Date: September 12, 2026
Attendance: Penn Kerwin, Gorr, Caitlyn, Professor Simley, Goodheart, Yochel Jarax
Neefox
The summons came from Governor Vane of Neefox, a mining colony on a volcanic island far out along the long chain of the Lordship of the Isles. It promised gold. It said the governor needed help with something, and that something was wrong with the mine. That was all it said.
Neefox sits on the coast under a huge dormant volcano, and it is known for one thing: silver. As the ship came in, its passengers saw the town hanging off sheer cliffs above the water. Every building was cut from basalt or coral stone and painted in bright colours. There was no beach, only small fishing piers built out from the rock. Several big galleons rode at anchor in the harbour, doing nothing, and a lot of men stood around on the docks, also doing nothing.
The six who answered had all come in on the same ship and had got to know each other on the crossing.
Yochel Jarax came from the Kron Hills, north-east of the City of Greyhawk. He had never been on a ship before and was very glad to be on solid ground again. He had always tried to keep himself pure in his studies, he said, but something had touched him in some very nasty temples near Hommlet. He felt corrupted. He had come looking for a way to cleanse himself, and he hoped good deeds might help.
Professor Simley was a gnome wizard on sabbatical from her university, doing field research. She had already spent a few days in Neefox and had made a lot of good, neat deals. Friends, she meant. She had also picked up a gambling habit, though somehow she had won it all back. She had had particular luck with the hermit crabs.
Goodheart was a cleric of Pelor, the Sun and Healer, and he had one purpose: to find the cult that meant to blow up the volcano.
Caitlyn was a dragonborn from Veluna. Her parents had come into money and sent her to the monasteries to be made into a proper woman, and she had decided that was not for her. She walked out and travelled from Veluna through Hommlet, Greyhawk and the Wild Coast all the way to the Lordship of the Isles. She wanted to be a pirate captain. For now, that was what freedom meant to her.
Penn Kerwin was a human of plain Suel descent, with pale sun-burnished skin and white-blond hair. He said he had worked as a marine guard for a merchant trading company, which was true. Anyone who had worked with him then could tell he was running from something. He kept a home on Duxchan in the Lordship of the Isles and had been up the Wild Coast and as far as Rauxes. He wore a breastplate and carried a glaive. The rapier at his side, he kept muttering, he was not yet worthy to wield.
The sixth was Gorr, a goliath of great size.
The harbour district was lined with banks of smelters and heaps of charcoal, and none of the smelters were burning. The taverns along the piers were packed, which was strange at that hour. These men should have been at work somewhere, and they were drinking instead. Outside several of the taverns stood posts covered in notices. In the middle of the street a fastidious-looking gnome in spectacles was checking his notepad and peering about as if he had lost something.
Simley went over to introduce herself, one gnome to another, and asked whether anything was the matter. He brightened at once. She must be one of the adventurers the governor had sent for. Was it just her? He looked relieved when she pointed out the rest. They had hired six, he said, and for a moment he had been worried. Simley told him they had nearly lost a few of them on the pleasure barge the night before, but there was nothing to worry about.
He offered to lead them up to the governor’s mansion and waved vaguely uphill. Nobody needed leading. The town was small and most of its houses were humble, and the governor’s mansion stood out above them, large and resplendent. He took them through streets where more notices were pasted to the walls, into the mansion and to a waiting room full of plush couches, with velvet on the walls, nothing like what the people in the village below owned. The governor was in an interview with one of his workers, he said, and would be with them shortly. Then he backed out and shut the doors behind him.
The Governor’s Eggs
The voices behind the inner door got louder. A gruff one carried clearly: You and your people had your chance. Now it’s time for the mercenaries to have their go. A quieter female voice answered, too low to make out.
The doors slammed open. A red-skinned tiefling came out in overalls, smeared all over with charcoal, wearing a bright red miner’s safety helmet with a pickaxe painted on it. Her horns curled awkwardly around the sides of it. She saw the six of them, made a disgusted noise, and kept walking.
