The Stag Walks Out

Session 26, the morning after the Olvenka day, Castle Ravenloft. Vess woke, and what got up was the stag.

The morning

Vess had been unconscious in the castle since the kitchen in session 23. Strahd had caught her and held her in the form of a stag, and Mark beheaded the stag in one clean motion; Logi and Khione stabilized her afterwards. Her death had since become the lie at the heart of Logi's Banishment.

The stag rose with its ears gone and the seam still across its throat. It moved through Castle Ravenloft making the sound a stag makes and went out, past every person who had been arguing about how she died, and none of them stopped it.

Outside it reached the Pendant of Nyss, and on reaching it she changed again: into a fox. Then she walked off, and the party let her go. Nobody said anything about the ears. Nobody asked what the stag was, where it was going, or whether it was her.

What she is

None of this was explained at the table:

• The elf form is dead. The woman the party knew is not coming back.
• The stag is her true form, not a curse and not Strahd's doing.
• The fox is Nyss, her guardian and a relative, inhabiting her, reached through the pendant.

After

Vess left the party, and the valley, with the pendant. At breakfast the same morning Strahd turned her leaving on Logi: why does he keep insisting he killed Vess, when Vess walked out of this house alive? Then he wrote the night into a book, which partly took on Taara, Mark and Yager and pushed them toward the version where Logi and Mark did kill her (The Erasure).