Chapter 2: The Taste of Strawberry Wine

Ivan's apartment above the yarn shop had always been his sanctuary. Now, three hours after cleaning up glass and explaining to increasingly suspicious neighbors that he'd had "an accident with some equipment," it felt more like a bunker.

"You can't just ignore this," Stasik said from his perch on the kitchen counter, where he was systematically knocking herb jars closer to the edge. "Pretending the attack didn't happen won't make the next one less painful."

"I'm not ignoring it." Ivan swept glass shards into a dustpan with more force than necessary. "I'm thinking."

"With what? The same brilliant strategic mind that thought running a yarn shop would keep you hidden from a cosmic death cult?"

Ivan shot his familiar a withering look. "Do you have something helpful to contribute, or are you just here to be smug?"

"Both, actually." Stasik's tail flicked with satisfaction. "But if you want helpful: you need to know what you're dealing with. And your grandmother left you the tools to find out."

Ivan paused in his cleaning. "What tools?"

Instead of answering directly, Stasik hopped down and padded toward the pantry. "Third shelf, behind the pickled beets. The bottle that's been sitting there untouched for seven years because you're too stubborn to admit you might need it."

Ivan knew exactly what Stasik meant. His grandmother's strawberry wine – not the kind sold in stores, but the kind that could dissolve the barriers between worlds if you knew how to ask it properly. He'd been avoiding it since the day he'd moved into the apartment, treating it like a loaded gun he wasn't sure he knew how to handle.

"Scrying is dangerous," Ivan said, but he was already moving toward the pantry. "Especially when you don't know what you're looking for."

"More dangerous than waiting for the next shadow-thing to kick down your door?" Stasik positioned himself in a patch of late afternoon sunlight. "Besides, you know exactly what you're looking for. You just don't want to see it."

The bottle was exactly where Ivan remembered it – heavy green glass with a cork sealed in red wax, warm to the touch despite being stored in the cool pantry. The wine inside was the color of fresh blood and summer strawberries, and when he held it up to the light, it seemed to move with its own current.

"Baba Yaga's vintage," he murmured, reading the Cyrillic script etched into the glass. "Made from strawberries that grew in soil watered by the tears of the earth itself."

"Poetic. Also practical." Stasik's voice carried a note of approval. "One sip will show you what threatens you. Two sips will show you why. Three sips..."

"Three sips will show me things I can't unsee," Ivan finished. It was one of his grandmother's favorite warnings. "I remember the lessons."

He'd been twelve the first time she'd let him taste the wine, just a drop on his tongue while she guided him through a simple scrying to find a lost cat in their village. The visions had been overwhelming – not just the cat's location, but its entire history, its hopes and fears, the complex web of magic that connected it to every other living thing in a fifty-mile radius.

"The shadow-thing mentioned Koschei," Ivan said, settling cross-legged on his living room floor with the bottle cradled in his hands. "The Deathless One. I need to know what his servants want with me."

"Besides the obvious?" Stasik curled up nearby, close enough to intervene if the scrying went wrong. "Your blood, your power, your potential as either weapon or sacrifice?"

"Besides the obvious."

Ivan broke the wax seal with his thumbnail, and immediately the apartment filled with the scent of summer storms and wild strawberries. The cork came free with a soft pop that seemed to echo in dimensions beyond the physical world.

One sip. Just enough to wet his lips and set his magical senses ablaze.

The world dissolved.

Ivan found himself standing in a place that existed between shadows, where the air tasted of copper and ancient stone. Before him stretched a vast hall filled with figures in dark robes, their faces hidden but their intentions crystal clear. They knelt before an altar carved from what looked like fossilized bone, and on that altar...

A heart. Still beating. Still human. Wrapped in chains of starlight and thorns.

"The vessel preparation proceeds," said a voice that sounded like grinding millstones. The speaker stood behind the altar, taller than the others, his presence making the shadows writhe like living things. "Soon, the Deathless One will have what he requires."

"And the grandson of the Iron Witch?" asked another voice, this one familiar – the creature from Ivan's shop, somehow present despite being destroyed hours ago.

