Adventurers
- Dulo Chaec (Magic User 3)
- Koko (Cleric 5)
- Rarder (Fighter 5) and Konrad Claver (Cleric 3)
A fierce interrogation of the prisoner began, but he turned out to be very willing to tell the party whatever he knew. His band of fortune seekers had come to this mountain as part of a larger caravan of some hundred travellers looking to investigate the barrows for largely financial purposes, though it was more an alliance of convenience than of loyalty. Various groups had split off and gone their separate ways, and he'd seen possible evidence of foul play and betrayal.
His group's mapmaker had run off with the rest, but he knew of a room passed a wide corridor and up some stairs which had given him a strong case of the heebie jeebies, even down here in the Barrowmaze, with a skull resting on a plinth beyond a murky barrier of some sort, runes darkly glowing all over it.
Hoping for a high-level undead creature there, the party set off, arming the prisoner and pushing him to the front rank. He appeared willing enough to go along with it.
Turning off one corridor, they came across a portcullis with a curtain some 10 feet beyond it. The burliest adventurers heaved the barrier up and held it in place while Rarder's retainer Bubbleworth had a scout around the room. Finding nothing immediately obvious in sight, the halfling pulled aside the curtain and, to everyone's astonishment, vanished.
Jamming the portcullis with a crowbar, the party rushed in and tore the aged curtain aside to find a great mirror. They all span away while Rarder used his magical one-way-mirror shield to gaze into the reflection, where he could see Bubbleworth struggling against a zombified version of himself. The party desperately tried to find some way to intervene from this side but all was for naught, and as the unliving raised its fist to deliver a killing blow Rarder smashed the mirror. All sign of his retainer vanished.
Sorrowfully, the party traipsed out from the now empty room and continued until they came to the wide corridor their prisoner had mentioned. Scattered throughout were scattered skeletons and the dead bodies of hooded figures, robed variously in black and maroon. The latter were very similar to those the party had encountered with the King Under The Mountain. The prisoner assured them that he'd found the corpses already like that. They had not been dead long.
After dispatching some giant red-hot beetles, the adventurers ambled through the corridor and found a room with some open and busted doors, and a pit full of more corpses. While most of them poked around these features, Dulo found himself intriguided by the reliefs along the walls, which seemed to meet in the middle of one wall. He probed and prodded, and found a part of the wall which might be fully pressed inwards.
While the party consulted the best thing to do, wise old Konrad pushed the button. The wall slid away to reveal a dark corridor and a buzzing sound. The cleric bellowed a challenge, and several massive bugs flew out. The party were able to dispatch them but they proved a trickier proposition than expected, resilient to Dulo's sleep spell and able to gut the prisoner before being wiped out.
The adventurers gazed at their dead guide. To their right was the doorway he said he'd used, to their left a doorway mostly destroyed by something more physical than age, and ahead of them lay a dark but enticing secret door...