The governor waved them in. He had very big tusks. He was glad they had come at such short notice. The silver mine, the lifeblood of the colony, had had some sort of accident. Ashton, he said, pointing vaguely after the tiefling, had sent in a rescue team to find out what had happened, and no one had heard from them in three or four days.
They’re dead, one of the party said. Sorry, but they’re dead.
The governor nodded. That was more or less what he had been telling her. Her sister was down there and she wanted to send in another rescue team, but he was more concerned with getting the silver flowing again. There were a lot of independent operators demanding their share of the mine’s payment, and if he didn’t get the money to them, things would go much harder for the people of his town. Ashton could take them out to the mine. He pointed out of the window at the volcano. If they found out what was wrong, and if they managed to rescue any of the miners, he would be happy to pay them.
There had never been trouble at the mine before, he said. And if they had heard rumours or stories about cults, that was all nonsense, spread by workers who didn’t want to work and would make up any excuse to spend more time in the bar.
Professor Simley said that if they brought the miners back, she would need to talk to him about rights and protections for hermit crabs. She had met some very nice hermit crabs over the past few days. The governor’s expression was impossible to read. He might have been angry, or simply lost for words. What he said was: Sure.
Did he have a layout of the mines? He did not. Ashton might. He basically just counted the silver. Ashton was a good foreman, he said, but she cared a little too much about her people. To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs every now and then.
People are not eggs, someone told him.
It’s an expression.
He had more interviews to get through, he said, and letters to send hiring more adventurers, in case (and here he lowered his voice to a mutter) these ones failed and died horribly. The party thanked him for his confidence. When they asked how many adventurers had gone in before them, he said they would be the first. The miners had sent in their own rescue crew, but no adventurers. They were the first. He swore it. Someone pointed out that if there had been earlier adventurers, the party would at least get their loot. Then the six were hustled out, and they could hear him muttering to himself as the doors shut behind them.
The Road to the Furnace
Ashton was waiting outside the mansion with a pack train of mules. Well, she said, if we’re going to do this, let’s get on with it.
She offered each of them a mule. They were cantankerous animals, but they knew the trails to the mine very well. The mine, she told them, was in a place called Tilva’s Furnace, its entrance built into the flank of the mountain. It was called the Furnace because of the heat that came up through the ground there, and they should pack plenty of water. The party did some quick shopping. Simley had a supply of healing potions and handed them round so nobody had to spend their own gold. Then they rode out of town towards the island’s interior.
On the way they asked Ashton about her sister. She sighed in frustration. Her sister was one of the best excavators they had. When the cave-in happened she hadn’t waited to be asked: she gathered a crew and went straight in to free whoever was still trapped. Ashton had been down at the port loading the latest batch of silver onto the ships and didn’t know anything was wrong until she stopped hearing from her. She kept asking the governor to send in another group, and he wouldn’t. He was afraid of losing more miners and more production. The man only thinks about the bottom line.
The party told her they might be able to do both. She nodded. Please save my sister.
Her sister’s name was Char. Ashton gestured at herself. I have a very distinctive look. But somehow my twin is blue instead of red. She guessed there were about fifteen miners inside, depending on whether a shift had changed, but she didn’t know exactly who had been in at the time of the collapse. The area was thermally active, she said, and the mine was always hot, but the volcano was dormant and there had never been earthquakes like this. When Simley asked whether something strange must have happened for someone as skilled as Char not to manage the rescue, Ashton said that was exactly what she had tried to tell the governor. If her sister hadn’t come out, something bad had happened.
She admitted she didn’t much trust adventurers, who were known for taking everything that wasn’t nailed down and leaving trouble behind them. But as long as they saved her sister and the rest of her crew, she didn’t care what they took out of there. Someone asked whether a dwarf called Dan, a drinking companion from the bar, was with the crew. Ashton knew Dan, a stinky little fellow, and thought he was somewhere in the mine. That gave them a real reason to go. As it turned out, every miner they named was on that crew.
