This is the third of 5 stories I wrote to fill out our story in between sessions of a Curse of Strahd game I played with some friends. Posted here for anyone interested and to open it up to critiques and criticisms. I'm not an experienced writer, just a hobbyist when the urge strikes. Enjoy if it's to your liking. STORY WARNINGS AHEAD. This follows the Curse of Strahd module and will reveal bits and pieces of its secrets. The stories are written as if the reader knows these events, and my preamble below will try to avoid spilling too many secrets. Just be aware you might accidentally learn something you didn't mean to.
For some context, Sniv is a Kobold fully in line with 5e D&D canon. She's on the shorter side even for a kobold at 2'9 (84 cm), blue scaled, not particularly muscular, roughly 26-28 when adjusted for human age, and usually driven by a cheerful determination to live up to her role. On the nerdy side of things, she's a Paladin/Cleric hybrid using Strength domain to pick up Shileghleigh, allowing stat focus to be on WIS and CHA with a little in CON and DEX. STR and INT are below average representing her scrawny build and very limited education growing up. She was raised from an egg as a devoted follower of Torm, the God of Duty and Righteousness by her Dragonborn Paladin master. Accompanying her are Calo the Human Ranger, Korfel the Shadar-Kai Warlock of the Raven Queen, and Kalika the Yuan-Ti Abomination Barbarian.
The story picks up just as Sniv and her group put down the dread vampire Strahd. They had done the impossible and destroyed an ancient evil who had shrouded the land in darkness for centuries. No longer under threat of death, and able to escape the cursed lands they had been sucked into, the moment almost felt unreal. Their survival had been a tenuous hope they pushed to the back of their minds; every waking moment had to be focused on their last desperate attack. As if suddenly woken from a hellish fever dream, the group is left to make sense of what had happened. And Sniv is left to mourn the death of her mentor, after receiving ever larger severed parts of him culminating in his gilded skull. The rest had been reanimated to hunt her down as an undead puppet. A tale that deserves its own story, sometime in the future.
