We spend a few hours hiding there deep in the forest as Akkiir and Uphir learned more about the dark rings that they now had in their possession. They summoned the horses and quickly learned that each horse had it's own personality and to get it to do what they wanted, they had to try and bond with the beasts. They had to find a way to appease the proud steeds' pride to get them to serve. After much practice, they came upon the most tentative truce with the horses.
The horses would provide us with the means to begin our assault on Castle Ravenloft. We would use the fast travel of the Ethereal not only to quickly get to the castle, but to use their abilities to get inside the castle and locate our prize. It only took a short time relatively to travel the distance to the castle, but we decided that we would rest in the dark forests beneath the cliffs overlooked by the castle for the night to regain our strength before attacking the castle.
That night we were approached by the stranger we saved from the cells beneath Castle Ravenloft the "first" time we were there as prisoners. It turns out he belonged to a clan of werewolves and he gave us warning of Strahd's searching for us. Through talking with him, we found out that Silvo was in fact a werewolf and now was the leader of their clan now that we had destroyed their previous leader Skennis. If we were going to find Silvo as prophesied by the cards and use his help to get home, we would need to go to this lair of the werewolves. Soon, he was gone and we tried to get some sleep.
Our sleep was interrupted once again as during Nim's watch he noticed his doll friend had reappeared. The doll had run strange string through the trees all around us. This was confusing at first but became clearer later. Soon the lumbering zombies filled with the deadly maggots began assailing our camp. The "string" seemed to be holding them at bay somehow! We battled the zombies and soon they were defeated. We had to use some amount of power to finally destroy the last of the masses of maggots that tried to overcome us, but soon it was done. Sleep would take a while to come, but come it did and we found rest.
In the morning our plan was put into motion. We used the extra-planar abilities of the dark horses to approach the castle but soon learned that magical defenses had been put up that would not allow the horses to enter. This was a big disruption to our plan. We were forced to land upon the bridge near the gatehouse to the castle and materialize there to proceed. No sooner had we done so than a mass of feral vampires from the ruined village across the bridge began charging us. We ran for our lives and slammed the gatehouse doors behind us, locking them out.
Before us was the courtyard and across the way the main entrance to the castle. It looked like our plan now was to go in the way we did before and retrace our steps to find the bone room. Upon entering we found vampires dressed in aged finery dancing in the main hall once again. This time they did not let us pass as visitors, they charged us and battle was begun.
We would have to face two charges of vampires and endure the assault of Strahd himself before we could travel further. The tactic that worked well was Janlynn using her holy symbol artifact to stun the vampires and whilst they were stunned I would cast a Faerie Fire upon the lot of them while Akkiir gathered them around himself to battle them with his powerful sword of light. That with the helm and attacks and spell from the rest of the group we quickly burned through the first onslaught.
The second charge had Strahd show up and he had a big impact on the battle. His largest ploy was to use arcane magic to wretch the sword of light from Akkiir's hand and gain possession of it. The second thig was a curse he placed upon the entrance that cause skeletal hands to grasp up from the floor to attack any who stood within or tried to pass over their large area. Being within the spell was deadly.
We basically used the same tactic again to defeat these vampires but this time we had Janlynn cast he powerful daylight spell which picked up the slack for our missing sword of light. We finished that battle and after defeating 20 or more vampires in total, we were wounded, and had used up much of our magical reserve, but were no less worse for the wear. We rushed forward, retracing the steps we took last time we were here.
We went down into the dungeon once again and made our way into the torture room and beyond into the old teleportation chamber. To our dismay, Strahd had reinforced these doorways with powerful enchantments that brought death to any trying to get through. Luckily, after being set off and almost killing everyone once, we knew what to look for going forward and each door we encountered after that we carefully checked for traps and disabled them. I would need to use a knock spell on each door as well to magically unlock it.
We wound our way upstairs again and eventually made it to the library and although the secret door through the fireplace had been disabled, Uphir's strength managed to get it operating again and we made our way past into the secret tunnels. We found the way down the "dumbwaiter" system with it's cables and levers and soon found ourselves in the hallway with the double doors leading to the ossuary. The traps were disabled and as the door was opened, several riders were on the other side ready to do battle.
Battle was begun, but our fortunes turned sour almost immediately as Uphir was once again dragged beyond our reach into the ethereal realm. We battled and soon all of the riders vanished into the ether. A nice reprieve for us perhaps, but it meant that Uphir was now facing off against all of them herself. This did not bode well.
We knew there was nothing we could do about Uphir, so we set about taking down the skull of Argynvost and preparing for Elwynn to hold it and transform with it into one of his animal forms. This was how we were going to bring it out.