The trail climbed in switchbacks up the mountain. In places the smell of sulphur was very strong, though not enough to poison them. They passed fumaroles, where the water table ran close to the surface and the heat boiled it out of the ground as steam. It was like walking through a sauna.
At last they came to tracks running along the ground and the remains of the mining camp on the mountainside. Ore carts lay tipped over. Tents and shelters had been half knocked down. Rocks covered the tracks and filled the mine entrance, though there was a small gap at the top that they might fit through on hands and knees. Ashton had felt nothing down at the port, but clearly something had happened here. She unloaded water and medical supplies and said she would wait outside and set up a triage camp.
The Sign of the Eye
They searched the camp first. Simley knew stone, as gnomes do, and she could read in the fractured rock and the way the tents had fallen that there had been an earthquake. Searching separately, two of them found the same symbol: one burned into a beam, the other scratched into the side of an ore cart. It was a spiral winding in to a centre that looked almost like an eye.
This was very culty. Of course, the governor said it was all just rumour.
The gap at the top of the rubble was very tight. The heat was the real problem. It pressed in from every side, and the longer they stayed in it the more it would drain them. They judged that squeezing everyone through as it was would take about half an hour, and clearing enough rubble first would take around twenty minutes. They decided to dig. Gorr called on his giant blood and grew huge, and he and the others heaved the stones aside while Simley stood by pointing: that one over there, that one looks easiest. She also slipped a few shiny, interesting-looking stones into her backpack. In about twenty minutes they had cleared half the blockage, and now they could get through bent over instead of wriggling.
Before they went in, Simley asked Ashton whether she could round up some more workers to clear the rest, so there would be an easier way out when they came back with people. Ashton thought that was a very good idea. She finished setting up her camp and headed back down the mountain.
The Dead in the Tunnel
Beyond the entrance the mine was pitch black. They had their own lights: a conjured glow, and a ring that threw out a broad beam when it was turned. Fallen timbers and rubble showed where the roof had come down, and every so often dust trickled from the ceiling. They felt nervous as they went deeper.
Following the rails down, they came to an ore cart crushed under a great stone. Three bodies lay around it, one with its top half buried in dirt and rock. They dug him out to find out who he was. Goodheart examined the dead. The buried man had suffocated. The second, despite his helmet, had been killed by falling stone. The third was badly burned. The first was a dwarf with a candle on his helmet. Poor Belton. The second was a human with an eyepatch, Chauncey. The third was an elf with slightly torn ears. All three were dead.
Goodheart offered to preserve the bodies with a prayer so that they could be carried out later, if there was time. There was a church in Neefox to Bleredd, the god of mines and miners, where they might at least be given last rites.
The Lift
A little further on, the track ended at timber reinforcements holding back the earth. Above them was a huge shaft. The mine had been driven into the side of the volcano and then upwards into the mountain. A round wooden lift platform hung in the shaft. The earthquake had knocked it off its axis and it was stuck fast, blocking the way up. A rope ran to a pulley on each side of it.
Penn thought that working the pulleys might straighten it. It needed two people. As they pulled and tried to free the platform from the rock, dirt and small stones rained down. Penn put his back into it, and with a loud thunk the platform dropped back into alignment. It slid slowly down by itself to the bottom, where it tripped a small lever and a little barrier popped up in front of it.
There was a body on the platform: a human miner wearing a red helmet like Ashton’s. The others had worn blue or yellow. Since Ashton was head foreman, red probably marked a crew leader. He too had been killed by falling rock. In his pocket they found a strange brass cog with a small crank attached, a fine piece of work that might fetch good money from the right buyer. They moved him to the side of the shaft to be collected later.
The platform was still covered in rubble. Clearing it was slow, sweaty work in the heat, and they managed it. Then they couldn’t see how to work the lift. There was no lever or switch. The platform’s gears ran along a toothed beam in the wall, and at one point a piece was obviously missing.
The brass cog fitted it exactly, as if it had been made for it.
