As we search the Grolls crown we found the remains of ancient destroyed building. Inside it a still intact, and trapped, hatch leading to a cellar full of crates filled with bars of mithril. All of these crates and the mithril bars were ingraved with a hammer and sickle symbol. Yes my dear audiance you hear correctly, the hammer and sickle, the symbol of quality from the ancient dwarven civilization. The same dwarves that set the standards for trade, the standards of weight, the standard of true quality, for which dwarves are still known these days.
6 tons of mithril we found, each of us took 4 bars of the stuff (2.5lb /bar). The symbol on inspired us, the sign of the hammers, it would be.. 2 hammers crossing each other.
I restored Takhe, he came to in a panic, we managed to calm him down a little and asked him what he had happened to him. He told a story of his father, the leader of the Solve mines, took all the dwarves in search of the ancient dwarven city: Forgehelm. A city of ancient glory, one of the greatest magical civilization ever build. However as they tried to get to the city they were stopped by duergar, gloebgloebs and demons.
His words were hysteric, so first it was “suggested” to him to tell the truth, but still he acted strangely. Because of his words of demons Redemption “protected him from evil” expelling a black energy that had been controlling him. With it out of him we finally got the complete story.
The dwarves had traveled to down, they had stopped at several spots in forgehelm outpost, but at some point the road had been blocked, there they travelled into an underwater lake, where the gloebgloebs lived. Two groups of gloebgloebs lived there, the followers of the deepfather who just wanted sacrifice everything they found, and the seamother’s tribe, who were willing to trade with others. As they got further some kind of evil energy started to corrupt them. They didn’t trust each other anymore, they started fighting each other.. murdering each other. Takhe fled the tunnels back up, betraying and killing friend and family in the process. The dark energy inside of him wanted to get to the surface. He described this all taking years, while they were only gone for months, some kind of timewarp must have been taking place underground.
The whole reason they wanted to get to the forgehelm city was because there was the crystal forge. A place of untold magical power where magic items could be created. But as Takhe told us about the forge, about how it looked, what it did, the hammers couldn’t not help to but feel like what they were told about.. was another box. Another one of the boxes that contained the ancient protector god.
We decided that we just had to go back to Esk with this information, as this was important for her, and we didn’t want to disappear for months or years in the underdark.
Esk was not very convinced Takhe’s story, and wanted to drain him of his memories. We convinced her to use more mundane interrogation techniques, preferably ones that wouldn’t kill the poor dwarf. Esk was not able to get us to deep underground with a single spell. But she would work on a one use only item that would get us out of the underdark and back to her, which would act as a fail safe.. or would just safe a lot of time.
We decided to head for Soro, update them on the progress and look in the ruins underneath the ground to find the seals of the ancient god and verify Esk her claims. As we headed towards Soro Ricardo confessed what his troubles with Egbert had been.. Someone had died in his den, when the guard came, Ricardo killed them!. Egbert had seen this, and promised to get rid of the bodies, if Ricardo promised to basically be his bitch. When Ricardo met up with Esk he asked her to get rid of Egbert. And she did. Ka’Tau had send Ricardo a message that Egbert had been killed, and found in the sleeping chambers of Jolie, the local whorehouse owner.
When we arrived in Soro Jolie her trial was underway, we got just in time to stop it, and convinced the judge to postpone the trial until tomorrow when redemption would cast zone of truth and hopefully clearing Jolie her name.
We met up with the council and told them what had happened to us over the past month, leaving out that we would help Esk with getting the last boxes, but telling them mostly everything else. We decided that we would leave for the ruins under Soro next.