Chapter Three: The Last Dream of Mirza Horgul

It looks like a tight squeeze, but Everil is going for it, and if you mostly submerge yourself you should be able to get in there.

The stream isn't flowing very forcefully.

"If you go south of the Hidden Ophid...follow the red marks...oh please, please, you must stop him before he crosses the broken boulder..."

Some of the trolls start to stir, getting up and stretching their rubbery limbs, evidently catching wind of the fact that the king taking flight into apparently forbidden territory may impinge on their responsibilities as Royal Guards.

At the mouth of the stream, Everil ducks his head under the water and starts trying to wriggle through the opening.

Leaving Everil's hapless majordomo and lethargic Royal Guard behind, Vad and Mordred and company race toward the stream to follow the badger king.

He squeezes his hindquarters through the opening just as the party reaches the water, splashing up the flow to catch him. Mordred is the first to reach the opening, lowering himself down into the water to swim-crawl through on his belly.

While he doesn't have to struggle to fit himself through like Everil did, the difficulty in following soon becomes apparent. Once through the opening, Mordred barely has enough room to keep his nose above water as he crawls up the rocky stream bed. Everil, meanwhile, is making good time as he uses his powerful claws on the sides of the cavern to pull himself forward. Blood in the water tells Mordred that Everil is taking little care to avoid scraping himself on the sharp rocks, prioritizing speed of travel above all else.

Pursuers, give me some Athletics checks!

It wasn't a natural 1, so this will be merely humiliating and not fatal!

Mordred loses his grip on a slippery rock and faceplants into the water, accidentally inhaling some of it, and losing ground as he comes up coughing and sputtering. Zangua slips past him on his right side while he recovers, hot on Everil's tail...but the badger king isn't letting anything slow him down, and he's still gaining ground on his pursuers.

Anybody else got an Athletics roll in 'em?

There's not much to Perceive down here except for water and rocks and the rear end of a giant werebadger, so let's just say that Leth Perceives that "Hidden Ophid" probably refers to the larger underground river they followed earlier, which more or less parallels the Ophid River on the surface, and that this stream probably diverts from it.

Leth, too, passes Mordred, and soon overtakes Zangua as well.

Since you followed Everil about three quarters of a mile west to reach his "castle," you'd probably lose a lot of time by backtracking.

Zangua helps Mordred get going again while Vad keeps pace.

Everil, however, is in his element -- badgers are made for crawling through narrow tunnels. Before long even Leth begins to lose sight of him, though the sound of his splashing and scratching carries. But after a few hundred yards and a few bends in the stream, even that sound grows faint under the noise of the companions behind him and the babble of the stream itself.

The good news is that the tunnel starts to enlarge. There's more headroom, and it's getting easier to move.

Leth emerges into an open chamber, about 15' x 25', the rest of the party close behind, and his heart sinks. The stream continues through another small cavern, but from the dry ground on either side of it there are tunnels branching off to the southeast and southwest as well.

Mordred can't hear anything that would indicate which path he took.