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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Damon Griffin" data-source="post: 2645733" data-attributes="member: 3568">Paladin's Journal - entry 8I called a temporary halt to the explorations and we spent the next couple of days doing different things:  Sharwyn learned herself a new spell from Winter’s spellbook, Winter practiced some combat moves that me or Braford or Lance showed him, and got the hang of using different kinds of weapons.  He also tried out armor but decided against wearing it because of how it’d affect his spells.  Lance and Wulfgrim gathered enough stones to build cairns for all the orcs we’d killed on the gate level, and moved the bodies from the cave where we’d stowed them a few days ago.  And they made cairns for the trogs we’d killed, too.  Gerik and me hunted and killed a moose, and Tayla got another deer, plus we brought in lots of firewood and nuts.Around dusk the second day, we saw a line of torches coming up the mountain side, and Wulfgrim and Gerik went down to meet Lady Athlese and get her caught up on what the situation was.  She had arrived with a couple dozen dwarf women, there to clean the place up and get it ready for the rest of their group.  That woman who used to live here before, that made Tayla the map, was in this group, and also a dwarf priestess.  Despite being tired, the women came in clucking about all the work to be done and how they’d start here or there and do this or that – and I think they was a little disappointed to find the halflings had already done so much, especially in the kitchen.  But there was still plenty to do and they didn’t complain.  I asked Lady Athlese about the disposition of any trog non-combatants we might find later on, and she allowed they might winter in the caverns as long as they could be kept separate from her people and would be made to leave come spring.  She said she wanted to wait until morning to question the trog prisoner.So the next morning Lady Athlese and Wulfgrim and me went into the cell to talk to the sorcerer.  Gerik stood outside the cell with his crossbow, waiting to plug the sorcerer if he tried anything funny.  The trog wasn’t inclined much to cooperate, and didn’t tell us nothing about any more of his people we might find.  He did mention another group of dwarfs, already in the caverns below, and after a bit Lady Athlese and her cleric worked out he must be talking about some dueregar, a folk like dwarfs but evil and rumored to have strange powers.  He also mentioned how dwarfs is good eating, and I could see by the look on Lady Athlese’s face this one trog wasn’t likely to see next spring.Soon as we’d done talking to the trog we went back down the caves, started from the orc shaman’s room and going back the way we did before.  That route was still clear as far as the place we fought that group of trogs, and we went on south from there down the tunnel.  At the end of that tunnel we come came to a very large and sparkly cavern.  Wulfgrim was so taken with it he didn’t notice much else going on around him for a while.   From the look of the place, and how Wulfgrim acted, and the map Tayla had got in Blasingdell, we worked out this must be the Glittery Home itself.  There was cliffs to the south and the northeast, but we can’t see the whole place so we start making a circuit.  A bunch of us see some movement among the boulders on the northeast cliff, and we move that way with caution.  Winter sent Boo on ahead for a peek and Boo comes came back telling Winter’s there’s bunches of snakes back there.  Turns out they wasn’t weren’t snakes but something I never seen or heard of before, with bodies like big snakes but wavy tentacles around the mouth.  They wasn’t weren’t much trouble to kill, but I don’t like to think what they might have done to a couple of us if we hadn’t spotted them ahead of time.  There was a suit of armor and a bunch of coins in their lair, but no magic, so we left it all there for the moment.  From the top of the cliff we could see a path winding through some big patches of fungus on the cavern floor.  Wulfgrim said it probably winds like that to avoid damage to the stonework.  We got down and finished making our circuit of the Glittery Home, along the way passing a stairway going down and another one going up and an iron door.   Then we went back to the west wall and followed the stairs going up, and come came to a mausoleum.  There was a couple dozen stone coffins, all of ‘em carved with the name of a different dwarf, but only three of them had a date and manner of death, and the rest we guessed to be empty, though we didn’t check.  