Editing When the King Comes Knocking:The Upper Tunnels

In their first journey together as a group, the heroes were hired by the Dwarves of [[When_the_King_Comes_Knocking:Forgehome|Forgehome]] to investigate a mining team that had lost contact with the hold. They discovered that a necromancer and disciple of Torog, Valkarias, had taken control over a colony of myconids and was forcing them to spread his evil work.

The band of heroes also met with the Heart-Spore, the queen of the myconids, who pleaded to them to release them from the grip of the necromancer. The heroes did this, but not before Kristoph lit the Heart-Spore on fire.


''As he starts to back away, Kristoph bumps into a minecart. He starts to walk around it, then changes his mind and stares at it. His eyes move back and forth between it and the heartspore. The twisted grimace his face has worn since they saw the being controlling the dead dwarf finally resolves into calm certainty. He picks up the mine cart in a shocking display of strength and hurls it against the wall. Again. A third time it crashes into the stone and this time it shatters. The way that Kristoph carries himself makes it easy to miss the raw power of his frame, but it's obvious now. Kristoph selects two dozen or so lengths of wood in a great armload, leaving behind the drier planks in favor of those that have been exposed to the ubiquitous damp pools of the caverns.''
''
Kristoph walks back, now caressing the ends of the planks with a suddenly-burning gauntlet. Intense arcane heat washes over the party from feet away as he coaxes the wood into slow-burning, smoky life. There are flickering embers visible as he starts to stuff the wood into various places in the in the heartspore's niche, a few of them with the unburnt end beneath the fallen dwarf. It starts to become clear that this hole in the wall will become a funeral pyre as flammable dried clothes and the corpse and the rest of the wood ignite. It may take an hour, or two, but heat and smoke is already building, wrapping the heartspore in an eventually fatal embrace.
''
''"Okay. We can go now."''

-Post, the Wyzard #78

Once Valkarias had been defeated, they found his journal, which reported about his mistress who lives in Moon-crazed Malebrethyr, the City of the Sunken Towers.

Among the necromancers prisoners was the dragonborn cleric Straka, who decided to join the adventurers in their pursuit. They also freed a team of mutilated miners, who were led by the steadfast Anargim.