A few days have passed since Ameiko's rescue from the Glassworks and the heroes' subsequent exploration of the strange dungeon that Brodert Quink, Sandpoint's resident sage, refers to as the Catacombs of Wrath.
Brodert, a balding scholar of Varisian history and engineering, claims to have spent 2 decades of his youth studying with dwarven engineers at Janderhoff and 3 decades as a
cataloger at the Founder’s Archive in Magnimar. He remains baffled and enraged that his learning and obvious intelligence haven’t afforded him more prestige.
Brodert has been studying ancient Thassilonian ruins for the past several years and has recently become obsessed with the Old Light. No one believes his theories that the
tower was once a war machine capable of spewing fire to a range of more than a mile, and this casts some shadow on his claims that the complex the adventurers discovered deep under Sandpoint is actually the lair of an ancient Thassilonian Runelord.
Following his investigation of the catacombs, Brodert beleives the statue that once held the cold-iron and ivory masterwork ranseur to be Runelord Alaznist and that the strange well that spewed forth the 3-fingered creatures, that he calls sin-spawn, was a minor runewell keyed to the sin of wrath. That is before the party cleverly drained it of its power.
Ameiko, much occupied with the business of getting the Glassworks back into operation, has not been at the Rusty Dragon very often. She has not forgotten her rescuers however, as Bethana succinctly summarised several days ago "Ameiko says your gold is no good here" and the heroes have enjoyed the homey hospitality of the Rusty Dragon ever since.
And so it was that as the evening shadows started to gather, heralding another enjoyable evening in front of the fire at the Rusty Dragon that two bedraggled merchants staggered in and threw themselves into some chairs at an empty table. Pulling off their boots and rubbing at their blistered feet, the story of their misfortune was not long in coming. In short...goblins.
"We were coming down the Lost Coast Road and about 6 miles out of town, just after we'd crossed the Thistle River, the little blighters swarmed all over us. We barely got away with our skins but once they'd clapped eyes on Shadowmist they seemed to only care about that horse. We ran, but they've stolen our wagon, the supplies we had and that magnificent horse."
"The only compensation is that the warhorse really gave them what for," pipes in the second merchant, "I saw him send one flying about 15 feet! I hope he gets away, I'd rather have lost him than know the goblins had chopped him to bits."
It takes no time at all to ascertain that the goblins had all the markings of those pesky inhabitants of Thistletop.
