Exhausted and confused, Ezmerelda briefly recounted her failures. At Sir Godfrey Gwyilym's behest, she had went to speak sense into Vladimir Horngaard, and requested his Holy Symbol of Ravenkind. In response, the revenant summoned phantom knights and slew her where she stood; the Vistana did not know how she ended up in the tower, or how she had survived. Ghalwin climbed down to safety with Ez on his back, and the two went over the deaths of The Pack. As she silently wept, van Richten asked Ghalwin to not speak on his behalf, wanting a better moment to face her.
The party decided to briefly rest in the magic wagon, then take a crack at Captain Horngaard themselves. Armed with alchemist's fire and Holy Water from Ez, they decided to walk right in. Ajuni, Ghalwin, and Geronimo followed invisibly behind Tobias and Mormeros, who posed as undead brothers of the Order. Through a broken-stained glass window, they breezed past a chapel of revenants into the cemetery, where Ghalwin pushed in the opening to the mausoleum. Stone steps lead to an underground tomb that housed a dragon's skeleton, missing its skull. Though the crypt had clearly been looted many times by enterprising thieves, it was still guarded by a single revenant knight. She was tricked by Momo and Tobias' disguises, but was alarmed by the sound of Ghalwin's armor clinking down the steps. Hijinks ensued as Mormeros sent her running around chasing a thief's illusion while the party ran back up to the graveyard.
With his dragon scale mail, Tobias had clocked a trace of draconic essence on Argynvostholt's ground floor. They re-entered and found that it had also clearly been looted, but was stocked with tapestries and busts of the same handsome man; Ajuni recognized him as the figure watching them from the tower. Following Tobias' magical detection to the fireplace of a ransacked den, they found a tiny blue ember choking on ash but moving with vague sentience. Ghalwin held it a candle, and the wick helped the hearth roar into cold silvery fire. The ice-cold flame adopted the form of a smoky wyrmling and it began to hiss, flying around the room.
Mormeros took a leap of faith, supplicating himself before the dragon, and it paid off. The wyrmling wished to speak with them further, and flew up, leaving a trail of ash behind it. They quickly surveyed the rest of the ground floor, encountering little more than a Bat hiding in pan, but Momo was excited to find some incredibly aged barrels of Champagne Du La Stomp. In a destroyed ballroom filled with spiderwebs, Ajuni observed a pale blue light twinkling beneath old rubble. Above it was an absolutely gargantuan, ghostly spider and a clutch of translucent eggs. Not looking for a fight, the party decided to follow the dragon's trail of ash upstairs. They did, however, stop to pull back a couple of curtains, and Mormeros removed a black cloth covering a bust only to find his dead face staring back at him.
He pretended like it didn't bother him and they continued up to the third floor. They found that the smoky dragon was growing in size, and it lead them into Argynvost's old room. Inside was the handsome man, who revealed himself to be a fractured ghost of Argynvost. Though scattered and hollow, the ancient dragon still possessed a keen intellect, clocking Mormeros' attempts to hide his identity as well as Tobias' earnestness. He discussed sad fate that had consumed Vladimir and his Order, and expressed his desire to help the party remove the mists from Barovia, which he believed would allow his knights to pass on.
Tobias intuited that they needed to get Argynovst's skull back, but was leery about entering Castle Ravenloft without the Holy Symbol. They climbed over the rubble to Captain Horngaard's audience hall and, seeing that his corpse was collapsed in his throne, Mormeros tried to pull the Symbol from his grasp with a mage hand. This enraged Vladimir, who awakened to confront them, and the requests that followed only angered him further. He moved to attack with his magic greatsword, but Ghalwin was alert. The fey knight struck with powerful divine smites, but found that they were not nearly enough to beat back the revenant.
Vladimir revealed that six Phantom Warriors had been guarding him from the Ethereal Plane, and in tandem with his ghostly knights, he struck down Ghalwin then Tobias in quick order. Ajuni launched fireballs into the spirits that shattered the windows of the hall, as Mormeros tried to banish Vladimir, but his fiendish magic was unable to find purchase. The tiefling moved to protect Ajuni, his back to Vladimir; he would make sure that she, at least, left alive.
As her friends fell, Ajuni would not allow herself to feel powerless again. Facing down disaster, she invoked Delban, and the Star of Ice and Hate answered. He warned her that making this pact would come at great physical cost, but Ajuni accepted his corruption. She somehow barely stayed conscious (1 HP!) as she was consumed by shadowed dread then frigid cold, and watched as Delban's magic trapped Vladimir within a sphere of ice. This bought enough time for her to heal Ghalwin and Tobias, who beat back the spectral knights and jumped from the hall's broken windows to the ground below.
Ajuni grabbed Mormeros and opened a dimension door to Ezmerelda's wagon, yelling at her to move. With an "Arvesh!", they burst past the mansion, and Tobias, Geronimo, and Ghalwin all leapt onto the speeding carriage. As night fell behind them, they galloped away, narrowly avoiding annihilation at Argynvostholt.
