You enter the Mound from an entrance at its top, and find it to contain a hive of Formians – an invading race from another plane that resembles giant ant-centaurs.  The menial workers inside largely ignore you as you navigate the maze-like earthen interior, stumbling into their fungus farm, food storage rooms, and an armory (with many masterwork weapons which you nab as loot).

At one point, you are attacked by a larger, clearly more authoritative Formian who is mind-controlling a couple of vile stunted slave-creatures, as well as by several of the warriors of the species.

You fight off the defenders, advancing deeper into the center of the Mound. You find the queen dormant in a small locked room and decide against destroying her. You continue on, finding a secret door that leads to an area set apart from Formian dwellings. The rooms appear to be the workspace of a powerful humanoid wizard, one who dabbles in necromancy. The wizard is growing crystals that hatch black skeletons, and you meet one of them, alive (as such things go) and seemingly insane, leaning up against a wall of a dark tunnel. He rambles incoherently on a variety of topics – the predominant themes being tongues, pits, and/or lakes of fire. When he realizes Daisy is not his master, he flees and sets off an avalanche trap to keep you from pursuing. Continuing to explore, you discover a spacious wizard workshop, and pinch some magical goggles and a staff, plus numerous spells and alchemical formulas, which you stuff in your pockets. You find a smithy, where many magical blades are in various states of being fashioned. Daisy takes a full set of halfling plate mail on display that she realizes must be Axlan in origin. Strange doings occur within this area –  ghostly figures briefly appear on the ceiling, and a corpse used presumably for experimentation disappears entirely after exiting the room, its tracks leading you deeper in. There’s a room of cages with silent, listless human prisoners. They don’t seem interested in escaping, so you give up trying to rally them. You also find an empty meeting room, with banners emblazoned with the star symbol of the Seven Sovereigns:

Finally, at the heart of the Mound, you find a room decorated like a comfortable lounge.  Inside is a halfling woman reclining on a settee, sipping tea. Next to her in the center of the room is a circular pit in the floor with its walls lined with books. There are
two dog-sized centipedes, the halfling’s pets you presume; one appears to be delivering a book from the pit to her.  When she sees you, the woman smiles the barest of smiles and offers a greeting. She’s been expecting you…

“Well, thieves, here you are”, she says. “I hope it was a satisfying ‘adventure’ for you.”

She is well aware of your shenanigans within the Mound, listing them with some disdain, though she does not appear too outwardly upset, all-things-considered:    “At least your damage to the colony was minimal. Killed one of my taskmasters though, tsk tsk.  At least you didn’t mess with the queen or the nursery. Though for a second it seemed otherwise and I was going to have to put down my tea and actually stand up from my couch.”

A halfling necromancer?!  …Daisy’s mind reels.

Standing tall and shaking off any revulsion, you explain you are here for Trimphid and the halfling boy he stole. Justice, you argue, has yet to be served!

Instead of seeking retribution for breaking & entering / killing her minions / and stealing her stuff, the wizard is inclined to listen, impressed that you have infiltrated her hide-out and curious about your ties to Trimphid, and so you begin to converse, rather than fight – a fight you would likely quickly and soundly lose, it’s not hard to imagine.

The wizard’s name, you learn, is Imone Furik and she is one of the Seven Sovereigns. She is a powerful transmuter and not a specialist in necromancy, FYI, though she does dabble in it from time-to-time.

You learn the following points:

• Trimphid and the boy are elsewhere. Tumn is safe though and was not taken against his will. In fact, he is grateful to Trimphid for rescuing him and revealing his true destiny.  Furik is not inclined yet to reveal the boy’s whereabouts just yet, but will do so if you are all willing to use your obvious talents in pursuit of a mutual cause.
• She claims her organization is not responsible for what happened to Daisy’s village. Those were not their orders and she suspects it was carried out by agents of Sibril – the neighboring island nation to the north, recently usurped by a dragon.
• She explains there is an Axlan prophecy of the Shepherd Prince. The usurper of Sibril, the dragon Cognail, seeks to expand his domain and secretly plots to conquer your nation of Paradon. The prophecy states that a halfling called the Shepherd Prince, a descendant of the Dardai Derulade (a halfling clan), may one day restore Axlan glory and defeat the dragon.  Agents of Sibril must have been ordered by the dragon to kill all of the halflings in Daisy’s village.
• The symbol of the thistle is in fact that of the Axlan clan the Dardai Derulade. Cognail is deathly afraid of anyone of that blood as they are mortal enemies of dragonkind.  The Seven Sovereign have been trying to collect weapons with the Derulade mark as they are particularly potent against dragons, but they have yet to unlock the words of activation.
• Tumn *is* the Shepherd Prince, Furik claims, and with the Seven Sovereigns help, they will prepare the prophesied hero to fulfill his destiny and save Paradon from the dragon’s invasion!