They turned the crank and the platform began to rise. As it went up they passed several side shafts that were blocked, and one higher up that was open. The mechanism creaked. Then the ground moved. A tremor ran through the mine and more rock fell from the roof onto the lift. Some of them got out of the way, and some were hit hard on the head. While they waited for the shaking to stop, Simley took a helmet from the dead miner. It was too big for a gnome and sat on her like an oversized sun hat. Caitlyn took the opposite approach and wore a tiny helmet perched on top of her dragonborn head like a top hat.
When the earth settled they cranked the platform the rest of the way up to the open side shaft, though the fresh rubble made it harder to turn. The heat got worse. It felt like a real sauna now. There was nowhere else to go but in.
The Burrowers
The darkness ahead turned to a shimmering red, yellow and orange, and anyone who knew the earth could tell it was molten rock. The shaft opened into a much wider cavern, broken open by the same upheaval: a ruined, bowl-shaped space with cracks and holes in its floor, and the glow came up through them.
As they entered, the earth shifted again. New cracks opened in the floor. Then a big armoured creature burst through one of the walls. It looked something like an armadillo, ran on all fours, and screamed. A second one broke through after it. They were bulettes. The six had heard them coming, and they moved first.
Goodheart prayed, and a spectral mace of Pelor’s light struck the first beast. Penn swept in with his glaive, his reach keeping him back from the jaws. Yochel saw how heavily it was armoured and went for the unprotected joints with his dagger, then with flurries of blows. Gorr raged and brought his battle-axe down twice, and the beast was badly hurt. Simley, careful to aim so that none of her friends were caught, set off a spell that hit it squarely. Caitlyn ran straight at it with shield and shortsword to draw its attention. Her blade glanced off its plates in a shower of sparks. It was already enraged, and it turned on her. Don’t make me go to the other one, she muttered.
The first bulette was bleeding from everywhere, its eyes red and bloodshot. It tried to escape by diving straight down into the floor. The blows that followed it as it burrowed killed it, and it died stuck halfway into its own hole.
The second bulette leapt across the cavern and came down almost on top of Caitlyn and Simley, knocking them both flat. Goodheart’s bolt of holy light, fired as it loomed over them, missed when it twisted aside at the last moment. Then Penn came up behind it and opened a long wound, and hot blood sprayed across the cavern. Yochel found a weak spot and punched it in the gizzard. Gorr hacked at it. By now the cracks in the floor had widened into holes, and lava showed through them. Simley spat acid at it from where she lay on the ground.
Caitlyn got up, pulled out her trident and threw it. When it struck, the bulette’s eyes showed something like recognition, and it turned on her in a fury. Watching it, she understood: something had attacked this creature with a trident before.
The bulette’s great jaws closed around Simley’s waist. It shook her like a shark and tossed her aside. As it turned on the others, Penn came up behind it and drove his glaive through its heart. It gave a deep bellow and fell over on its side, dead.
As it died, the whole cavern shook again, and the floor collapsed beneath them.
The Temple of Glass
The hallway behind them went too. Caitlyn spread her wings and flew. She caught one falling companion, who grabbed another by the feet, and the three of them came down together in a dangling chain. The rest fell, and landed hard.
They had dropped into a caldera full of lava, where the rock was all volcanic. The heat was far worse. One tunnel leading away was caved in, and another was open. In front of them stood what they took to be a temple, built of volcanic glass and basalt. It was ancient, but someone had been restoring it, and the newer work looked very dwarvish. As they realised that, they saw dead dwarves lying all around them.
The heat was wearing several of them down now, and they felt their strength draining with every step. They looked at the dead anyway. Many of them had been killed by tridents. I’ve never been here before, I swear, said Caitlyn, and she tossed her trident aside. She could always call it back.
Caitlyn also knew what she was looking at. These weren’t dwarves. They were Azer, fire dwarves, beings of elemental fire with hair of flame and armour of burnished bronze. Their hammers and axes lay around them. The restoration of the temple was almost certainly their work. Simley searched for magic and found none on the dead. On the restored statues, though, she found carved runes showing the worship of fire elementals.
