Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

The Season of Still Stone

"I know little of sorcery, for all I can see its marks on the world, but this much I know," you speak with as much conviction as you can muster. "Bearing magic you do not know is like bearing a unknown centipede in your pack. To know that it is death magic, then the centipede is red and black, perhaps it is a false Blood Crawler and not the true, but it is not a risk I would want to sleep through."

"Death magic is... magic that explodes into a lotta death?" Cob asks, a crease between his brows. "Maybe we make it explode at enemies...?"

"Alas, master goblin, that sort of magic is more likely to wither than explode," Mina replies, very deliberately looking him in the eye. "Too slow to be useful in a fight, even if we were mad enough to use it like that, but more than enough to wither our bodies and befuddle our minds in a long journey."

"Pale bellies seemed to hold up well." Gorok is unmoved.

"I will take your word for it, but they did not seem that healthy to me. Even beyond broken bones and stabbed guts there is much that is wrong with them; gum rot, ithiscolios, deformities of the feet I do not even know the name of, I just know it is not supposed to bend that way."

"How does that hang in the scales?" the hunter cuts short the long list of ailments that had started to dip into Mina's own tongue for words that the tongue of the People, and presumably that of Gorok's folk, did not have.

"She is saying they are so miserable they would not even notice being cursed by that thing," you answer. Odds are you would have done it with a laugh if you had not noticed the sorceress' expression soften to pity.

Whether Gorok's hiss is amusement, agreement, or something in-between you do not know for sure, but he helps hoist the corpse out of the chest with ropes while Cob assembles a pyre with faintly worrying skill. After placing the withered thing in the middle the hunter douses it in foul smelling waxy secretions from the crab thing's abdomen. No sooner had he set it alight that it goes up like dried shelf-shroom, the flames eating greedily at the blackened flesh.

The light at least is a healthy red. It can't have been too bad, you tell yourself.

The four of you then returned to camp tasks, be they securing the swords in place to the already worryingly ungainly harnesses, making stew out of conjured water and duergar trail rations to ward away the monotony, or in your case trying to make mending magic catch on Mina's shoes. Sadly they do not seem to remember 2hat it was like to be new-made, only slightly less scuffed and torn.

"Was'dat?" Cob points at the mound of cooling ash. Then, before anyone else could get out a word in answer, he plucks something out. At first you mistake it for a shard of charred fungus wood, but then you notice that it is round... a ring.


"Cob no!" Alas, your warning comes too late as the goblin decides to clean the thing off with his tongue, revealing black steel covered in unfamiliar runes.


"Is cold," he proclaims, sounding only a mildly miffed at the discovery. Tilting your head and twisting your sight sideways to the world, the same plaid aura as had clung to the corpse reveals itself, but... weaker.

Gained Dark Steel Ring (Aura: Faint Necromancy)

"Well, if it didn't hurt to put it in his mouth I guess it can't hurt to let him keep it," you hear Mina mutter under her breath. The marks, she later tells you, are leaves and flowers, the fungus of the Burnlands. Though looking more closely at the thing, after you had persuaded Cob to let it go for a moment, she says that the flowers are called night-bloomings.


"I saw them on a coat of arms once, a sort of shield marking, and they were quartered with the moon." She is so proud of the recollection that you do not have the heart to tell her you have no idea what a 'moon' is.

Instead you note: "There was no ring on the corpse's finger, it must have been inside of it."

"Why would anyone swallow a ring, much less a magic one?" Mina muses, less at you and more at the now eternally silent ash pile.


Thankfully the night passes without incident, unless one counts the trio of worm-lizards stealthily trying to get at your refuse pile. Sleep restores your magic and with it the chance to interrogate the morlocks.

Do you have any suggestions for questions to ask the morlocks?

[] Write in

OOC: I thought about rolling through this, but this is a mystery and asking creative questions might get you answers you would not have if I just asked what I thought Akorian and friends would come up with.

The Season of Still Stone

Hearing Mina utter the harking guttural morlock tongue, broken words and the curses of half-dozen languages lashed together, makes your stomach turn uneasily, though looking around you see none of your companions are so troubled. Cob is playing with shards of chitin and bits of stone that had been jarred loose by the fighting, trying to skip one between the other in rules only he knows, while Gorok is out hunting, having obviously decided that the rest of you can handle a pair of barely conscious prisoners, even if with all the healing light that passed through your hands all your magic save the lesser is spent.

