WFRP Update 23

I was in the tavern early the next night, enquiring as to the whereabouts of my little tale teller. It was getting very late when I finally saw him. He had a fresh cut on his face, but seemed happier than he had in many a day.

"Ahh, my good friend, Let me buy you a round for a change. Fortune has smiled on me this night."
After we had downed our ales he started back in on his story. All of my attempts to discover what had happened last night were met with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Not interesting. Now the fate of Iltelka, legendary witch of Altdorf!!"
"Now, after our blood had calmed and we managed to look around, we recognized the other warlock as Earnst Hidleman. We had travelled with him far back in our trials. He had been a strange type back then, but who would have thought that he could have succumb to the powers of that witch."

"Now, since this poor Earnst had accidentally fallen on my dagger a number of times, we couldn't ask him his side of the story, but we did manage to wake up Iltelka and listen to her story. She told us some horrible story about how Earnst had gone looking for the hidden chamber and was really upset when the dwarfs couldn't produce the last key. He even killed some of them and then turned them into the walking dead.
"Now, we had to check this out, so Magdelaine and ELpham, both frothing at the mouth head into the tower with me. Well, sure enough we did find that part of the story was true; the dwarfs had been turned into the walking dead! Luckily for the empire, I am still faster than a walking corpse. We laid them to their final rest and kept searching the tower. We even opened the rotating room that housed the hexagram. And it was a good thing that we was curious, for we discovered that they hadn't killed all of the dwarfs. They were mighty happy to be free and started telling us a different version of the events. They claimed that it was all Iltelka's plan, although Earnst did do some of the magic."

"When we got back and started questioning Iltelkta again, she changed her story and started telling us that she was actually looking for some huge load of warpstone. Now while we were trying to figure out why anyone would even go looking for such a cursed item, we got to witness
dwarven justice first hand...or would that be head? In any case, it sure stopped our questioning of Iltelka.

"Now Rudolpho was no longer in danger of dying, but he sure wasn't up to doing much of anything, so we decided to be nice to the fop and stay here with the dwarfs for a few days. We helped them dig a grave or two and licked our wounds for a while. And then we followed Magdelain's crazy suggestion and put the last key into the hexagram."

The little man stopped for a while and grazed out the window for a long time. Finally my curiosity got the better of me and I pushed him to finish his tale.

"Well, the center of the hexagram drops down, just like some hidden set of stairs and we all descend into this library type room. Magdelaine was as giddy as a halfling with his first stolen pie. Now, after a whole lot of reading from her and a lot of tired looks from us, she spins us a
little tale.
"Seems that this was the library of someone of the Wittgenstein family, who spent a lot of time working on prophecies and astrology. He also claimed to have discovered a huge piece of warpstone that fell from the sky. The book details how he set out with this great lead box to recover the stone and take it back to the castle Wittgenstein. Now, seeing as how we had seen the terrible things that were happening the in village of Wittgendorf and how we were such noble and upstanding citizens of the empire, we made a vow then and there to travel to castle Wittgenstein, recover the warpstone and rid the land of a great evil.
"And the fact that these evil types usually have a lot of valuable, portable things just lying around didn't hurt either.

"Now, we still had to try and survive until we rescued the empire, so we sailed off to Altdorf first and sold off our goods and picked up a few other things to sell. There was also a mysterious chest that somehow appeared in our hold one evening. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. And I got the name of a buyer in Nulm in a dream...yup, a dream. Not much else to tell about that bit. Lots of travelling up and down the river. And once you've done that once, you kind of have the idea. I did manage to finally pick of some fancy clothing for myself. Running around in those peasant cloths was just so annoying."

"That's enough for now. I've had too much ale to continue telling my tale. I'll see you here again tomorrow."