Echoes of Water and Betrayal

At the edge of an underground river, three water elementals circle a javelin ten feet down that throws lightning into the water and makes them swell. Nobody wants a fight. Tüül refuses to take a pretty bauble from another being without good reason. La Maestra tries diplomacy by body language, and Aelion sneaks ahead and finds two drow digging up an old stone canal with their bare hands.

The ambush goes better than most of the party's fights: a natural twenty, a smite, a dagger through an eye at long range, and a drow mage who runs straight into a carrion crawler nest. Then the party counts heads. Easter Ashwell, the miner who saved Aelion twice, tried to fetch the javelin for him, against orders. They find half of him at the water's edge.

Owlin rejoins after three weeks just in time to be struck down by lightning when Lavius lifts the javelin free with a mage hand. Then La Maestra holds up her eggshell fragment, and the "gold vein" under the floor turns out to be a glowing trail, the mark left where the golden egg was dragged through the mountain thirty years ago and hidden under masonry. It runs through the forge and a hall of dead goliaths and murdered priests, into a collapsed wall. La Maestra blows it open onto the mountainside above Mourningfall. "Welcome home," Aelion tells Tüül. "Such as it is." A Zhentarim banner hangs inside the cave, and tiny flowers bloom in every footprint the old priest leaves on the way down.