Date: September 12, 2026
Attendance: Blackadder, Tar, Joe, Cain
The Governor’s Waiting Room
A servant led them through the front door of the governor’s mansion, past a small army of household staff, and upstairs to the sitting room outside his office. The office doors were shut. Behind them two voices were arguing: one gruff and male, the other a woman’s, too muffled to make out. Then the man’s voice rose above hers. That’s enough from you! You had your chance! Now it’s the mercenaries’ turn.
The doors banged open. A tiefling woman stormed out in a smock and overalls smeared with charcoal and dirt. Her skin was a bright red, and her horns curled out from under a red safety helmet. She turned towards the four of them waiting there, growled, and gave them a look of pure disgust on her way out.
Governor Vane stepped out after her. He was an orc, with tusks so large they sat oddly above his extremely fine suit. It’s good to see you, he said. He knew them well. They had done his work before. Again, sorry about your daughter. He had more trouble for them.
Had his daughter been abducted again? Not this time, the governor said. He had managed to keep her inside. More people missing, then? He bristled. Missing people? I don’t know what you’ve heard, but it’s purely an exaggeration. I assure you there are no missing people. One of them reminded him that they had handed him a logbook of every missing person last time. Like I said. No missing people. He made a little hushing gesture, and lowered his voice. There had been some kind of accident at the Silver Moon mine. Silver was the island’s chief export, and it was how he kept the pirates off the city’s back. If the silver dried up, so did their safety. He needed them to go to the mine, find out what had happened, and rescue any miners who happened to be trapped down there.
Trapped, said one of them. Not missing.
Trapped, the governor agreed.
His head foreman, the woman who had just stormed out, had already sent a rescue team in after them. Nobody had heard from that team in three days. She had not wanted him to hire outside contractors, but he had given up hope that her people could deal with it. The four of them protested that they were hardly outside contractors any more. They had worked for him so long they were practically on the staff. Then you need to start filling in the staff paperwork, the governor said, and declared himself delighted: this meant he knew he could trust them. He had already ordered the foreman to take them out to the mine. It was very hot out there, he warned them, so they should take whatever precautions they thought they needed. If they got the silver flowing again, they would be handsomely rewarded.
Did he know anything else about the mine? Nothing, he said. He wasn’t involved in the day-to-day. He pretty much just counted the money. The foreman’s name was Ashton, and she ran the mine. Asked whether he’d give them a writ to show they were in his service, he pointed out that they already had theirs, and that duplicates cost extra. Then he signed one anyway and handed it over. If you run into any trouble, just show them that. He shut himself back in his office, and a little gnome clerk came out to ask whether the gentlemen needed anything else. Transport to the mine? Ashton had that all ready for them outside.
The Road to the Volcano
She did. Out front a train of pack mules stood in a line, and Ashton was strapping on harnesses and feeding them. She looked the four of them over. Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s do this. Get on one and we’ll head out.
The road ran out of the port city into the island’s rocky interior: bare stone broken by small pockets of jungle, climbing always towards the volcano at the island’s centre. The reason for the mules became obvious as soon as the path turned into switchbacks up and down the mountainside. The closer they got to the volcano, the hotter it grew, until they reached a gorge cut into its flank where the air was easily a hundred degrees.
In the gorge lay the remains of a mining camp. Lean-tos and tents had collapsed, a mine cart lay on its side, and rocks were strewn everywhere. Ashton admitted she didn’t know what had happened. She had been down at the docks. When she came up to investigate, her sister Char had told her there had been some kind of earthquake, but nobody at the docks had felt a thing. Char had gone in with the first rescue team. Ashton made no secret of what she thought of adventurers. In her experience they came in talking big and loud, stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, and rolled out again, leaving everyone else to clean up the mess. But if you could please see it in your hearts to save my sister, I’d appreciate it. Char was the best excavator she had ever met.
There was no map, she said, but the mine was a straight shot, a single shaft. When they asked what Char looked like, she pointed at herself. This, but blue. They were twins, but for some reason Char had come out blue and Ashton red.
