With the fragile alliance with Count Dracula sealed and the weight of an impossible task pressing down on them, the party split their forces. The Traveler, Lena, and Travian remained behind at the shrine — the place where Mike O'Riza had once been reborn — to rest and secure a means of escape should things go wrong. The Traveler was winded from the effort of tearing reality open to carry them halfway across Wachovia, and Lena stayed close to tend to him while Travian and his undead Puma, Lightbane, kept watch over the group. The remaining four — Mike O'Riza, Sir Ulric Thornstrom, Greg the Haunted Armor, and Sybil — turned their eyes north toward the jagged peaks of the Dagger Reach, where the Belarch and the Bloodstone awaited.
The Dagger Reach rose before them like a wall of broken blades, its black granite peaks swallowed by mist and the sound of whispers that had no living source. Pale lights drifted between the rocks, and the mountains themselves seemed to stir with ancient awareness. Faced with a sheer and treacherous climb, Mike O'Riza shed his intangible spirit form and transformed into a massive dragon, his body large enough to carry the others on his back. The party climbed aboard, and with a powerful beat of his wings, he launched them into the sky above the Dagger Reach.
The ascent was anything but smooth. Violent gusts of mountain wind hammered the dragon from every direction, threatening to tear the riders from his back. Sir Ulric Thornstrom fought to hold on with every ounce of his considerable strength, and at one harrowing moment, Sybil was thrown loose entirely — only for Greg the Haunted Armor to lunge and catch her by the scruff of her neck, holding her dangling in the open air until she could be pulled back to safety. Sir Ulric himself was briefly flung free, but spread his wings and battled back through the gale to rejoin the group. Through sheer determination and the dragon's powerful endurance, the party crested the summit and began their descent.
The path narrowed as they dropped into Grief's Hollow, a cursed canyon where the mist never lifted and the air was thick with the memories of the dead. Mike O'Riza returned to his natural form, as the passage was far too tight for a dragon to navigate. The ground trembled with distant, echoing screams, and shadows moved at the edges of their vision — the hollow was said to remember every death that had ever occurred within it, and tonight its restless dead were very much awake. The party pressed through on instinct alone, navigating the fog and the whispers until the hollow finally released them into the open air of a volcanic valley.
What lay beyond Grief's Hollow was a wound in the earth — a chasm of fire and shadow where the ground had cracked open long ago and never healed. Black smoke curled from fissures in the scorched stone, the sky glowed ember-red, and the air tasted of ash and iron. At the edge of the chasm, silhouetted against the infernal light, stood Mikael Belisand — the Belarch — robed in crimson vestments, hands folded, the Bloodstone Gem glowing from the scepter in his grip. Beside him stood his twin subordinates, Veyran and Lilitha, flanked by a horde of homunculi and a retinue of shambling zombies. Kneeling in spectral chains nearby was the Revenant, straining against his bonds and going nowhere.
Veyran and Lilitha exchanged sharp words at the party's arrival, noting with thinly veiled mockery that the Traveler was absent. The party ignored the barbs and turned their attention to the Belarch himself, who listened in cold silence as their proposition was laid before him. They explained the plan — to bring the Bloodstone and the amulet together at the Blighted Grove in Gräuhaven, where Mike O'Riza would perform a ritual to give Dracula's wife a body and free her from the tree, breaking the curse that had unleashed the Blight upon the land. The Belarch was unmoved by sentiment but not by strategy.
He acknowledged the stalemate between himself and Dracula with the calm certainty of a man who had been waiting a very long time for it to break. He refused outright to set foot in Castle Dracula, citing the oppressive dread that clung to the count's seat of power, and instead offered a counter-proposal: he would meet them at the edge of the Blighted Grove in Gräuhaven, on neutral ground, and he would bring the Bloodstone with him. The Revenant, still bound in spectral chains, would accompany him as insurance. With that, a tense and uneasy agreement was struck.
The party made their way back to Castle Dracula through a magical rift, stepping out into the courtyard where Count Dracula was already waiting, goblet in hand. They relayed the Belarch's terms, and Dracula listened without expression before a slow, knowing look crossed his face. He observed that it had been a very long time since both he and the Belarch had occupied the same place at the same time, and that there was a certain elegance in letting the enemy bring the prize directly to him. He agreed to the terms without hesitation, then dissolved into a swarm of bats and vanished into the depths of his castle to make his preparations.
The party stepped outside the castle gates to rest, unwilling to linger within the oppressive dread that permeated the grounds. Sybil tended to her armor, repairing the wear of the journey, while health potions were brewed from vials of blood — sourced, conveniently, from the castle's ample supply — and distributed among the group. The party spoke quietly about what was coming: the ritual, the cost it would demand, and the strange, fragile hope that had somehow survived every obstacle thrown at it. Mike O'Riza mentioned, almost in passing, that the ritual would not only give Dracula's wife a body — it would also make him something he had never quite been before. Something real.
When they were ready, Mike O'Riza transformed into his dragon form one final time, and the party climbed aboard for the flight back to the shrine. The winds of Duskwatch battered them as before, but the party had grown accustomed to the rhythm of the gusts, anticipating each one with the ease of experience. They landed at the shrine without incident, and Mike returned to his natural form before burning an arcane marking into the ground — a quiet, scorched sigil that would serve as an anchor for a future rift, a door they could open when the moment came. The marking did not glow. It simply waited.
At the shrine, the party reunited with the Traveler, Lena, and Travian, who had spent the time resting and keeping watch. The group began to catch each other up on everything that had transpired — the volcanic chasm, the Belarch's counter-proposal, Dracula's cold agreement, and the plan that now bound all of them together toward a single, uncertain moment at the edge of the Blighted Grove. Whatever came next, they had done the impossible: they had talked two ancient rivals into the same room without a single blade being drawn. And somehow, against all odds, they had grown stronger for it.