A tunnel north from this room turned out to be a southeast tunnel we hadn’t explored before on our first trip down, so we went back out to the big cavern and took a look at the iron door at the east end.The door was rusty but we could see the lock had been recently oiled and picked.  Even so it took Gerik and Tayla about five minutes working together to get it open again.  Behind the door was a room with eight walls, and in the room we can see two doors and three big statues of dwarfs.  We could hear a pounding off in the distance like maybe an anvil, and when I checked I found evil beyond this room to the north and the east.  By now we are somewhat suspicious of statues and doors with dwarf faces carved on them, and sure enough there was a trap here.  Both the doors was false, and the statues tried to drop axes on anyone fooling with them.  When the second axe dropped the pounding we had heard stopped.  Gerik poked around behind one of the statues for a while and found a secret door that opened onto a short stairway.  We headed up and as soon as we hit the top step, a magical mouth on the wall started screaming about intruders.Past the magical mouth we went into a big room, must have been fifty or sixty feet wide and twice as long, with huge columns carved to look like giants and dragons holding up the roof.  A voice hollered at us to leave, but we went on in anyway.  Gerik snuck in keeping to the shadows, and Sharwyn made herself invisible.  Winter cast a spell and started climbing up the wall and along the ceiling.  The rest of us just walked straight in until Wulfgrim got shot in the back by a woman with a crossbow.  I’m pretty sure she’d been invisible until that point, but soon as Gerik saw her he shot her as well.  Sharwyn could see her, too, but I’d told everybody in the last room I could sense three different evil auras, so she decided to wait until more of ‘em were visible before she attacked.  Then two more shot at us with crossbows and she made a big web that caught one of those.  Just a few seconds later, a couple doors in the room open and four more people come came out – like dwarfs somewhat, but as tall as me, so we guess them to be dueregar – and another one from the far end of the room near this big throne.  Sharwyn shot one of those four with an arrow and it vanished, so it must have been an illusion all along, but the one that hit me was solid enough.  She carried a staff with a sword blade on each end.  Braford charged one of the ones that come came out of the doors, and found out not only was the dueregar an illusion, but so was the open door behind him.  Sharwyn shot another illusion and it went away, and melee combat was going on with several solid opponents.  Though we didn’t see him at first, there was a wizard in the next room casting spells at us and sending his rat familiar in to deliver spells by touch.  Winter spent the whole time hanging upside down from the ceiling shooting his bow.  I don’t think he hit anything even once, but I guess it would be hard to do that, since it would seem to him the arrows fall up as they move forward.  Wulfgrim conjured a spiritual hammer and whaled away at the dueregar with it.One dueregar tried to attack Sharwyn, and Lance moved to protect her, and wounded that one in the leg so bad he just sat down against a wall, though we never went unconscious.  After that Lance killed the rat familiar.  Sharwyn went after the wizard and put an arrow or two into him before he went invisible.  Then she tried to throw a colorful spray at him, but Gerik had gone in ahead of her in and also attacked the wizard, and her spell hit Gerik instead.  Braford had moved up to join me on the woman with the sword staff, and she quickly thought better of fighting both of us, and tried to run off.  Braford, Wulfgrim and Tayla chased her and caught up to her pretty quick when Braford smashed down the door she’d shut and barred behind her, and they killed her.  Sharwyn and Gerik and me finished off the wizard while he was still invisible, when he tried to push past us to go into the big room.  Wulfgrim got hurt bad enough that he needed to heal himself at one point during the combat.  I took a fair bit of damage from the sword staff, and Lance got an electric shock from the rat, but otherwise we was in pretty good shape.All told we run into two female and six male dueregar by this point.  We got two male prisoners secured, after we saw them shrink from man height back to regular dwarf size, and started looking around the place.  The room the wizard had started in was a big forge and foundry and we saw they had been making weapons there.  We found a couple of rooms full of tools, and Tayla found out the anvil itself was magical.  The wizard’s book of spells was here, too, and signs that some magical experiments was going on.  