Was there anything else she could tell them? There had been a lot of strange symbols turning up around the camp lately. Graffiti, people said, left by disgruntled workers. She led them to one of the mine carts. Scratched into its side was a spiral that wound in on itself and ended in an eye. One of them knew it at once: the mark of the Cult of the Elemental Eye. Ashton half believed the graffiti story, and half did not.
She set about putting up a triage tent with the supplies she had brought. When they had rescued as many as they could, she would be ready to treat them for heatstroke and whatever injuries they had.
The Cave-in
The rail tracks ran from the camp straight into the mountainside, where the tunnel mouth had caved in. There was just enough of a gap at the top of the rubble for someone to squeeze through. It was about fifteen yards of crawling on hands and knees, pushing their packs ahead of them, and it took them a good twenty minutes to get everyone and everything through. On the far side Ashton waved to them from the gap. Beyond it the tunnel was dark, and the only light was the light they had brought.
They followed the tracks a couple of hundred yards into the dark while the air grew steadily hotter, until they came on a mine cart crushed under a giant boulder. Three bodies lay around it. One was half buried in loose dirt that had slid down from the tunnel wall. The other two lay in the middle of the tunnel. One wore a red helmet, and the other two wore yellow. The red-helmeted one was a tiefling with black dragon tattoos all over his chest. The other two were goliaths, both of them short in the leg, and they seemed to have died in each other’s arms.
What had killed them was hard to say. Some had blunt wounds from falling stone, and some had burn marks. The man they pulled out of the dirt pile had no visible wound at all.
They were only a hundred yards in, so they dragged the bodies back to the cave-in. As they heaved the red-helmeted tiefling up onto the rubble, something heavy and metallic fell out of his pocket. Ashton threw a rope through the gap and pulled while they pushed, and one by one they got the dead out to the other side. These had been part of Char’s rescue party, the second wave. They called out to Ashton that there had been a minor cave-in a couple of hundred yards in, and that these three had been caught in it. She looked worried. Was her sister with them? This was all they had found.
The thing from the dead man’s pocket was a large bronze cog with a crank handle fixed to it, like the handle of a jack-in-the-box. They shouted back through the rocks: did she know anything about a cog? She did. It operated the lift.
The Lift
Past the crushed cart the tunnel came to a dead end, but the shaft opened upward. This mine did not dig down into the earth. It dug into the mountain and then climbed, following the silver veins up through the rock. Signs were posted all around the shaft, showing yellow hard hats and warnings of danger. A beam ran up one side of the shaft as a track, and about thirty feet overhead a round wooden platform hung off-centre. The earthquake had knocked it off its track, and it was wedged across the shaft above their heads. A rope dangled from a pulley on either side of it.
Tar went up the wall like a spider, with a light fixed to his boot so he could see, while the others waited below. With some effort he tried to work the platform loose, but it was clear he would need help to bring it back into line. He tied off a rope and threw it down so the others could haul on it from below while he pushed from above.
He got his side righted. Then the platform slipped. It swung down, knocked him off the wall, and slammed into the ground in a cloud of dust, pinning Tar and one of his companions beneath it with a load of rock on top. When the dust settled, Tar’s legs were trapped and he could not pull free. Together they braced and heaved, grunting and groaning, until they had lifted the platform far enough for him to wriggle out from under it.
The moment it came free, the platform settled back onto its track. A small lever clicked into place and the gate popped open, and on the back beam they found an empty housing where a set of gears belonged. The cog fitted it exactly. They rested for a while to recover, mending whatever had been broken, though the heat was starting to get to them. Then they cleared the rubble off the platform, fitted the cog, and began to crank.
The platform rose slowly. Looking up, they could see several side shafts opening off the main one, all of them caved in, except one about sixty feet up. They stopped at the first collapse on the way, and Cain looked it over. Any dwarf could have read it. Something had undermined this spot. Something had dug underneath it and brought the rock down. It was not a sinkhole. Something had been burrowing beneath them.
They cranked on. Like an animal sensing an earthquake before it comes, they felt a prickling in their ears, and then the whole shaft began to shake. Stones came tumbling down from above. One of them had taken a miner’s helmet, and was glad of it. Most of them dodged the falling rock, but a big stone clocked Cain on the head, and for a moment he looked dazed. Then the rockfall stopped and the shaft went still again. Nobody believed it was stable.