It’s a lot to take in. And Dov and Nim quickly realize elements of her story don’t exactly add up based on what you heard from Rucksack’s eyewitness accounts nor on what Trimphid wrote in his the note you intercepted.  You are understandably hesitant to trust a wizard who practices unethical magical practices, let alone one that leads a vast criminal organization.

Furik claims it was just supreme good fortune/fate that the idiotic Overseers bungled their dragon leader’s mission and spared the Shepherd Prince, but whether Brega had anything to do with it is a whole other matter, you think.

At any rate, Furik holds all the cards at the moment. She knows where Daisy’s brother is, and may have further info to help Dov (pseudonym: Doug) clear his name (though she appears not to recognize the investigator, and he didn’t drop any hints as to who he was).  She also seems earnest in her efforts to stop Cognail and a little desperate to enlist your help.

You agree to a deal, though it makes your blood feel sour in your veins: Help Furik and the Seven Sovereigns with a mission, and in exchange, she’ll teleport you to Tumn.

“We know that Cognail is interested in the tomb of an ancient human barbarian queen known as Nomobobo Bloodboat, but we don’t know why.  A group of scholars from Raismonts’ Academy of the Arcane have mounted an expedition to plumb the tomb’s depths, and we have reason to believe a Sibrillian spy has infiltrated the group. They have hired a man named Caspiran, a talented tomb-robber and dungeoneer, to help them avoid its many traps. They were due to meet him yesterday at the inn in the frontier town of Chelton on the edge of the Plains of Nemir, and begin the trek to the tomb. I intercepted Caspiran recently, suspecting him of being the spy, but after extensive interrogation, I’ve determined that he’s no Sibrillian agent – just an opportunistic crook . He had actually planned to betray the scholars, ambushing them with a few of his friends.  I see an opportunity here: The scholars have never seen Caspiran. Doug, you can pretend to be him, and can claim your friends here are part of your crew. You can infiltrate the group, travel with them, determine the identity of the spy and what Sibril’s interest is in the Bloodboat tomb, then report back to me”

Furik introduces you to the creepy black skeleton you met earlier. His name is Quandary. You stand in front of the mirror in her lounge, she utters some command words, and the mirror’s reflection shifts to show you a bird’s eye view of Chelton. When you’ve completed the task, Furik tells you, return to Chelton and seek Quandary out on the cemetery hill.  He’ll make the arrangements to teleport you back to the Mound.

Furik insists you relinquish the magic goggles and staff you stole.  But she says you can keep the formulas and weapons; though you are warned about the magical blades – these are her “little experiments” and may not have desired results.  The Axlan armor is her gift to Daisy, a token of her deepest sympathies for what happened to her village.

You walk through the mirror and find yourself alone under a wide open noon sky on the cemetery on the hill overlooking the little run-down frontier town. Still not feeling in any way good about how things went down in the Mound, you set forth with heavy hearts – and exhausted bodies (when exactly was the last time you rested anyway?).  The sole inn in Chelton is called the Laughing Pig, and inside you easily spot the group of scholars sitting nursing drinks, and waiting for Caspiran to show up.

You meet the scholars – all wizards from Raismonts, three graduate students and a mute professor. They’ve hired an amicable Bregan cleric to guide them across the Plains. You convince them to wait another day before embarking so you can have a chance to rest up.

As you make your way to the location of the tomb, Nim befriends Ereleuva, the chattiest of the wizard students, and from her you learn a bit about the Nodkun, the barbarian tribe that gave up their nomadic lifestyle to build a necropolis in honor of their queen Nomobobo. At one point in the journey, you spot a pack of Blink Dogs in the distance. This magical canine race likes to “blink” –  teleport in an out of this plane – once or twice a minute. Your guide, the cleric Gylaw, explains the dogs actually avoid the site of the Nodkun necropolis. He calls them a superstitious lot, pointing out that they see omens in the stars. This comment can’t help but make Nim bristle.

Dov furtively prepares and drinks two See Alignment elixirs and can determine no one in the party reads as “Lawful Evil” nor “Chaotic Evil”.

You arrive at the tomb entrance to find the scholars’ guards they’d left there mysteriously absent. Before you can investigate, you are ambushed by a bunch of Caspiran’s crew, who jump out of hiding from behind the rocky terrain. You take them out before they can reveal Dov is an imposter.

The cleric Gylaw heals any wounds you incurred and you spend an uneventful night camping outside the entrance, before waking up in the morning, preparing yourself to descend into the necropolis.

To Be Continued..