1. Return to Vallaki (with Asvard)
Asvard and Horrick return to Vallaki to bring news and celebration over the death of Strahd. Quickly, they uncover new evil in the form of the Baronet Victor Vallakovich seemingly controlling his father through enchantment and secretly taking the role of Strahd in Vallaki, to solidify his power and eliminate rivals. Given good reason to rid the town of a corrupt evil (and Horrick secretly motivated to steal Victor’s spell book for his own), the pair of adventurers quickly plot the family’s swift downfall.
Asvard gifts the Baron poisoned wine from Strahd’s castle who accepts it graciously and permits the town to celebrate in response, then given time away from Victor’s suspicious eyes Horrick recites the incantation of the magic mirror to summon the spectral demon to kill the budding wizard.
Following it into the manor, Horrick enters the baron’s study only to find him and his mastiffs dead to the poison, and takes the time to search his library, finding within it a collection from his favorite poet, Edgy Gallon Poe.
Meanwhile, Asvard found the baroness dead to suicide, and eventually found the aftermath of the assassin’s battle with Victor, who barely clung to life while fighting the poison in his blood.
Killing Victor with the power of his god, Asvard put an end to the undead the vile wizard had created, and ransacked the room for magical artifacts. Their mission finished, Asvard gifts Horrick both Victor’s spell book, and relinquishes the magic mirror to Horrick to be destroyed (or so the wizard says).
2. Force of Law
The village of Vallaki left in ruins without a noble to lead them, Horrick attempts to quell the unrest using his new found popularity for killing Strahd by attempting to educate the populace of a better way to rule that allowed the party of The Breakfast Club to conquer the castle of Strahd.
He suggests a forum of the villages wisest, and bravest, moderated by the most trustworthy among them elected regularly by his or her peers within the forum. Though many questioned the potentially spurious account of the Baron and his family’s death, they nonetheless eventually submitted to his logic, especially once the more violent rebels were reduced to ash in the intervening days.
Satisfied with the return of order to the village, the Abjurer of Vallaki collected his valuables and trekked out into the land of Barovia on his own.
3. The Wizards Tower
There was only one place the Abjurer felt was secure enough to house the dread power of the mirror, and possibly one of the only places that might have magic strong enough to break it: Kahzan’s tower. He spent over a year repairing the damage done to the tower, and began to reinforce it with magical defenses of his own.
In that time, Horrick finished transcribing Mordenkainen’s rituals, and supplemented his study in transcribing the spells of the fallen wizard Victor. Horrick only interrupted his self-exile to find someone to purchase one of his three spell scrolls of Identify. More money was needed to fund the last of his transcriptions from Victor’s book into his own. Save for the spell Darkvision (what creature would need a spell to see in the dark? Perhaps a blind monkey?).
4. An Evil Unsettled
Left impoverished from his studies, and finding himself too enamored with the Magic Mirror to destroy it, Horrick the Abjurer once again travels Barovia to correct whatever evils remained following the vampire lords destruction. His purpose was both to fulfill his calling and to avoid the temptation to use unsettling magics he had learned and acquired.
To his surprise, however, he finds hordes of dwarves under the command of Alberich Frostbeard to have established a warriors presence within the formerly accursed land. The madness of his former Stead, however, was not only still present but possibly magnified since he had last seen the dwarf life cleric. On the pretense of their former friendship, Horrick requested an audience with the dwarf lord to speak to him and become appraised of his conquest.
Eventually, the deep gnome will come to suggest a plan that would rid his family of the Frostbeard curse. In exchange, Horrick requests some portion of the riches the dwarf had acquired in order to fund the project. If Alberich came to agree, then utilizing expensive gems from far off lands and spoils taken from Barovia, the Abjurer would begin construction of his Grand Abjuration.
Utilizing legendlore, the deep gnome would come to know the ancient history of the Frostbeard’s and the secret origins of how the fiendish pact had come to be. It was here that Horrick learned an unusual secret about himself.
Horrick’s spirit was old and split asunder many generations ago, let loose into the wider universe after a Frostbeard twin tried to renege on a fiendish deal by splitting his soul with a non-Frostbeard. This made the made the twin’s soul and his descendants souls ineligible to be collected until their soul pair also died. Horrick was the reincarnated descendant of this half-soul . . the soul pair of Alberich.
Finally, Horrick had the answer to the madness, the abyssal whispers plaguing his mind borne from the void in his half-sundered soul, and pulled to Barovia by the presence of his soul pair Alberich.
Dedicated to his own restoration, but lacking the power to alter souls, he used the knowledge gained by legendlore to learn the true name of the pit fiend which held dominion over the Frostbeard family. Horrick devised a method to use Alberich’s family book as a Talisman.
Horrick used powerful magic circles within glyphs of warding, as well as private sanctums, counterspells, and banishments all set with their specific triggers as contingencies to failure. Then, once the wizard found a way to amplify his infernal calling spell, he would summon the pit fiend and cast planar binding in the hopes of bending evil to the Abjurer’s will.
5. Dusk
While studying the means to end his and the Frostbeards Curse by force, there was often a time when Horrick was tempted by those foul magics he had learned from Victor, or the one present in the accursed Magic Mirror. Eventually, the Abjurer would test his will, to ensure he would be strong enough when it came time to bind the pit fiend, and not succumb to its foul infernal deceit.
To test this, the wizard would use the tower’s anti-magic enchantments to render the mirror defenseless. While the mirror was in its mundane state, Horrick sundered it; shattering the glass into many shards. When the anti-magic faded, and Horrick Albartie the Abjurer stood above these shards of glass, he saw his face in one of the shards and felt… belonging to it. He took this shard and hid it from himself, as he melted down the rest of the glass mirror to recycle its now mundane materials for some other project.
From this memento of the past, Horrick fastened for it a hilt, and a sheath, to serve as a reminder that the evil cursed things of this world belong only to him.
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