At the top, where the one open passage led away, a blast of heat hit them in the face, worse than anything yet. The extra water they had brought saw them through it, but they knew that anyone they found alive down here would be so drained they would need a great deal of help to get out. Down the tunnel ahead, instead of darkness, red and yellow light flickered on the walls. There was lava somewhere ahead.
The Burrowers
Before they went on, Cain called on his gift and felt outward through the stone for sixty feet in every direction, alert for any movement. The tunnel opened into a wide chamber with glowing holes in the floor, which were the source of the red light. As they came into it, Cain knew something was coming.
Two creatures burst through the walls on either side. They looked like armadillos, with armour plates down their backs, and they chewed through rock as they came. Both were crazed, and both turned on the party at once. Cain had felt them coming in time, and none of the four was caught off guard.
Blackadder struck first, driving a sliver of psychic force into one beast’s mind. His magic quickened Tar, who went into a reckless rage and ran along the wall past the first creature to reach it, hitting it three times. Joe put an arrow into the other one, a single shot that tore a huge wound in it. That one leapt forty feet through the air, landed in the middle of them, and crashed down on two of them. The first snapped its rock-crushing jaws around Tar’s middle, shook him like a dog, and threw him against the wall.
Cain called down sacred flame, but the beast seemed to feel the heat coming and sidestepped it. A moment later, though, as it gathered itself to pin one of them against the wall, a withering darkness took it. Its flesh melted off its bones, and it fell apart.
The room was shaking. The cracks the burrowers had made began to open into pits, and through them they could see the lava far below. Tar kept slashing at the second beast until blood sprayed across the floor. Joe circled round it and put another arrow in. The creature turned on Tar, caught him in its jaws, flung him against the wall, picked him up again and tried to tear his arm off. He heard his shoulder pop as it started out of its socket.
The chamber shook again, and the cracks became holes. Blackadder’s boots carried him to a corner where he could stay out of the open, and Tar hacked at the creature until it fell. How do you finish it? Tar’s answer was to take its head off with his bare hands. Sinew and bone stretched and snapped, and the body dropped.
As it died, the whole chamber gave way. The floor and the hallway behind them fell thirty feet. Tar’s wings burst out and he caught the air and glided. Blackadder’s magic caught the rest of them as they dropped, and they drifted down to the bottom of the cavern as gently as leaves.
The Caldera
When they had made sure all their parts were still attached, they looked around. They were inside the volcano’s caldera. A huge lake of molten lava lay ahead of them, and on the ground where they had landed lay twenty or thirty dead dwarves. None of them looked like miners. When the party looked more closely, they saw these were not dwarves at all. They were azers, the fire dwarves of the elemental planes.
Down the slope, closer to the lava on the left, stood a huge temple of carved volcanic glass. Statues honouring vast, formless elemental powers lined it. It was a mixture of old construction and new. Many of the old flowing statues had been restored, or built over, in a blunt and blocky dwarven style. Behind them the passage they had fallen through was caved in. A second path led away to the right along the cavern wall.
They went down to the temple first. The heat was getting harder and harder to bear. The temple was open to the air, and the lava pool could be seen from almost anywhere inside it. A great altar stood at the front with a space behind it, and the pillars were carved with dwarven runes and symbols honouring the fire elementals. All of it was newer work built up around the old.
While they were looking around, they heard footsteps somewhere in the temple, behind one of the pews. Someone was hiding there. Tar flew over the seats to look. Crouched behind a pew was an azer, leaning on a broken spear and badly wounded from battle. He raised one hand in what they took to be a gesture of peace and spoke in a language none of them knew. Cain put on his helm of comprehending languages, and the words came clear: Peace. I mean you no harm.
They came to help him, but he waved them off. Thank you, but we have no time. Other surfacers had come. They took them. And my friends. He could not understand a word they said back, so he simply beckoned. Hobbling on his broken spear, he led them back past the bodies and down the path to the right.
