Everything below is as Lotan tells it, and he tells it in taverns, at length, with a mug in his hand and Roxy working the room behind him. He has never produced a document. Nobody in Venturia has ever been to Barovia, and Barovia is not a place anyone here has heard of, so there is nothing to check it against.
That does not make it untrue. It makes it a story.
The Line
The Kaligors are a Barovian family of vintners, and by Lotan's account they became vintners by conquest rather than by trade. Six or seven generations back — he counts on his fingers and gives up — his ancestor Velonar Kaligor was one of the adventurers who ended Count Strahd von Zarovich and sealed the Amber Temple. Velonar married Andrea Kaliskiny, the druid who made the sealing possible, and the two of them bought the Wizard of the Wines, the most famous winery in that land.
The family has made wine there ever since. Lotan's own winery in the Winecradle — The Sorcerer of the Spirits — is, in his words, an unofficial extension of the family business.
The Curse
The part of the story Lotan does not perform is the ending of it.
Lady Noctyrix, the bruxa the party killed to weaken the Amber Temple's vestiges, cursed the bloodline of every person in the room as she died — every lineage present, tainted forever. Lotan is descended from two of them.
He mentions this in passing, as a joke about his skin and his horns: who would've known that being cursed could cause you so many problems? He does not elaborate, and he changes the subject.
Why He Is Here
By his telling the family stayed in Barovia for a thousand years and he did not. He grew bored of the same sights, stowed away on a ship, was caught, and was made the captain's servant — a man who detested his horns and his red skin and found reasons for the lash. In port at Candlekeep, with the captain drunk, Lotan cut his throat, took his money, and took back the one thing he had brought from home.
After that: ship to ship, sailor to pirate to privateer, fortunes made and lost, and eventually a ship of his own. That ship went down in a storm crossing the Sea of Fallen Stars, and what happened in the water is the story he stops telling.
What He Says Happened In The Water
Two things found him as he drowned. The first was vast and single-eyed and asked whether he would take a way out at any cost. Before he could answer, something older and more primal cut in and spoke over it — a voice he describes as a broken mirror, every word carrying a dozen meanings that were all somehow the same meaning.
He swore fealty to the second one to escape the first. He does not name either. He woke in a hammock with a headache, went up on deck, and met a gnome who would not stop talking.
That gnome was Roxanya "Roxy".
See Also
- Lotan — the last of the line to leave Barovia.
- Kaligor — the cutlass, and what he believes about it.
- The Sorcerer of the Spirits — the winery he runs here.