed the valley of Barovia. She came to know the old count, Strahd's father, and the two formed a close friendship; she was often welcomed into the household, and she met his son there many times.
When an old blood feud reignited, she refused to stand by and fought alongside the family. The war was won, but the count fell in its final days. At the funeral she and Strahd talked until the candles died, and shared grief slowly grew into love.
The wedding
They married in a grand celebration in the great hall of Castle Ravenloft. Afterwards he protected the valley, and she earned the love of its people.
The portrait
The wedding was painted in the great hall's colors. Taara is the bride, veiled, her white wings chained in gold, wearing a black-and-violet gown close to the one she wears now, holding a bouquet of blue roses. Beside her stands a young Strahd, human and dark-haired, in black regalia with a deep red cloak and fur collar and a jeweled clasp at his throat, holding her hand. Castle Ravenloft rises lit and whole in the background; blue roses and butterflies frame the scene. Candles burn on either side.
It hangs at the far end of the castle gallery, among portraits floor to ceiling and centuries deep: three times the size of any other, and lit and kept clean when nothing else in the room is. The lectern beneath it held Kept Memories for eight hundred years, until Strahd moved the book. The party found it in session 24. Beneath it Strahd gave Khione her sight so that she would read the book; he did not know she cannot read.
How it ended
Strahd began to grow grey beside a wife who did not. He hunted a way for them both to stay young forever, and the hunt led him to the flame that kept her people ageless. She left him before dawn to put it beyond his reach, and he took the marriage out of her memory. The full order of events is on Ether's Flame; what he did to her memory is The Erasure.
Remembered
- Session 24. Logi read the first two chapters of Kept Memories aloud in the gallery, beneath the portrait. Taara got back the courtship, the wedding and the happy years, but not why she left or forgot.
- Session 31. On Ether, all of it came back to her (Ether's Reignition).
Kept Memories tells its own version of the marriage, written by Strahd and altered so that it lies about the order of events.