Winter, Sharwyn, Tayla and Wulfgrim started chattering away about what might be going on there and how all the different magic effects we’d just seen were managed, by what combination of spells, magic items, supernatural racial abilities and so forth.  Heironeous knows I can't follow half of what they say.We searched the bodies and stripped the prisoners of their goods, and tried to interrogate the prisoners, but these dueregar don’t seem easily intimidated.  They did mention that there was some kind of undead behind that one barred door that Braford had hit running, big skeletons and something else, and said that their boss, an evil cleric we hadn’t met yet, was still in the area and had no fear of undead.  The prisoners were more scared of her than they was of us, thinking she could condemn them to some worse fate after death than they was already looking forward to.  Tayla and I checked and found magic or evil or both behind all four of the doors we hadn’t opened yet, three in this room and one down the hall behind the throne.Braford and Lance hauled the two prisoners up to the pokey and come came back down about an hour and a half later with five pounds of powdered silver and some holy water they had got from the dwarf priestess.  While they was gone I filed down a couple of silver pieces to get what I’d need for a circle of protection against evil, the stuff we’d taken was all piled together and checked for magic, Winter studied the dueregar wizard’s book of spells and we had a bite to eat.Right around the time Lance and Braford got back, Gerik had started going around to quietly wedge shut the three doors as wasn’t not already barred, and one on of them he heard some kind of chanting or something going on beyond the door.   He said he thought someone tried to cast a spell on him, but I guess it didn’t work because nothing happened to him just then.  A minute later, though, as he was wedging the last door a secret door opened up next to him and he ducked into a side room but got spotted by another dueregar woman coming through the secret door.  He moved pretty quick but she ended up tagging him with a spell anyways and he got held in place right after we heard him shout.  Lance, Braford and me run up behind her, realizing her to be the boss cleric the prisoners had told us about and took her down quick.  This is the second time I’ve killed a woman this way – attacked without mercy, and them with no armor or weapons of the usual sort.  It bothers me some, though I know both of them were evil priestesses, and so true blasphemers instead of just misguided folks.  I know such types can’t be permitted to live and are not deserving of mercy, but it still goes hard.  Lance cut her head off as a final blow, so there wouldn’t be no chance of her coming back as an undead herself. Past the secret door that cleric had come through, we found a short hallway we know must have more secret doors along it, but we agreed to camp where we was for the night and go at the undead fresh in the morning.  Next morning we made Sharwyn and Tayla invisible, left Winter and me in plain sight and made everyone else invisible just to undead, and unbarred the door.  We went into a big shrine or temple area with an altar on one end and doors on the other, and Wulfgrim cast a consecration spell that covered the half of the room away from the altar.  There was a dwarf body on the altar and an orc kneeling beside it.  Two big skeletons rose up from the floor when we went in, and the orc – which it turned out had been turned into a wight – turned around and smiled at us.  Winter and Sharwyn cast spells that would disrupt undead, and I stood my ground at the edge of the consecrated area, fighting defensively to draw attacks from the skeletons while Wulfgrim tried to turn them.  Being about nine feet tall, they could reach across and try to hit me with the big bronze maces they had, from where I couldn’t hit back without leaving the consecrated area.  Neither skeleton hit me, but when Wulfgrim’s turning destroyed them, one did drop its mace on my shoulder.  The wight ran off behind the altar, but Braford and me ran after it and killed it with a couple of blows.Gerik had gone to check out the doors at the far end of the room and we found him hypnotized, from which Wulfgrim and Braford and me realized there was an allip in the next room.  Allips are a special kind of undead that hypnotize people by babbling, and they are also the unsolid kind that can come through walls like it was nothing, so we didn’t tarry long in that room, just made a quick check around the altar and then left.Back across the throne room in the southeast corner, we went down a short set of stairs and through a door into a kitchen, where we was attacked – at least I think it was trying to attack – by a wooden table.  Made me wonder if it wasn’t made from twigblight wood.   