Before Strahd formally took the burgomaster’s authority, the Steward’s office administered the village on the burgomaster’s behalf. The last Steward died in 3437 — the year of the last Night of Four Moons — and was not replaced. The house has been vacant for twenty-five years. Its windows are broken and its garden is overgrown and its attic contains a locked chest of parish records dating back before the Concord — records nobody has inventoried, because nobody has been given the authority to. The village passes the house daily and does not enter it. What the villagers do not say, because they do not have to, is that the Steward was killed by something they collectively decided not to name.

The Steward’s House is boarded up on the ground floor. The upper windows are broken. The door lock is old and simple. The garden is overgrown, but through the weeds you can see a stone path that once led to somewhere.

Sensory

• Dust, damp, absence
• Wind through broken glass upstairs
• A single row of stones in the garden that don’t belong to any wall — foundation of a shrine? A grave?