advantage.
543 Barovian Calendar
By the time the spring thaw was well advanced, the manor house was ready for Azalin. It was a relief to us both. With each passing week the castle seemed to get smaller for us, particularly the laboratory. I had many experiments in progress, testing and practicing the spells I'd learned, and his own work vied for space with my own. On one memorable night the magical energies became too intense to be contained when his concentration wavered in a casting. A tendril of the power lashed out, noisily connected and combined with my work, and when the smoke dispersed I discovered a man-sized hole in the wall. The stone work hadn't been destroyed so much as melted. Neither of us had been too terribly pleased over that incident.
The job of moving him out was larger than I'd anticipated. For someone who had arrived with just the clothes on his back he'd accumulated an astonishing amount of equipment in the relatively short space of a few months, much of it very fragile. Safe overland shipping of the glass work was possible, but we both elected to magically transfer it to the house. My barrier wall only functioned in one direction to keep things from entering, so it was no problem to me to get things out.
The job fell to me to do all the translocation work, giving me the idea that this was yet another spell Azalin did not know and wasn't going to bother learning. The impression which he continued to give was that he was too busy, which was nonsense to me. When the fever to know is inside you, nothing prevents you from seeking and learning more. That same fever possessed Azalin, but he never seemed to give in to it.
Once more was I tempted to ask the why behind his eschewment of new spells, but I was in a hurry to convey him from the castle and the summer nights were short. I had to save my energies for the transferrals, not waste them plying him with questions he was obviously too occupied to address. Later, I promised myself. When the time was right… later.
The process took longer than expected, for I had to rest between each casting, but eventually the last of it was out of Castle Ravenloft, including Azalin himself. As a courtesy-and to get him out faster-I saved him the long trip by land around the mountain and sent him along with the final shipment. With his permission, of course.
The instant he was gone I hurriedly took myself off the premises and set into motion a series of detection and cleansing spells I'd stored away just for this moment. They spun and hurled through every crack and corner of Castle Ravenloft, their purpose to find any hidden magical traps Azalin might have devised. During one of his interminable stories he mentioned doing that to an enemy once, and there was no reason to think he wouldn't repeat the ploy.
As his style of magic was different from mine I'd designed the spells to react specifically to it. I was surprised, perhaps even a little disappointed, when nothing turned up. I thought he would at least have some sort of scrying contrivance in place, but then he would anticipate that I would be looking for problems. He wouldn't be so foolish as to leave anything obvious lying about. It would have to be the hard way, then, requiring me to go over the entire castle inch by inch to make sure it was clean and secure.
In the meanwhile, until I was satisfied that all was safe, I would take my daytime rest not in my crypt beneath the castle as usual, but in a small cave I'd carved into an inaccessible crevice on the wind-blasted north face of Mount Ghakis. The wards and traps I'd placed there were the equal of those around my crypt, but with the added advantage that Azalin had never been near it. Not even the mountain goats went that high up. I could only reach it myself in bat or mist form. Perhaps he knew about it, for I suspected he had some kind of Sight magic which he had not deigned to share, but with the protections I had in place he would be hard-pressed to take effective action against me without being there in person. Somehow the picture of him in mountain climbing gear precariously dangling from a rope, his illusionary robes flapping up around his ears in the wind while trying to cast a spell, wasn't one I thought I would ever witness in reality.
After a week of thorough searching I decided the grounds, castle, and even the spiky outcrop of the mountain it stood upon were safe and clear and moved back in. I also reinforced the area against intrusion, casting fresh new spells over the old and making sure my servitors were completely unpoisoned by Azalin's influence.
Throughout all this I kept an eye on the manor house by means of the crystal ball Ilka had given to me, being careful not to bring myself too close to Azalin's immediate presence. More than once he started and looked around, causing me to retreat. When not dodging him, I was able to get a good view of the progress he made with his laboratory.
Impressive was the best word to describe it. The ranks of glass works, when properly lodged in their carved wooden holders along the curving walls of the tower made sense to me now. When filled with certain fluids and linked by a mile or so of twisted copper wire he had ordered from the mines of Immol, they would amplify the energies we would summon. The round shape of the structure would confine the power into a concentrated form large enough for us to walk into. The problem with working in my own laboratory, he said, was the opening created would be far too small to use, no more than a hand span. Not a hardship for me, since I could slip through in the form of a bat, but I kept that snippet of news to myself, knowing it would only annoy him. There were other ways of doing that.
When they'd done all they could do, he dismissed the few remaining workers and finished the final setting up himself-not that he deigned to shift anything or so much as hold a paintbrush in his gloved hands. He employed spell work. Furnishings darted about the rooms like birds as he directed them to their designated places. By merely pointing his finger he traced sigils in silver fire along every square foot of wall space in the laboratory, each sign meant to amplify and focus the power we would raise. When illuminated by candles or magical light they shimmered, sending bright reflections into every comer of the room.
When it was done the place was indeed impressive, and I held a certain amount of envy for it. When once he was gone I planned to take it over. Though I hoped to be gone as well, I did not intend to leave permanently. My main hope and desire was not to abandon Barovia altogether, but reunite it with the plane from which it had become separated. The arrival of Azalin had brought home the hard fact that Barovia was yet very provincial and further progress on many levels of development was all but stagnated by its utter isolation. Locked away in this pocket of the Mists it might die for want of external stimulus and trade. And if Barovia died, then how long would I be able to linger, futilely trying to feed upon its rotting corpse?
From Azalin's private commentary notebooks, contd.
Free at last, at least of the frustrating, stultifying atmosphere of Castle Ravenloft. It has been nearly a year since my arrival and long past time for me to leave it and Barovia behind.
I had initially considered taking over the land from Von Zarovich, but only, only on condition that it could somehow be shifted from this small pocket of a plane to the larger one where I originated. To trade my rule there for rule here would be demeaning for one of my capabilities. One would as soon ask a hawk to trade the free flight of his hunting range for the mastership of a cage. To make an annexation of that cage into the hawk's larger territory is quite something else again.
Toward that end I have tried to secretly establish some form of regular contact with members of the Barovian nobility, beginning with Baron Latos, who seemed most obligingly tractable to my influence. This proved to be a waste of time. Von Zarovich, I discovered, had already imparted strict instructions against anyone contacting me, and as is in my own land, his word is law in Barovia-the whole of the law that no one dares to violate lest they end in his infamous dungeons. While I can agree with the reasoning behind this policy, it has proved damnably inconvenient to my purposes.
His nobles fear him, and their fear could be something I might be able to turn to my advantage but for the fact they fear me even more. I know not exactly what he said to them, but they avoid me whenever possible and it's left an immutable impression that even I would be reluctant to try changing as it would be ail too obvious to Strahd. I could do it, but forcing them all, one by one, to rally to my banner would consume much time, and Von Zarovich would notice and stop things long before I could make any significant progress.
Far better that I focus on the primary work toward an escape, then worry later about how to take over his
