The Artist


 * You are strapped to a chair in a room that is at once much too small and incalculably vast. You don’t know how long you’ve been there. You try to take a breath, and you choke — both on the pain of ribs that aren’t where they should be and on a familiar stench of rotten flesh, sulfur, and iron. For a moment, all you can do is panic — you struggle to catch your breath, struggle to remember how you got here, how you ended up here again, thought you might have been safe from this at least in Barovia — Barovia, which hardly anyone can enter and no one can leave — and you think suddenly of your companions, who are new to your life but also probably some of the closest any folk have been to you in years. You think also of Ireena, and of Doru, who might be a bloodthirsty sarcastic little shit and old enough to know better — you had to be by his age, after all — but he’s still a child and you worry, suddenly, what He might be able to do with that kind of raw material to work with. Ri-An, too — your chest constricts, and you feel again the unbearable wrongness of your body, can feel your organs are not where and what they’re meant to be — you don’t know what He would do with Ri-An, but you can imagine a whole world of bad that starts there.

A mysterious figure from Bodaway's past about whom he had recurring nightmares as a result of dream pie withdrawal. In his nightmares, the Artist bore the faces of various people he's known — some friendly, some not.