The Plot Thickens

## Summary

We chased down and captured Mordekai as he fled the Redbrand Hideout. He taunted Bird, but was willing to divulge more information after some less than tactful persuasion. We learned that he was working for someone calling themselves "The Black Spider", who wants to find something called the Spellforge - the location we think Gundren and his brothers discovered.

Bird also pressed Mordekai for information on a man called Bryn, someone whom she had known as a child. It turns out that Mordekai used to operate a child crime ring, before selling the older children to a group known as the Sons of Torog (a group Peren was familiar with). The tiefling laughed as he said if Bryn wasn't dead by now he would be in the depths of a mine or fighting in a gladiator pit in the faraway Calishite Empire.

We decided to spare Mordekai for now, Bird wasn't ready to dispose of him yet.

The townhall in Phandalin was burning when we got back, although nobody knew why. We rushed to assist the townsfolk in putting it out and managed to rescue most of the upper levels in the building. The townmaster, or rather whoever had been impersonating the townmaster was nowhere to be seen.

The next day, we had to decide what to do with Mordekai. He was locked in the cellar of the Stonehill Inn, but he couldnt stay there. Bird tried one last time to glean the whereabouts of Bryn from him, but it became apparant that he truly didn't know, and didn't really care. She wanted to kill him, but couldn't do it. Despite many years of tracking him down, at the ultimate moment she chose to be better than him and spare his life.

Peren had a different view on things. Anyone who associated with the Sons of Torog, and the trafficking of children, did not deserve to live. He stabbed Mordekai through the heart.

We gathered our things, said goodbye to Sildar and set out to rescue Gundren from the clutches of the Cragmaw Tribe. Led by Florp, we made good progress into the foot hills of the Mistbreak Mountains, climbing high above the Iluskan Valley through dense pine woods. After two days of hard trekking we laid eyes upon our quarry.

The ruined castle was probably thousands of years old. It had mostly collapsed in on itslef, but enough of the original structure, shored up in places by crude timber beams, remained to make it a formidable target. We spent a day scouting and observing, before formulating our plan to get in.

A rarely used portgate on the southern side of the ruin marked our entrance. Inside, we made short work of a few hobgoblin guards before finding ourselves outside King Grols chambers. It had been unbelievably easy so far...

We could hear the bugbear leader arguing with someone inside. We matched the feminine voice to a dark rider we had seen approach the castle earlier that day. But when we launched into combat only King Grol was in the room. It was a short but brutal combat, and after Grol fell, we discovered Gundren - badly beaten but still alive.

It seemed too good to be true when we also discovered his brother Tharde, bound in a small antichamber. The second dwarf knew exactly where the map was, and quickly grabbed it before we made our escape. But as we were leaving, Tharden told us we needed to go a different way, to destroy a copy they had made. Bird was suspicious, but we agreed. We shouldn't have. He ushed us into a dark room, what looked like an ancient chapel, and then barred the barred the door behind us. Then we heard a familiar feminine voice on the other side, and realised we had been duped.