The party burned the bodies of the dispatched wights and tended their wounds. The horrible captain of the band, a twisted, hunched creature with a face that looked like death itself, burned with the rest, but left a troubling mark on the party all the same.
They arrived in Wukeiwang that evening and spent the night in the Inn & Tea House. The next morning, they met with Lónghua, who had for them a letter—delivered with a draconic magic reserved for important communiques—from their commanding officer, Lóngzhi. She explained that she had learned much in her week at the Imperial City, dispelling some of her worst worries about the curse that had befallen the party and replacing them with a new one. It seemed that each party member’s Sacred Mark, the mark given to all mortals by the gods that binds their soul to the Underworld when they die, had been broken by the dragonborn wight’s foiled ritual. This raises questions about the power that the dragonborn wight possesses, and it means that there is no afterlife promised to any of the party members who are felled—but it does mean, at least, that they will not immediately be pulled to Hell in death.
The party then delivered their report, explaining their conversation with Gremoira and delivering their message, the diamond-tipped arrow. Lónghua recognized the symbolism and related it to the party before ordering them to go seek out Durad-Om and perhaps begin to unravel the mystery beneath the Elven and Dwarven dispute. She, meanwhile, would detain the dwarves and attempt to stave off a diplomatic incident for a few more days.
The party found tunnels into the granite mountains near where Lónghua indicated the entrance should be on the map, and entered. Therein the party found dozens of bronze automata, vaguely dwarven shaped but for the single, bulbous eyes that occupied their helms. The automata busied themselves about a small, old dwarven settlement, mutely mimicking duties as traders, kennel-masters, and steel-makers.
A voice telepathically introduced itself as THE WATCHER, a sentinel of some sort who was tasked by the Iorvethen to ward these ruins, and Durad-Om within, from intruders, and who had busied himself by creating these automata over the lonely centuries. After failing to convince THE WATCHER to allow them entry through a thick steel door, the party and THE WATCHER more or less agreed to simply fight it out.
The party battled through the settlement’s forge, crossing a flow of misdirected magma, trouncing a score of automata, and finally making their way to the smithing room, in which hunched a hulking machine with a gorilla-like reach. The party distracted it with a parliament of oversized owls, disabled it, and pulled the lever behind it, opening the steel doors to the ancient dwarven city deeper in the mountain.
Inside, among old subterranean towers, the party encountered THE WATCHER, a four-eyed spectator. He, too, fell before the owls, and the party stands in the empty city in silence.
the party explored the ruins that THE WATCHER had called home for centuries, looking to see if this was Durad-Om, the birthplace of the Dwarves—or if that lay yet deeper. Four pyramidal temples, a wider structure, and a much larger set of paired pyramids stood in this cavern, many of them filled with refuse. A hulking bulette slept upon one of the piles of garbage, and the party routed around him. One temple was coated in a filthy, toxic mold, which appeared to obscure some sort of plaque.
The party braved the large paired pyramids, which seem to have been THE WATCHER’s lair. Reality bent in gently sinister curves in here, a soft imprint pressed in by centuries of THE WATCHER’s dreaming. The party was assailed by scarabs, and having woken the bulette, sacrificed Guan’s horse to distract it while vanquishing the scarabs and seeking higher ground. In the second story, THE WATCHER’s dreams of guardianship had manifested a strange sword, Figment, resting in a pedestal like so many swords of great legend and omen.
Finally, the party crossed over to the peak of the largest pyramid’s pair. Here, an empty archway, a portal of some sort, stands in a room chiseled and clad in an ancient ornamental style. A podium stands before the archway, with three inscriptions, two of the translations and in Dwarvish and Elven, and the last is in a dwarvish script but reproduces the spoken Orc words for the same phrase: “SPEAK THOSE WHOM YOU WOULD HONOR.”
The party opened the portal to Durad-Om by reading off one of the names of the fallen, as memorialized in the mold-encrusted monument nearby.
At the threshold of the great city, they met Hialathar, a tiefling sage and the city’s steward. As he led them deep into the mountain and through the pitch-black empty streets of the ancient dwarven metropolis, he explained to them everything they wished to know. Durad-Om was indeed the birthplace of the dwarves and halflings, where they were forged by a stern and demanding god in order to better mine the mountain’s ores. It became a sacred place when the god’s creations overthrew him and made the city a proper home rather than simply the site of their bondage.
But Durad-om was destined to be a place of great moment and import. For it was located in the Underworld. The Underworld, Hialathar explained, is not below the material world. It is around the material world. It is the outer wall in the world’s fortress against the entropic, ravenous forces of Hell. As such, Durad-Om was one of the final fortresses held by mortals in the War for Morning, the war in which Algot the Shield and Aymon, Ilrune, and Fenian had fought. At Durad-Om, Tormus-Iliath, the Wandering God of the Wind, and a garrison of loyal soldiers—dwarf, orc, and elf—fought and fell. Since then, Durad-Om was been a tomb and a holy place, watched over by Hialathar and his clan.
The party left Durad-Om and returned to the ruins beneath the Ki-Rin Ridge. They cleaned out the rest of the ruins, slaying the bulette in the process, and now they contemplate their next moves.
Last session, the party cleaned up in the ruins in the east of the Ki-Rin Ridge. They knew, finally, why the Iorvethen of the valley guard the entrance to Durad-Om, and why they need to guard the holy city. They set out for Wukeiwang to deliver this information to Lónghua, taking precautions to avoid being discovered leaving the entrance to Durad-Om by the Iorvethen. Instead, however, they encountered the Dwarven expedition party led by Orfko-Mount-Phalden… acting shady and keeping secrets, on their way to dive into the mountains in search of the city. The party subdued Orfko and forced his attendants to surrender.
When they returned to Wukeiwang, Lónghua had a tale to tell them. Lónghua had tried to politely but firmly detain the dwarves as her guests in the Imperial House to prevent another incident with the Iorvethen. An argument over this detention turned violent, and Orfko—or one of his companions—had wounded Lónghua in their absconsion.
Lónghua thanked the party for returning the dwarves and informed them of her intention to keep them closely under guard and to be merciful in their sentencing. But then she had orders for them: a dangerous one. A Iorvethen emissary had tipped her to a horde of wights on the march, approaching the south pass. A concentration of undead that large, even in this remote corner of the Empire, is rare and ominous indeed. Lónghua ordered the party to summit the southern peak of the Ki-Rin Ridge, where the ancient palace of the Ki-Rin itself is perched. From there, they will have a commanding view of the pass, the valley, and the plains beyond to the south, and they will be able to determine what must be done.