Cast 4x Cure Light Wounds -> Gorok at 14/14; Morlocks at 2/22 and 5/22 respectively

Meanwhile, the conversation with your prisoners is getting repetitive and, on their side at least, louder. For her part, Mina seems at first perturbed than angry. "They are describing all the ways they are planning to kill, torture, and eat us. Apparently they have a tradition to cut off pieces of their prisoners and eat them in front of them."

Keeps the meat fresh, you forbear from mentioning. Aloud, you simply ask: "They did not let anything slip?"

"Nothing that's of use," she sighs.

"Tell them carrying box around has cursed their souls. Tell them I can see it on them," you say half in a whisper. Perhaps fear will loosen their tongues where pleasant words had not.

She does. Alas, not to the answer you might have hoped. The prisoner nearest to you starts hacking, coughing, staining the stone with bloody spit. It takes you a moment to realize they are laughing at you.

Your hand tightens into a fist, but you do not raise it. "Not worth the rope we tied them with," you mutter in disgust.


"It's bad luck to kill one who can't raise a hand to defend themselves, no matter how much hate grows in their heart," Mina tries one last time

"My luck has been little other than bad since my shadow started whispering," you scoff.

There is a look of hopelessness in those pale grey eyes that you mislike more than you like to admit, even to yourself, but at the same time you cannot see how you could leave such enemies behind you, even tied up and with a rock between them. A sly thought comes to you. If you could convince Cob to be for execution likely that would make two with the cold-blooded Gorok, then you can reluctantly break the stalemate.

"No..." you say aloud, a whisper of a whisper, but enough to make it real. You won't lie, cheat, and try to pull strings from the shadows, not again. "They have to die."

So they do by Gorok's heavy blade, two quick thumps of flesh giving way to steel, before the blade scores the stone underneath. In unspoken agreement their bodies are left to gnawers and sloppers. Not that you would be altogether happy to sell their skulls for candle holders, but you think Mina might do something foolish if Gorok turned his craft on them.

Cob, dark bless him, is left confused by all the dark looks and stony expressions and not just that...

"You don't wanna eat them cause they are shaped kinda like us? But they would've ate us."

As you open your mouth to answer, Mina surprises you by breaking her silence. "They might be sick, if we... anyone who ate them might catch what they have."

"Ooh... you can catch sick from food?" From the way he stares through the tunnel rather than at it you would guess the goblin is recalling some time his tribe suffered just that fate.

The tunnel ends not six miles from the place you had camped, opening into a middling cave with stalactites and stalagmites not quite joined in the middle. Small patches of hardy lichen grow by the light of faded grayish crystals, enough to feed the small scuttling things fleeing from the sound of your steps, but nothing larger than the palm of your hand, hopefully. For all the apparent youth of the cave you notice the worked stone does not vanish when you step out of the tunnel but trails off to the left, while the path to the mines is to the right, at least according to your clients back in Cauldron. They had not mentioned that anyone beside Cob would have to crawl through on their hands and knees.

As you looks towards him you see that far away look in his eyes again. Slowly, he raises a finger to point to the left. "Ring wants to go this way."

"It is talking to you?" you ask alarmed... and already contemplating how to get the damned thing away from him and toss it down the nearest dead drop.

"Not with words, feels wants to go this way..." Again he points to the eastern wall of the cave where you can see some collapsed masonry that might be of the same make as the tunnel.

"Can you tell it no?" Mina asks carefully.

"'Course Cob can say no, Cob's Cob, ring's just ring, you think trap?"

Gorok hisses to himself thoughtfully as he looks at the pile of tumbled stone. "See there, opening near the top, that is where pale-bellies came from with corpse, with ring." Then with speed and deftness that belies the size of his claws he plucks a rat from the ground, a tinny thing barely two fingers long, but wild eyed and trying to eat his hand.

"Moldfolk came this way, maybe fight, maybe die." He slinks from one opening to the other, tail sweeping just above the ground. "They came from both sides, left and right."

"The morlocks will have raised a right stink in the ruins, they will be on their guard," you note.

"Or they might be weak there because of raid," Cob points out, hopefully.

What do you do?

[] Cob Scouts down the narrow tunnel to the left where your clients said the way to the mine is

[] With Gorok at the head and ready for trouble climb the rubble to the ruins where the ring 'wants to go'

[] Write in

OOC: I considered having a vote on if you want to be cunning or direct with regards to the execution, but it felt a lot more IC for Kori's motivation to be direct so I went with that.