The Heart of the Matter

Allow me to recount events up until this point, for fear that I may lose myself by night’s end…
 
We awoke from our rest and began exploring the rest of the castle, in search of the Heart of Sorrow. To be quite honest, I don’t recall much of what transpired during the day. Or, what we took for our “day” in this place. The moon still shone red outside, and the party went to great lengths to shield me from its light for fear I may transform and begin rampaging here in the castle; or worse, against them. I can’t blame them, if I’m being honest. I once hog tied Erkki and cut him with a silvered sword just to test if he’d become infected, and here I am having willingly taken the curse upon myself. What kind of man becomes the thing he hunts?
 
I suppose.. I was scared, really. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had something to lose. Some one to lose. And I wanted more power to protect her. Sergei promised to come to us in our hour of need, but to be honest I don’t know how much faith I put into that. When we got up, we found a vampire was watching us, and quickly ran away back to Strahd. Esmeralda was tracking it with some arcane ability, but lost sight of it when it entered a room where Strahd was waiting. We searched for things as we went after them, coming across a few items of note. Not wanting to engage the vampire lord until we’d dealt with the Heart, we used the staircase to change floors instead.
 
We found ourselves on the main floor, as I’d come to call it; the same floor we were on when he invited us to his castle for dinner. His great hall where we know the fragment of Mordenkainen’s staff remained. Strahd arrived before we could take it, before we made it into that room, even. I had devised a new counter for the vampire this time; one that he truly never expected. Throwing open my water skins that we had filled with Holy Water back in the pools under Krezk, I summoned a wall of wind to suck up the water and keep Strahd pinned. The wind would prevent him from turning into mist, and hurt him grievously as the acid-like Holy Water swirled within the wind like a hurricane. The group managed to counter his attempts to teleport free, but a final casting uncountered saw him switch places with Oren, freed from my trap.
 
He fleed once he had the chance, having been caught unawares by our guile. We recovered the staff fragment from a compartment beneath the vampire’s throne. The front door had been open and then sealed again, apparently saving Moira from imminent death. Kasimir was picked up by some winged beast and flown off with; I don’t know if I’ve ever met a man with worse luck than he.
 
I was led around through most of the castle wrapped in furs and blankets, shielding me from the light of the moon. I didn’t mind, for the most part. Eventually, the heat became too much for me and I threw the articles off of me for relief. We were before the heart, and the floor was covered by a thin layer of red.. “ooze”. The others didn’t know what it was, but it was a danger that I was familiar with given my family’s line of work. It was an Oblex; a more dangerous type of ooze than a mere gelatinous cube. We managed to stab the heart and destroy it, just before the creature below our feet awoke and tried to come after us. Thankfully, the wall of force we put in place held it at bay long enough for us to escape without an encounter with the creature.
 
With no real other goal beyond our final confrontation with Strahd, I proposed we all go back down to the crypts and rest within the Sanctuary there before we engage Strahd again. It it here that I will end this entry.