GM POST
After shedding your winter clothes and warming yourselves by the masonry hearth long enough for the numbness to leave your extremities, you signal Brydum Black Axe that you're ready to meet with the Dain. Gruffly beckoning for you to follow, Brydum leads you deeper into Battlehammer Hold with its wide squat vaulted passages and arches carved in the likeness of legendary dwarven kings. With lanterns illuminating the stone, the time of the surface world seems to hold little meaning.
A pair of weary dwarven guards resting on their halberds consult in whispered tones with Brydum, each dwarf glancing back at you like a sequence of erupting geysers from their council of beards. At last, the guards operate the hand-cranks causing the stone double doors to grind open into the Dain's audience hall. Braziers crackle along the sides, where sweating dwarves struggle with moving slabs of stone. Supplies of all kinds – smoked ham hocks, brined vegetables, bouillon, rations, casks of ale, lamp oil – are piled up against the walls as if the dwarves are preparing for winter everlasting.
"Dain of Dains," says Brydum, stiffly extending one foot, crossing his hand over his chest and bowing,
"this is Lumrolur, Bafflestone, and company. They're in search of a killer in Ten Towns, they say, and seek passage into the Underdark..." His voice trails off with a thousand yard stare, as if both he and the Dain know perfectly well what that implies.
Standing over a map of the caverns comprising the Dwarven Valley, Dain Stokley Silverstream scratches the side of his beard as he looks you over. One brow arches as if he were a surveyor evaluating the quality of a stone passage. A dwarf of middling years – younger than Brydum – he wears a winter wolf furred cloak, sports a braided red beard, and his crown seems to sit a little too large on his head scrunching towards his brows.
"He's told you of the state of Dumathoin's Temple and you're still determined to enter the deeps?" Murmuring to himself as if he's impressed by your stubbornness, the Dain limps over to a stone chair with a high back carved with the Battlehammer clan symbol.
"Well, you're not alone in seeking the deeps. Baerick Hammerstone," he nods his head contemptuously to the east,
"would plumb those depths for more of the black ice if he had his druthers. There was a mage too, weeks ago, and I turned him away - he had a dishonest face. Then that damnable drow Do'Urden. And now you..."
Pivoting, he eases into the chair, one leg extended from an old injury.
"As soon as I have those doors opened - Baerick and the drow will catch wind of it, mayhap the mage too, and I'll have to fend off more of their demands. So I'll be wanting something in return..." With a hard squint surveying your party, Dain Silverstream nods as if he's reached a decision after hours of negotiation when only minutes have passed.
"If you've a killer to catch, then you've no time to waste. The fastest will be clearing out the zombies in the temple and restoring the door keys to Brydum, who'll accompany you as a guide... Fair?"
Raising his brows in surprise, Brydum remains silent.