The Chain Gang
He crouched behind a rock and pointed. A peninsula of stone ran out into the lava. At the end of it were several serpentine creatures with the long bodies of snakes and the arms of men, carrying tridents. Around them sat the miners, half conscious and spent from the heat, all chained together along the edge. Among them was a blue-skinned tiefling in a safety helmet: Char. Two chained azers sat with them.
As they watched, one of the snake-men drove its trident into a miner’s stomach and hurled him into the lava. When he struck it and screamed, the whole cavern shook. Across the lake, more fingers of stone jutted into the lava, and on them more of the creatures were cheering.
They were salamanders, and they were the ones killing the miners. Every death in the lava set the mountain shaking.
Joe loosed the first arrow and hit the nearest salamander hard. Two of the creatures came at them across the rock, raised their tridents and threw. One struck Tar, piercing and burning him, and the trident leapt back into the salamander’s hand for a second throw that went wild. The other salamander threw at Cain, and both throws hit. Cain fell before he could raise his hand, and lay still.
Back on the peninsula, another salamander stabbed a second miner and hurled him into the pit. The cavern shook again.
Blackadder cast a darkness over the far end of the rock, black and total, so that the salamanders had no idea where anyone was. Then he knelt by Cain and forced a healing potion down his throat. Cain had a brief glimpse of his god, and then he was back. He got to his feet and called up his guardians. The spirits of Pelor were smiling suns, and they wheeled around him and scorched any enemy that came close. He drank a potion of his own for good measure.
Tar raged and cut into the nearest salamander. Joe’s next arrow struck it in the side, and where its blood spattered the ground it burst into flame for a few seconds before it burned out. The creature dropped flat and slithered forward, but Tar caught it with his sword as it passed and took its head off before it could reach Cain.
The next salamander dropped onto its belly too and tried to wrap Tar in its coils like a boa constrictor. It was an epic struggle. For a while the two of them were simply choking each other, until at last Tar tore it off him and threw it to the ground. It reared back up and stabbed him with its trident.
In the dark on the peninsula, a scream of frustration rang out. The salamander there was trying to throw another miner into the lava and could not find one. No miner went tumbling over the edge, and nobody heard a splash. Blackadder had beaten the executioners with nothing but darkness.
Blackadder’s boots carried him through the fight towards the prisoners, and on the way he shouted in Infernal, which Char would understand: Your sister sent us to rescue you. A voice came back from the darkness in the same tongue. Oh, thank the gods! Get us out of here! Could she fight? he called. She could not. She had no weapon. She was a miner, not a soldier.
Cain stood his ground and kept his suns turning, dodging every blow that came his way, and threw a quick word of healing to Tar. Tar swung at the salamander in front of him and spat acid over it. The salamander tried to crush him in its coils again, and again he forced it off and threw it into the light, and it stabbed him again. These creatures burned to be near. Simply standing beside them at the end of a breath was enough to scorch, and Tar was taking the worst of it. He gulped down a healing potion and kept swinging. Then Cain gathered all the strength he had and poured out healing over everyone around him: the party, and the two chained azers as well.
Blackadder reached the azers, who held up their chains to him. The chains were locked, and there was no key. He told them he would free them as soon as he could.
The last salamander was covered in Joe’s arrows, blood dripping down its scales, and it was very badly hurt. It turned on the healer and tried to crush Cain in its coils. Cain slammed his shield into its head. It struck at him with its trident and missed. Then the smiling suns flashed around it and blasted through its body until it was full of holes, and it fell.
For a moment it lay there hissing, and the hiss sounded almost like laughter. In its hand was a bloody medallion. It crushed it to its chest and cried out, Tharizdun! Its whole body burst into flame and left nothing but ash-covered bones.
The Cataclysm
On the other outcroppings, the salamanders were still cheering and shaking their spears. For a moment nothing happened. Then a bubble began to swell out in the lava. As it grew, it took on features: eyes, then a mouth, a maw dripping lava. Something vast heaved itself up out of the molten heart of the caldera. A huge hand slapped down on the near side of the peninsula as it dragged itself up. Chains hung off its body. Many were broken, but some still held, and it raged against them.
