Deekin makes a note.

"I don't know what it has to do with anything but I guess I might not, sure."

"Mysterious item turning out to be important very old trope. Deekin not totally convinced of significance, just going with Garrus's bit mostly."

"Do you guys want a look at it?"

Deekin nods firmly.

She pulls out the weird cursed arrowhead.

Deekin squints at it. "...no aura," he says finally. "Weird! But somehow cursed anyway?"

"Sure, you wanna swipe it and watch it reappear in my bag next time I get my spellbook?"

"Sure!"

Deekin takes the arrowhead and puts it in one of his belt pouches.

"Should we get moving towards Halaster? We don't know how long we'll have to travel."

"Yeah, good plan."

So they do.

They run into a handful of drow along the way, scouting parties for the Valsharess. None of them claim to be rebels; they just start shooting. They're pretty easily dispatched.

And eventually they can camp out for the night.

Deekin checks his belt pouch; as Belmarniss said, the arrowhead is gone. "Cool! Deekin have to wonder how it teleport without magic aura... maybe just Undetectable Aura? Would be boring, but pretty straightforward."

"Maybe it's actually some kind of crustacean, and when nobody's looking it reveals its legs and scuttles back over to her."

"Ew!"

"I work with the evidence we have!"

They get ready for bed, and for their respective watches. Soon enough it's time for more Shadows of Undrentide.

Alan feels conflicted about being a blackguard. On the one hand, it's against everything Drogan taught him, and he feels bad for betraying his teacher (in a way; it's all in the service of stopping the bastards who almost killed him, right?). On the other hand, it feels right. He's powerful, as powerful as he ever was when he was a paladin, and there's no stupid unintuitive rules getting in his way. He can crush his enemies just as efficiently as before (the kobolds aren't subject to Smite Good, but they mostly weren't subject to Smite Evil either). He feels right, for the first time in his life, and it's all because he did the wrong thing.

He encounters a lone kobold on the road. The kobold is frightened of him, but forces itself to speak to him anyway. Introduces itself as Deekin, says it took one of the artifacts from Drogan's home. He asks why he shouldn't kill it now. Deekin says, reasonably, that if he kills it he'll never find the artifact, because it hid the artifact in a place no one else knows about. In exchange for the artifact, Deekin says he must talk to its master, the great white dragon Tymofarrar, and convince him to free the kobold from his service, and forgive it for breaking the artifact. Alan accepts this offer with bad grace, and heads off to visit the dragon's lair.

In the upper reaches of the dragon's lair, he finds a tribe of kobolds. They attack him, fearing the strange human, and he slaughters them to the last hatchling and continues deeper into the mountain, where he finds the dragon Tymofarrar. Tymofarrar, feeling generous, explains that the attack wasn't originally his idea, and that in fact it was orchestrated by the Fey'ri sorceress J'Nah. Alan requests that Tymofarrar release Deekin from his service, and Tymofarrar makes a request of him in turn: kill J'Nah, and the dragon will grant Alan a boon.

What a bloodbath.

Nathyrra considerately waits until everybody is awake before appearing out of the shadows.

"Hi!" Deekin says brightly.

"Hello again," Nathyrra says. "I have some good news."

"Oh yeah?"

"You remember the army of drow guarding Halaster? Apparently they brought artillery emplacements."

"This doesn't sound like good news yet," Garrus says.

"The artillery emplacements have three hundred and sixty degrees of rotation, and could be pointed at their war camp."

"There we go," Garrus says happily.

Snort. "How many artillery emplacements, how are they guarded, what are the numbers like, all that good stuff -"

"There are two, placed atop a ledge to the north of the camp with a bottleneck ramp up to it. The bottleneck is guarded, but I found yet another of those secret passages that leads right onto the plateau; its entrance is also guarded but less heavily, and if we can take those guards down fast enough they won't know we're coming. There are about fifty drow in the camp, most of them low-level crossbow- or swordswomen but with more than a few mid-level wizards and clerics, and about a dozen duergar mercenaries. You can probably see why I don't relish the thought of a head-on fight."

"Yeah that'd be kind of a mess."