Day 15

It is the evening of the 15th day since I left Teeluw. I will try to write entries into this journal at the end of the day so that I can write about what happened in the days while they are fresh in my mind rather than writing about the day before just after I have woken up, as I did so often in the mountain.

Today I travelled into the village. I had two goals. First, to find someone to translate the runes I wrote about in the entry, "Day 6". Second, to discover what I could about the glowing rock that is now part of my right arm.

If I were a stranger visiting Teeluw and I wanted to find out something about, for example, a curious plant I had found in the forest, I would be most likely to find the answers to my questions by asking the elders. As such, it seemed only sensible to ask the man from whom I acquired the magical eye-staff. He, if you remember, seems to be the equivalent of the village elder, despite his young age. Well, I found him at his house just after lunch time and he invited me in for a drink of a leafy brew. He was very interested to know about myself and my past since the rumours had begun to circulate that a new character was exploring the mines.

The questions were no more than you might expect and I'm sure the answers to all of them will be known by this point to any reader of this diary so I shall omit them from the story. Instead, I shall skip forward to just after he has asked his last question about what exactly it was I did that forced me to be the first person in my people's memory to leave the forest and to after I have avoided answering for the fifth time and to where I begin to ask my questions.

I wanted to know about the runes. What they said, why they glowed - the things you'd expect me to want to know. I won't lie about how disappointed I was to find out that he, nor anyone else in the village, had the ability to translate the Dwarvish writing. To some extent I was prepared to find out that this would be the case. What was really disappointing was that there was a resident of the village who would be able to translate the runes for me. The problem was that she was out deep in the wilderness hunting for food to feed the entire settlement, and that she had left only yesterday. If I hadn't gone straight back to N'Ras' inn I would have caught her just before she set off. She would not return to the village for quite some time.

I also asked about the glowing rocks. Here I was given some answers, though not many. It is thought that the dwarves mined the rocks from the mountain before the battle between them and the Humen. There was a demand for them in the cities to the south. That was when this village was prosperous. But when the Dwarves had mined the mountain dry, the trade dried up as well. The cities forgot about the old traders' village.

We continued to talk and drink the brew until the sun was low in the sky, neither of us really getting the answers we wanted to our questions.