It screamed, and the whole cavern shook. Lava flew everywhere as it burst up out of the lake, and all four of them were scorched.
Blackadder went straight to the prisoners, spoke a word over the manacles, and every one sprang open: snap, snap, snap. He could not speak to the azers, so he pointed at the miners. The two fire dwarves nodded enthusiastically, each pulled two exhausted miners to their feet, and they ran for the tunnel. Tar and Joe took the rest.
The wounded azer who had led them there was named Forge. He was still limping on his broken spear, and he spoke to Cain, the one wearing the helm. Any of you who can channel magic, follow me. We have a chance to send this demon back to the hell it spawned from. He grabbed Cain and Blackadder and ran for the temple. Blackadder’s boots could have carried him there twice as fast, but he had to wait for Forge to show him the way.
Behind them the elemental cataclysm screamed again. A whirlwind formed above the lava and blasted a wave of heat through the cavern. It was beyond anything a body could stand. Two of them came through it wrung out and stumbling, and Cain was one of them. He was flagging, bringing up the rear as they ran.
Blackadder and Forge reached the altar. The others, with the miners, reached the exit tunnel and found it blocked. Stones had collapsed across it. Miners need to get to work, someone said, and Tar, who was strong enough, started hurling rocks out of the way. Joe dug beside him.
Then the cataclysm’s attention wandered. It turned towards the salamanders cheering on their outcroppings, plunged both fists into the lava, and sent waves of it surging up over the stone fingers, dragging every salamander in the chamber down into the lake. As it consumed them the lava rose, and the thing grew bigger.
At the altar Forge seized their hands and made them close a circle. As they clasped hands it felt as if liquid fire were pouring from one to the next, up their arms and through their bodies. Forge began to chant in Ignan. Their eyes became burning coals, and when Blackadder looked across at Cain, he saw Cain’s eyes on fire too. The pain was immense, and they channelled through it. Below the cataclysm, runes began to appear on the surface of the lava.
The Way Out
At the blocked exit, Char came to help. Then the two azers set down their miners and began throwing rocks too, and between them they cleared most of the way. It was enough to get the miners through. Everyone could feel what was at stake now. If that thing got out, the whole volcano would explode, and the town would go with it.
They started passing miners out through the gap. Char only nodded to them, thank you, good luck, and set off down the tunnel with the rest of the miners. They were all hobbling, but even here it was far cooler than back in the caldera.
The cataclysm pulled itself higher out of the lava, swollen with what it had eaten. It strained against one of its remaining chains, and the chain snapped. The ground heaved so violently that it knocked people off their feet. Someone in the circle stumbled and nearly lost hold, and held on.
When Blackadder and Cain looked at each other again, their hair was gone. In its place flames were burning on top of their skulls. Forge chanted and chanted. A fracture appeared in the lava beneath the elemental, a crack in reality itself. The thing was still raging.
Then reality tore open, and a vortex of lava spun open beneath it. The elemental cataclysm reached out a claw and grabbed the side of the peninsula as its whole body began to be dragged down into the Realm of Fire. It spun, lost its grip, and was sucked into the portal. The portal slammed shut as Forge broke the circle. The cataclysm had been banished back to the Realm of Fire.
Where’s my beard? said Cain.
The Official Story
The way back to the surface was quick. When they came out into the gorge, Char and Ashton ran to each other and held on in a long hug.
Blackadder spoke to Ashton in Infernal, so that the only people who understood him were the two sisters. Just like we agreed, Ashton. We’ve returned your sister, just as you hired us to do.
She smiled and went along with it. I’m sorry I mistrusted you. It was wrong of me. Thank you.
That was the official story now, and Blackadder told her to run with it. I want this to encourage others to work for you. Use it.
I will.
They rode back to town on the pack mules, with the rescued miners laid across the mules’ backs. Governor Vane thanked them for their efforts and offered each of them the reward they so richly deserved: gold, or a lesser purse and a magic item. Forge the azer had a gift for them too, a necklace of fire beads, each of which would burst into a ball of flame when thrown. In a volcano, they agreed, it was best saved for another time.