Sarenith 10, 4709 AR
Abandoned Dwarven Monastery, Darkmoon Wood

Biff continued an inspirational song as we left the cells behind. We continued to open various doors as we traveled deeper into the monastery. One room had the promising look of a study, but it had two wolves in it, which became aggressive when we entered. Worse, as we engaged them in combat, we heard someone call out, “Who disturbs my slumber?” This third wolf spoke clearly and had an eerie intelligence in its eyes. A worg! Biff and Kethsalar were everywhere at once, hitting the wolves with bolts and arrows, as Thorab and I attempted to strike the worg in closer combat. I managed to hit it, and then it attacked me, twice. I went down, and was revived a short while later by Liake, who thankfully had a healing potion in her pack.

Afterwards, I provided everyone with what little healing I could. We decided to search the stone desk in the room, and then the worg’s den beyond that. The desk contained a sack full of platinum coins, a handaxe that radiates magic, and a book, while the den had a sack of gold coins, a nice crossbow, a vial of some magical liquid and an ebony wand. Better still, we found the rest of the mushrooms we need to cure Falcon’s Hollow.

We could see some parts of the den were exposed to the outdoors— the sky was darkening as night approached, so we opted to rest, I assumed, to get a fresh start back in the morning. I’m not entirely sure what prevented us from leaving after an uneventful night’s rest, but it may have been what Thorab read in the book found in the study. It was a dwarven prayer book, but rather than to Torag, as we would have suspected the monastery to be devoted to, it was to the evil god Droskar, with the inscription:

“Torag is no longer worthy of our devotion. Only Droskar can deliver us from the failings of King Garbold.”

I figured I would follow Thorab’s lead; to my surprise we headed down some partially-blocked stairs in the worg’s den. The stairs ended in a large chamber with a broken obsidian obelisk in the center of it. We started to pick our way through the crumbled stone (Biff singing something encouraging all the while) and found we were not alone; six kobolds had been rolling away a large piece of the broken obelisk. I quickly dropped one with an icicle as I saw light from the corner of my eye; Biff had cast light on some of the large pieces of rock, while Liake lit herself with the new wand (we’re not entirely sure that was correct result of activating that wand). Seconds later, the kobolds were all dispatched. Biff decided to stay near the obelisk while the rest of us wandered off towards a glow coming from another chamber.

This chamber had steam billowing from it, as well as the orange radiance coming from a pit in the floor. Peering into the pit we could see molten slag and what looked to be boiling blood. I then had the misfortune of being attacked from above. A grick (a creature with a lot of tentacles and a large beak) dropped from the ceiling, obviously aimed at me. We discovered that Thorab’s newly found axe could hurt it, but none of the rest of our weapons seemed to damage to it. There was no way I was going to survive another attack from it! We were trying to figure out a way around it when a fiery bolt flew between all of us and stuck into the grick, killing it outright. Good thing that Biff had kept us in view!

Feeling braver, we skirted around the pit and entered a hallway beyond that. Something was lying in the middle— a headless corpse, with three dire rats circling it….