Day 16 – Forward

“‘Go back?’ he thought. ‘No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!'”

The following is dedicated to my Curse of Strahd group. I love you all very much; please don’t read this until March 8.

Vignon had been coasting for one hundred lonely years. From city to city, continent to continent. He’d picked up a handful of useful skills, but nothing life-changing. How to shoot a crossbow, how to pick a lock, how to fix items both magical and mundane. He was a veritable multi-purpose tool, and he was confident about that fact.

Until he ended up here, stuck in Barovia. It felt like he could separate his life into two sections: Before Barovia, and Right Now. Time here felt both like it was standing still and running out. He was constantly looking over his shoulder, always worried about the next thing. And yet there was a staleness to the air, a stagnancy worse than closing time at a Daggerford tavern.

Would he ever be in Daggerford again, feel the foaming waves of the Sword Coast, see the Spine of the World pierce the sky? He didn’t exactly feel homesick, just bitter that the options were taken from him. At least on the Sword Coast, he could find people who were in need of his skills. Here, he felt useless, or less than useless.

His companions were indefatigable. They could do what he could and then some. Why pick a lock or check for traps when you could Knock or send an Arcane Eye? Why mix up a healing salve when you could lay your hands on someone and patch them up instantly? They could do all of this and then some, seemingly never running out of energy. Meanwhile, everything Vignon tried came up short and left him exhausted.

He tried desperately to find something to like about Barovia. Everyone said he should get used to it–he’d be there for quite a while. But it was hard to like a place where you were punished for the crime of hoping, where every choice was a trap and every promise left a mark on your soul. He’d been coasting for one hundred lonely years, but never before had it been harder to put one foot in front of the other.

They all had something they wanted. Vignon had written it all down like a mechanical diagram, like it was an engineering problem to solve. The bard wanted a home. The monk wanted his wife back. The paladin wanted to be recognized. He could sympathize with all of them and none of them, still feeling somehow like he was on the outside looking in.

It was nighttime, and they were all cramped in the wizard’s tiny hut. Vignon was awake, scratching down the newest requirement: the wizard wanted to turn back time. This was the most demanding one yet, but he still considered it with the same care he considered the others.

“Vignon?”

The intrusion snapped him out of his thoughts.

“Howard,” he said suddenly, shutting his book. “I thought you were trancing.”

“I was,” said Howard, carefully unfolding his classes and putting them on. He pushed them up his nose with a smile. “But the vibes felt off, so I woke up.”

Vignon cracked a half smile. There was no getting past him.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about Fainsled,” Howard continued, guessing (partially correctly) at what was keeping Vignon awake. “You know how wizards like to just say things. We can give him a hard time about it tomorrow, so don’t lose sleep over it.”

“It actually wasn’t Fainsled,” Vignon lied. With impeccable sleight of hand he pulled out Howard’s book–the one Howard had given him–and held it up. “I got to a good part, and I just can’t put it down.”

The look of pleasant surprise on Howard’s face was almost worth the lie. “Well, then!” he said. “Don’t stay up too late, you hear? Even if it is quite the page-turner.”

With that, Howard removed his glasses and went back into his elven trance. Vignon watched him for a second, realizing he’d made progress on one of those goals in his notebook.

Maybe there was no one solution to the complex web of issues. Maybe he couldn’t build one machine to solve all their problems. Maybe he was the machine, doing small things here and there, incremental, iterative. The multipurpose tool, something somebody could use.

He opened Howard’s book and began to read.