Then they heard movement, the scuffle of feet, coming towards them from the tunnel that led deeper into the caldera. Simley wrapped herself in protective magic. The party formed a defensive wall, the fighters to the front.
A figure came out of the dark: an Azer, using a broken spear as a crutch, covered in blood. When he saw them he held up his empty hands in a sign of peace and called out in a language nobody knew. It was Ignan, the tongue of elemental fire.
Simley cast a spell that let her understand it. She couldn’t speak it, so she conjured a little magic slate in the air and drew on it, like a professor at a chalkboard: the mine, the collapse, the rescue, stick figures with frowny faces, and the party carrying the stick figures back up to the surface. Peace, friends, the Azer said. I mean you no harm. Weapons were lowered, though not put away.
He looked at the drawing and nodded. We’re all in danger, including your miners. This whole place is about to explode. Hurry, we must stop the ritual.
One of them offered him a healing potion. He drank it, and they watched some of his wounds close. He threw away the broken spear and waved them deeper into the caldera.
The Ritual Platform
In the tunnel they found tracks: signs of people being dragged, and alongside them broad serpentine trails, as if something long and snakelike had done the dragging. Salamanders.
The tunnel opened onto a stone platform surrounded by boiling, bubbling molten rock. The missing miners were crammed together at its edge, close to the lava, all of them in chains. They had been in the volcano a long time and were utterly spent. They would need help to get out. With them were two Azer and a blue-skinned tiefling, also in chains. Guarding them were three salamanders, serpent-bodied, with tridents.
The centre salamander saw them first. It dropped low and hissed, then turned, speared one of the miners on its trident and threw her into the lava. She screamed and burst into flame as she hit it. The whole cavern shook.
Yochel moved first. He ran at the left-hand salamander with his dagger and fists. The party agreed a plan: one of them on each salamander, so none of the creatures had a free moment to throw another captive in. Penn took the middle one and cut deep into it with his glaive. Caitlyn struck hard.
The centre salamander was not stopped. It speared another miner and flung him into the lava, and again the chamber shook.
The other two came down off their tails and slithered along the ground to wrap their bodies around the nearest enemies. Caitlyn was too strong for hers: she punched it in the face, and it fell off her dazed, and its trident thrust went wide. Yochel was not so lucky. The coils closed on him and crushed him, and the creature lifted its trident to stab him in the neck. He turned most of the blow aside, but the salamander’s body burned like a forge, and its heat burned everyone standing near it.
Simley’s next spell dragged two of the three salamanders into a crawl, so that every movement they made was slow, though the left-hand one shook it off. Gorr went for one with his battle-axe and swept its legs out from under it just as it raised its trident for another miner. It fell and squirmed on the ground like a worm. Goodheart called down Pelor’s guardians, a ring of radiance around himself that burned whatever came near him.
Yochel strained against the coils and couldn’t break free. Penn drank a potion, steadied himself and attacked again and again, and the salamander in front of him still wouldn’t fall. He drank a second potion and stepped back out of its burning reach. The slowed creature was too sluggish to strike at him as he went. Gorr stayed over the fallen salamander, hacking at it. I’m going to stay right up on him, he said, so he doesn’t just go back to pushing people in.
Then Penn waded in again with all his strength. The salamander hissed and spat fiery bile, its blood burst into flame where it splashed on the ground, and it died.
The fallen salamander writhed back up and struck at Gorr, but it moved so slowly that he stepped aside easily. The one holding Yochel stabbed him again. Both creatures flared with heat, scorching Gorr and Yochel, and Yochel was badly hurt. Simley sent her familiar flying over Gorr to drop a healing potion onto one of his horns, and it splashed down over him. Pelor’s guardians burned the salamanders again, and the one on the left died.
The last one turned to Goodheart. His spectral hammer came down and crushed part of its skull. It looked at him as it fell and made a hissing sound like laughter.
It is too late, it said. I give myself to Tharizdun.
It touched an amulet to its chest, burst into flame, and burned to ash.
