Fire Desnus 13 (night)

We’re spending the night down here. Everyone agrees that it’s too much of a risk to keep coming and going from the mine, and this wing of the…whatever this is seems safe now that we’ve cleared it out. The odds of being interrupted are low since there does not seem to be much inter-faith traffic.

We did more exploring and learned two important pieces of information.

The first is that “the beast” is just a wild boar. I don’t mean to imply that wild boars aren’t dangerous—they certainly are—but rather that it ended up being significantly more mundane than we were expecting. It was chained up in a room, like you do I suppose, and seemed hungry and not particularly discriminating about its meal. Zhog endeared himself to it by feeding it parts of its former captors and now he’s making noise about having another pet. And that’s all you need to know about that.

The second is just how deeply Smenk is in this mess. We found a storage room filled with crates that have his trademark rooster and coin painted on them, and they were filled with food and water. The story this told was pretty clear: Smenk entered into some deal with Dourstone to supply these fools with provisions, and Smenk being Smenk, he managed to irritate them to the point where it was less trouble for them to just knock him off the board. If that doesn’t sound like Smenk, I don’t know what does.

Also, how dumb do you have to be to do this? He essentially hired us to investigate himself, and even without that letter to Theldrick there’s mountains of evidence establishing that he is a co-conspirator in all of this.

Since he all but blackmailed us, I am not feeling particularly charitable about what to do with it, either.

Starday, Desnus 14 (morning)

The night passed without incident.

We found a stone key with Lamashtu’s symbol on it in Theldrick’s quarters, so we opted for that wing next. Unsurprisingly, the door opened up to a complex of naturally occurring caves. The tunnel leading away from the door was worked a bit into steps as it descended, and it emptied into a large chamber filled with stalagmites and stalactites.

We were admiring the beauty of this natural formation when something threw a javelin at me.

Viktor identified our attackers as grimlocks: humanoids that have adapted to living deep underground. The skin on their faces had grown over their eyes, presumably because eyes aren’t much good in the dark (for most people, anyway) so why bother having them at all.

This theme has repeated itself over and over: tunnel leading to cave, cave filled with stalactites and stalagmites, attacked by grimlocks. Sometimes there are chasms, sometimes there are ledges, sometimes there are pets, and this last one had a rope bridge, but that’s pretty much been it for variety. We’re taking a moment to rest up before moving on to—you guessed it—a cave with grimlocks in it.