Tayla made the floor greasy and the table slipped and tipped over on its side, and it quit moving when Wulfgrim told it to.  Beyond the kitchen we found two pantry areas and a dumbwaiter big enough for three people to get inside.  Some of the pantry food was stuff a person could eat, but might not want to, as we found no salt nor any spices or anything to make it taste good.  Winter sent Boo down the dumbwaiter chain to see what was below, and Boo come came back and said it was dark and wet and a long way down.  We decided to leave this area for later, as there was already a couple areas we’d been in and not finished exploring, so we went straight back up.  We wasn’t weren’t ready for the allip just yet, so we went back to the Glittery Home and followed that last staircase down.   We went down a ways, following stairs and tunnels, and roped ourselves together for part of the trip on account of the floor being slippery and us walking alongside that underground stream.  In time we got to another big sparkly cavern, where the path continued on through and there was two doors side by side on one wall.  Behind those doors were more pantries, and this was also where the dumbwaiter come came out.  Same kind of food and drink as upstairs, but some of it smashed up by the orcs and spoiled.In one of the pantries Wulfgrim got attacked by a puddle that jumped up from the floor.  It didn’t get a good enough grip on him to do its worst, but we soon found out it was made of acid and dissolved wood and metal.  It did seem to take damage from crossbow bolts, but dissolved them right after.  Shatterspike was spared that fate but the blade is now etched.  Tayla said we could neutralize the acid by dumping crushed limestone on it.  It looks pretty neutralized to me by that point, but maybe this is like cutting off the evil cleric’s head so she couldn’t come back in another form.  We did that and Gerik made a sign to warn the dwarves about it.Past the pantry area, through a door, was another open cavern where the underground stream run through, with all kinds of fish in it, and another door at one end of the cavern.  Gerik went to check the door and got grabbed up by a long pair of arms from near the ceiling, and when Sharwyn went to help him another creature dropped down from among the stalactites to attack her.  These creatures ain’t no bigger than halflings, but got arms half again as long as those ogre skeletons.  But they died without too much fuss and Gerik was happy to find treasure in their lair, up on a rock ledge near the ceiling.    Once Gerik did get to the door, we found there was a prison area behind it, with one dwarf in a cell.  No sign that any food or water, or bedding or chamber pot, had ever been in the cell, whoever it was might have been locked up and forgot.  There was a key on the body that we think might fit the iron door to the foundry.  Wulfgrim plans to collect up all the dwarf remains we find and take them to the mausoleum.  He and the dwarf priestess will discuss how to properly consecrate the area and when that would best be done.  He thinks that body on the altar was probably the cult leader, and says the body should be bathed with holy water, then burned in a ritual fire and sealed in his coffin.  The dwarf with the foundry key would get the same treatment if he or she can be identified, and the other remains bathed and burned and prayers made that their spirits be freed from their endless toil and shown the true path to the enjoyment of honest work and well-deserved relaxation and their ashes sealed in urns and put in niches in the mausoleum.  The dueregar and their cleric likewise except they would have to be shriven first.  I would have tossed the cleric into a fire with the wight – Wulfgrim and I agree the proper disposition for the wight is to cleanse it with holy water and then burn the body – since clerics that have dealings with undead are abominations and deserve no better.  But Wulfgrim says they are all “the unfortunate and misguided creations of a troubled and deluded god”, even the cleric.  But they won’t be put in the mausoleum.  Well, this mountain is a dwarf place, and so long as the dispositions are all proper, I won’t fret about the details of how it’s done.After that we decided to gather up that loot, plus that from the tentacled snakes and what all we’d left in the throne room, and haul it all upstairs and tell the dwarf women about the tool sheds, the foundry, the magic anvil and such, and also ask the dwarf priestess what she may know of allips.Gerik has been keeping our accounts since he has experience with inventories and ledgers working for his uncle, and he gave us a tally of what we collected so far, mostly weapons and armor of different sorts which maybe we can sell.</blockquote>

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