The Thing in the Lava
The whole volcano started to shake. A bubble rose out of the lava, and as it rose it formed a face. A huge molten hand reached up and slammed down on the edge of the lava lake. A colossal fire elemental hauled itself up out of the molten rock. On its wrists, around its waist and on its legs were chains engraved with dwarven runes, and most of them were broken. It strained against the rest, and the room shook.
It screamed, and fire filled the whole chamber, burning everyone in it.
Char, the blue tiefling, showed none of the weariness that was crushing the others. She seemed to be in her element. The two freed Azer were unhurt, being creatures of fire. The miners were another matter. Each of them would take two people to carry out. Simley swelled Char to giant size, and Char took two miners. Gorr, already huge, gathered up miners and leapt ahead in short bursts of cloud-giant magic, vanishing and reappearing further along. Together the party took four. The two Azer got up and walked out by themselves. Two miners were left, and Simley worked the same growing spell on another companion, who scooped them both up and carried them off. Someone brought up the rear.
The Azer they had met in the tunnel was called Forge. We must send this thing back to the Realm of Fire! he cried. Anyone who could work magic had to come with him and channel it. He needed two. Professor Simley and Goodheart went with him towards the temple while the others carried the miners towards the exit.
Halfway there, the carriers found the exit blocked with rubble. Behind them the elemental screamed again. A wave of heat rolled out from it and filled the whole volcano, and what little strength they had left drained away.
Forge led Simley and Goodheart to the altar at the front of the temple. Everyone else set to work on the blocked exit. Gorr threw stones aside so fast that it began to look like they would get through.
Glancing back, they saw that the lava lake was ringed with fingers of rock, and on those outcrops stood about fifty salamanders, all cheering. The elemental turned on them and screamed. The earth shook. It drove a fist into the lava and every finger of rock crumbled, and all the salamanders fell into the lava. As they burned, another of its chains snapped. Only one remained, on its other arm.
The Circle of Fire
At the altar, Forge took Simley’s and Goodheart’s hands and began muttering an incantation in Ignan to open a portal to the Realm of Fire. They would have to hold it for some time, and anything that broke their focus would put everything at risk. Goodheart had already warded himself against fire as they walked. Simley wrapped herself in a magic that made her flicker in and out of the world.
As soon as Forge took their hands, they felt as if their insides were on fire. They looked at each other and saw that their hair wasn’t hair any more. It was flame. Their eyes glowed red, burning at the edges, as the Azer’s energy ran through them.
At the exit the rocks finally gave way and the path was clear. The miners were out of danger. The others could have run. But they knew that if the elemental broke free, the whole town would be gone, and probably the whole island. They turned and went back.
The elemental beat its last chain against the walls of the volcano. The ground heaved and rocks fell from the ceiling, and everyone was thrown to the ground. At that moment Simley flickered out of sight. She could still feel Forge’s hand in hers, though she could no longer see it, and the words of the chant kept coming to her: the same words Forge was saying, though she had no idea what they meant. She held on.
The others ran into the temple and found the Azer chanting with his hair ablaze, an invisible companion beside him, and Goodheart holding on. Beneath them a tear was opening in the lava, like a rip in the fabric of the world, a doorway beginning to open. They joined hands in a circle. As each one stepped in, their hair and beards turned to fire and their eyes began to glow. It hurt, but they could bear it.
Out in the caldera the elemental’s fist burst open and threw lava across the whole chamber. The blast reached even the temple and seared the faces of everyone in the circle. They were burned badly, and they kept chanting.
Then the tear opened fully. The elemental screamed and reached upwards as the portal began to pull it in. Its body came away in globs. It shrank, and kept shrinking, until it was only a tiny flame, and then it slid through the portal and was gone.
Forge let go of their hands, and the portal slammed shut.
Sisters
They brought the miners up out of the mine. When they reached the surface, Ashton had already cleared the entrance. The two sisters, one red and one blue, held each other.
I’m sorry I doubted you, Ashton said. I should have had faith in you.
For helping him close the portal, Forge gave them a necklace strung with beads of fire. Then the six went back down to Neefox to tell the governor what had happened in his mine, and to collect their pay.