"He will come willingly, or he will be brought in pieces. The blood calls to blood, and Baba Yaga's lineage carries the soul magic our master requires." The high priest – for Ivan was certain that's what he was – turned toward the altar. "The ritual requires willing sacrifice, but will accepts forced compliance if properly... motivated."

Ivan tried to step closer, to see more clearly, but the vision began to shift and blur around the edges. Two sips. He needed to understand.

The wine burned like liquid fire as it went down, and suddenly Ivan could see everything.

The cult wasn't just trying to revive Koschei – they were trying to give him a new form, one that could walk in the modern world without triggering the ancient bindings that kept him imprisoned. The heart on the altar belonged to someone still alive, someone whose soul was being slowly drained to create the perfect vessel.

And that someone... Ivan's blood turned to ice as recognition hit him.

His grandmother. Baba Yaga herself.

"Impossible," he whispered, but even as he spoke, he could see the magical threads connecting the ritual to the Iron Forest, could feel the slow drain on his grandmother's immortal power. She was dying, had been dying for weeks, and somehow the cult had found a way to turn her own magic against her.

But there was more. The high priest raised his head, and Ivan found himself staring into eyes like black holes, ancient and hungry and impossibly aware.

"Ah," the figure said, his words seeming to come from inside Ivan's own mind. "The little hedgewitch comes calling. How thoughtful of you to introduce yourself."

Terror shot through Ivan like an electric current. The priest could see him, could track the scrying back to its source. Every instinct screamed at him to break the connection, to flee, but he was frozen by the weight of that terrible gaze.

"Did you think you could spy on us without consequence?" The priest's laughter was the sound of breaking bones. "Your blood sings to us now, grandson of the dying witch. We will find you. We will bring you home."

The vision shattered like glass, sending Ivan tumbling back into his own living room with enough force to knock over a side table. The wine bottle flew from his hands, shattering against the wall and staining the wallpaper red.

"Ivan!" Stasik was at his side immediately, blue fur standing on end. "What did you see?"

"They have her," Ivan gasped, struggling to breathe around the panic clawing at his chest. "They have my grandmother. They're using her to power some kind of ritual, and now they know exactly where I am."

"Impossible. Baba Yaga can't be captured. She's a primal force, a—"

"A dying old woman whose power has been turned against her." Ivan pulled himself upright, his hands shaking. "I saw it, Stasik. I saw her heart on their altar, still beating, still connected to her by threads of her own magic."

Stasik's expression went through several rapid changes – disbelief, calculation, and finally grim acceptance. "If that's true, then we have bigger problems than a death cult hunting you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if Baba Yaga falls, the Iron Forest falls with her. And if the Iron Forest falls..." Stasik's ancient eyes met Ivan's. "Every barrier between this world and the hungry dark collapses. The cult won't just get their vessel – they'll get an apocalypse to go with it."

Ivan was about to respond when every protective ward in his apartment shrieked a warning simultaneously. Something was coming. Something powerful enough to make his grandmother's wine-strengthened magic circle like a spider web in a hurricane.

"We need to leave," he said, already moving toward the bedroom where he kept his emergency bag. "Now."

"Too late," Stasik said, his form beginning to blur and shift. "They're already here."

The front door exploded inward, but instead of shadow-creatures, a figure in gleaming silver stepped through the wreckage. Female, beautiful in the way that glaciers were beautiful – remote and dangerous and absolutely unforgiving.

"Ivan Kozlov," she said, her voice carrying the authority of cosmic law itself. "By order of the Celestial Court, you are under arrest for violations of the Dimensional Stability Accords."

Ivan stared at her, wine-dreams and cosmic terror warring with a new, more immediate fear. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Practicing unsanctioned soul magic, consorting with chaotic entities, and endangering reality through reckless use of inherited power." She raised one hand, and light began to gather around her fingers like weaponized starfire. "You will come with me. Now."

"This day just keeps getting better," Ivan muttered, reaching for his knitting needles as silver fire filled his living room.

Behind him, Stasik began to laugh – a sound full of ancient mischief and absolutely no concern for cosmic law whatsoever.