Darkmoon9
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The Dark Powers aren't supposed to interact with the dark lords. Their supposed to be unknowable, esoteric, unfathomable beings, which is a hallmark of gothic horror. Strahd is their favorite toy, they wouldn't give him a deal to let him go. They'd just put Tayana's soul into Cozy and then arrange Cozy's death to screw with him.
Side note, the Dark Powers have only ever released ONE Dark Lord, Soth from Dragon Lance. And that was because Soth had the epiphany that he belonged there and deserved the torment. Which made him boring so the Dark Powers kicked him out.
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Good point, I think I made the mistake of assuming the Dark Powers were the same as the vestiges in the Amber Temple, who Strahd did interact with before, when he made the blood pact that turned him into a vampire. But further research reveals that they are different groups of beings. I am not too knowledgeable about Ravenloft material outside of Curse of Strahd and Von Richtens guide to Ravenloft.´
I based the idea of that Strahd might want Cozy as a successor on his third listed goal from Curse of Strahd, as Cozy is the most like him out of the group. I also think it makes sense that the Dark Powers would have desired Cozy as a Darklord if she had continued on the path of evil. But maybe it makes more sense that Strahd is not aware that the Dark Powers wants her, at least not before the mists traps her in Barovia, that perhaps could be a clue. True for the matter is that even if they made such a promise, the dark powers would never release Strahd, regardless of what he thinks. fortunatly by this point, all I would need to do is edit the description slightely.
You have given me a very interesting idea here, maybe the Dark Powers would probably put Tatyana's soul in Cozy's body to mess with Strahd, but that would probably have to involve arranging Ireena's death first as her soul is currently with Ireena.
11885290
I've read Knight of the Black Rose, When Black Roses Bloom, and Spectre of the Black Rose many, many times, and that's not how it happened. As near as I can tell, the idea that "Lord Soth gave up, admitted he deserved to be tormented, and so was released from Ravenloft by the Dark Powers" is an idea that originated in this video by The Spoony One, and while I love the guy's content, he got this one wrong.
Lord Soth's original curse, given by Paladine (Krynn's chief god of goodness) was to not just exist as a death knight, but also to remember his crimes and failures, being endlessly tormented by the pain of what he'd done. That was why he, accompanied by the banshees, had to sing the story of his downfall whenever any of Krynn's moons were full. "Pain via remembrance" was the essence of his torment.
The thing that we find out in Knight of the Black Rose is that, being an undead creature who has no natural end to his existence, Soth can feel himself slipping into catatonia, and is terrified of that. To that end, he draws some solace from the pain of his memories, because even if pain is the only thing he can feel anymore, at least pain is something. As the novel puts it, the memory of what he'd lost and his longing for things he could no longer have, "goaded his sleeping senses into some semblance of humanity."
It's when he goes to Ravenloft that the Dark Powers make things worse, by acting to remove even this solace from him. Before he becomes a domain lord, he begins to experience vivid flashbacks of his prior life while moving through Barovia and Gundarak, but it's only after he becomes lord of Sithicus that things get worse. All of a sudden, reminders of his past are everywhere, not in terms of direct references but in terms of flawed ones. The banshees no longer sing the song of his damnation correctly, either omitting things that happened, adding things that didn't, or both; it's now different every time, no matter how much he chastises them. Nedragaard Keep, his new castle, is very similar to his original castle of Dargaard Keep, but has just enough differences that it clashes with his memories, having things like a spiral staircase that winds in the wrong direction, an intact door where a ruined one should have hung, etc. (contrary to what some products say, it does not constantly shift; it's just that some little things are different from the original). His skeletal minions no longer stand at their original posts, but instead wander the keep freely, etc.
All of this constantly shoves his past into the forefront of his mind, reminding him of his pain constantly rather than intermittently. The result is that he can't help but habituate to it, the memories losing their power to hurt him due to his being forced to think about them again and again and again. And naturally, that means that he can't help but slip into catatonia. Even his attempt to retreat into the better memories of his life via magical "memory mirrors" (the subject of the When Black Roses Bloom adventure), ultimately fails, albeit by outside intervention in that case.
Eventually, Soth slips completely into catatonia, forgetting virtually everything about himself to the point of lacking self-awareness. And that's when we get to Spectre of the Black Rose, which has Lord Soth's original, god-given curse of "pain through remembrance" move directly into conflict with his Dark Powers-given curse of "torment by forgetting." The entire novel is essentially those two curses moving into opposition. The story is resolved when Soth symbolically reenacts his most heinous crime, allowing his wife and infant son to burn to death because he thinks she might have cheated on him and so the child might not be his. In doing so, he essentially chooses his original curse, and the Dark Powers release him from Ravenloft. We can speculate as to the specifics of why they did so, but we can't really say that it's because he decided that "he belonged there."
(Of course, the power of this scene was undercut a few years later, when Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had Soth actually choose redemption in the novel Dragons of a Vanished Moon, with Takhisis killing him in punishment for that; Weis and Hickman, it should be noted, hated the idea of Soth being in Ravenloft.)
As far as the Dark Powers directly communicating with mortals goes, we actually have more than one canonical example of that. For instance, in P. N. Elrod's novel I, Strahd, it's widely interpreted that Strahd's "pact with Death" is actually the Dark Powers, where they speak to him in the mocking voices of people that he knows. Gene DeWeese ran with this idea in King of the Dead and its sequel Lord of the Necropolis, where the Dark Powers speak to Azalin multiple times in the voices of people he knows, living and dead (the latter novel, it should be noted, conflicts with the canons of Ravenloft quite badly, but was largely retconned back into canonity via the adventure Death Undaunted, which while never actually finished was itself treated as having happened in everything written for Ravenloft in D&D 3rd Edition).
As for darklords being let go, we have a few other examples. Nathan Timothy, for instance, apparently lost his status as darklord after the Grand Conjunction, when his domain of Arkandale was absorbed into Verbrek; he didn't leave the demiplane, and is still bound to its rivers, but officially he's not technically a darklord anymore. A similar thing happened to Duke Gundar, former darklord of Gundarak, who (being a vampire) lost his domain after having a stake driven through his heart, only to be revived when it was removed years later (his head had never been cut off, filled with holy wafters, and then burned). And of course, Vecna wasn't "released" from Ravenloft per se, breaking out under his own power.
Finally!! Another Curse of Strahd crossover Fic! I'm no longer the only one writing one!
Might want to put a DnD tag on it though.
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Good point, added the tag, also noticed that we both, by sheer coincidence called our first chapter "Into the Mists". I am actually amazed this idea has only been done twice.