Time to rescue some people!

We rested for the night at Hogni's home, without incident. In the morning Rubani and Tetsu both felt distracted "in a fog" so to speak. They felt well enough to continue on. Hogni led us outside the village to a hillside to the gem mine. There were 4 people standing in front of the mine entrance, seemingly completely motionless. Alyva wanted to try sneaking closer so she could cast a spell on the group. The group was not confident this would work, as we are not the stealthiest group... Rubani stood out from everyone else and made quite a bit of noise. All 4 of the "people" turned in Rubani's direction. As they grew closer, several of the group were able to identify them as Zombie Shamblers. We moved in and made quick work of them. Hogni offered to hide outside and call a warning to us if he saw anyone approaching. Entering the cavern we soon came to a 20 foot wide, shallow river running through the cavern. After several dunkings we managed to get to the other side. We found a wooden bridge on the far side, which we put into place before continuing further in. Before long we found some wooden cages with people in them. We could see a decaying humanoid holding a child in it's hands. A voice from further in said "Choose, the child dies or you become one of us". We immediately leapt to save the child! We were able to kill the Shambling Zombie & the Plague Zombie quickly, but then had a very bad time with the Undead who was giving orders. He wielded both magic and his scythe very effectively. Rubani fell to the scythe, cut nearly in 2. He died from the blow :( We eventually felled the Undead, then turned to saving the villagers. We found a note on the boss bad guy. It read "Convert as many villagers as you can" & was signed Kraw. The villagers were able to tell us the boss went by the name Shardoss. There were about 50 of them to rescue.
We healed up the worst off for about an hour, before we escorted everyone back to the village of Nordarno. They decided they should travel back to Nyksund with us. While they gathered what belongings they could find, we went back to the cave to burn the Undead corpses,, as well as Rubani on a separate pyre. We then returned to Nordarno to gather the villagers and headed on the return trip to Nyksund. Tetsu continued to fight off the disease he had contracted from the Festering Gnashers. It took a few days, but he eventually did fight it off. We arrived at Tuv without incident, where we collected Hulda and her daughters. We then continued on to Nyksund. We were ushered into the city by the guards. We were told by the guards to go to the Wolf's Lodge, the church of Erastil, where Anarzee Whisperwind was waiting to speak with us. We headed there right away. Arrving, we saw an Elven woman dressed in gleaming silver armor standing out front. She noticed us and hurried over to meet us. She said she was sorry for our loss, referring to the death of Rubani. We thanked her and she asked is we had learned anything of note. We showed her the note we had found on the corpse of Shardoss. She said the other group of adventurers had not yet returned. She then asked if we would mind looking into the creature named in the note, Kraw. We offered to look for the other group as well, since they had not returned. We asked if they knew anything about Kraw. Apparently, they had last heard that name as being off somewhere between Drevja & Bodo. This area lay beyond Nordarno, where we had just come from. We told her the types of Undead we had fought along the way. She gave us some magic to thank us for our help before she flew off. We then went to take some much needed downtime before heading out again!