So. As far as i understand this. Karag Dum somehow managed to fucking enslave Morghur Shadowgave to protect their hold. Its the only thing that adds up with uncorrupted Waystone, and with the goddamn weirdness.
Unless, of course, they are giving him something in exchange for protection that gives him a better chance at taking out/taking stuff from the wood elves.
No wait, this seems deeper.
@BoneyM
Why didn't Borek mutate when Morghur reached out to touch him? Or to put question more clearly, from someone who only knows about Morghur from the wiki, it kinda seems like one of his powers is to mutate whatever he touches. Is that wrong of me to think, and it's not actually one of his powers?
Does she still think that the mountain is designed to look like a herdstone from a distance?
And can she find the waystone flow to determine whether or not the flow of magic is consistent with it being converted into a herdstone?
As in, it hasn't changed since we left Vlag.
What is the literal Khazalid translation of 'Cor' as found in Cor-Dum?
Are the trees we're seeing consistent with having been displaced from Bretonnia?
One last question, I know there was mention of it taking a month to reset the coin, but we've had it on Protector for longer than that, can we change to face now and just be unable to change it for another month?
Borek said:
"Karag Dum remembers much that others have forgotten, even when some might prefer we didn't. Even when we might prefer we didn't."
And has indicated a general well-regard for the wellbeing of the innocent that is inconsistent with loyalty to chaos, yet was unsurprised by the presence of Morghur, and was greeted affectionately by him.
Knowledge says: - Morghur is said to have been 'born' three hundred years ago, but there's stories of beings identical to him stretching back throughout recorded history.
Morghur is reborn whenever he is killed.
Borek expected Morghur, Morghur favors Borek, Borek isn't chaos-aligned. Obvious conclusion, Morghur is aligned with Borek in some way apart from alignment to chaos.
Less obvious conclusion: Morghur is aligned with Karag Dum because he is a dwarf.
That is to say, the first version of Morghur was born a dwarf.
How did they get the divine axe in OTL? And why should anyone think that when Grimnir went north those sworn to defend him wouldn't go north with him? And what would one of them become if they went and came back?
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[ ] THEORY: Physical signs point to Morghur having been holding the area against nomad raiders for a very long time, and history implies that he's not been seen in the old world since approximately when Karag Dum would have come under attack during the Great War against Chaos.
He's been here
this whole time.
And something is preventing him from wandering on.
Magical signs and, less reliably, intuition about Borek, point to there being something uncorrupted in that mountain in the middle.
Theory continued: Borek expected Morghur, Morghur favors Borek, Borek isn't chaos-aligned(he had the chance to prevent us from acting on Vlag, but he didn't, and was, in fact, happy about the result). Obvious conclusion, Morghur is aligned with Borek in some way apart from alignment to chaos.
Less obvious conclusion: Morghur is aligned with Karag Dum because he was a dwarf.
That is to say, the first incarnation of Morghur was born a dwarf, far longer ago than merely 300 years ago.
And Dwarf souls that never have the rites to send them to the underearth are ejected from the aether, and reincarnated into new bodies to live another life.
Morghur was originally a secret shame of Karag Dum, his first incarnation was a dwarf that went into the chaos wastes and was changed into what he is now. Possibly someone who followed Grimnir, then had the shame of coming back alive/having his soul corrupted by chaos down to the core so as to cause disaster when reborn, possibly someone else important to Karag Dum's history, important enough to remember rather than burying or forgetting to dull the shame.
They have formed a pact with Morghur to defend them and probably isolate them from everything outside, in the words of others 'much could have been seen as justified in that time', but it is still uncertain whether they've actually fallen into corruption.
[ ] ACTION: either feign retreat while we secretly return to scout out the situation, or fort up while we scout out the situation.
Ask the local tribes to get confirmation of how long Cor-Dum has been here, and a story of how he arrived. In fact, maybe send some winter Wolves and Hubert(or just Hubert)somewhere to ask, Hubert knows Khazalid right?
Determine whether we can actually keep up our stealth magic within the forest(and the associated relative proximity to Morghur[I'm not clear on his range]) if we can, scout to determine whether there are actually dwarves on the inside, whether they've gone over to chaos, and whether they would actually want to leave.
If they would actually want to, it might be possible to distract the Beastmen enough that they don't intercept an attempt to get them out.
Note- if we infiltrate to find that there are uncorrupted dwarves interested in leaving and simultaneously the Beastmen are distracted by attacks from the tribes to the north, we will need a signal to be able to tell the rest of the expedition to get moving immediately.
Note2: if we can't pull this off immediately we might need to aquire more of a food margin.
[] WRITE IN: either alter meeting protocol and invite Asarnil to the command meeting, or brief him on what's going on immediately after, if we're going to consider staying to scope out the situation, we need to convince him that command hasn't gone insane to try to prevent him from just flying off, as he's one of the other people on this expedition that can just leave if it looks like we're lost.
Consider escape route, if we leave pursued by absurdly powerful Beastman, we might want to escape through the territory controlled by their current enemies, if we leave unpursued we might have time to try to improve the road and take the same route back as we took to get here.
Consider when we're going to steal that damn goblet, if we have the chance to delay any dwarf springing for long enough for the theft we might want to, otherwise we'll need to scamble to do it during the escape.
