Date: September 12, 2026
Attendance: Blackadder, Tar, Joe, Cain
Blackadder, Tar, Joe and Cain were waiting outside Governor Vane’s office when its doors banged open and his head foreman, Ashton, stormed out. She was a red-skinned tiefling in a smock and a red safety helmet, and she was furious that the governor was hiring mercenaries again. The orc governor greeted the four as old employees, apologised once more about his daughter, and insisted there were no missing people. There had merely been an accident at the Silver Moon mine. Miners were trapped, not missing. Silver was the island’s chief export and what kept the pirates away, and Ashton’s own rescue team had not been heard from in three days. He gave them a writ and sent them off with Ashton.
She led them by mule up switchback trails to a wrecked camp in a gorge on the volcano’s flank. She did not trust adventurers, but she begged them to save her twin sister Char, “this, but blue”, who had gone in with the rescue team. She showed them a spiral-and-eye symbol scratched into a mine cart, which people at the camp called graffiti. They knew it as the mark of the Cult of the Elemental Eye. Ashton set up a triage tent while they crawled through the cave-in.
Inside they found three dead from Char’s rescue party under a boulder: a tiefling with black dragon tattoos and two goliaths who had died in each other’s arms. They hauled the bodies out to Ashton. One of the dead had been carrying a bronze cog with a crank handle, the missing part of the mine’s lift. The lift platform was wedged thirty feet up the shaft. Tar climbed the wall to free it, and it slipped, knocked him down and pinned him and a companion beneath it until they heaved it off. With the cog fitted they cranked upward. Cain’s dwarven eye showed that the side-shaft collapses had been caused by something burrowing underneath. A tremor brought stones down on them, and one struck Cain on the head.
At the top, in a chamber full of lava-lit holes, two armour-plated burrowing beasts burst through the walls. The four killed both, and Tar tore the last one’s head off with his hands. Then the floor gave way and dropped them thirty feet into the volcano’s caldera. Blackadder’s magic let them drift down. Around them lay twenty or thirty dead azers, fire dwarves, below a temple of volcanic glass that had been restored in dwarven style. A wounded azer named Forge was hiding behind its pews. Cain understood him through his helm of languages. Surfacers had taken the miners and Forge’s friends.
Forge led them to a stone peninsula in the lava, where salamanders held the miners, Char and two azers in chains. They were stabbing prisoners one at a time and throwing them into the lava, and every death shook the mountain. The salamanders opened by hurling tridents, and Cain fell before he could act. Blackadder covered the prisoners in magical darkness so the executioners could not find another victim. He forced a potion down Cain’s throat, and Cain rose and called up Pelor’s guardians, a ring of smiling suns. Tar wrestled free of a salamander’s coils again and again, and Joe filled the last one with arrows. Blackadder called to Char in Infernal, and she answered, Oh, thank the gods! Get us out of here! The last salamander died in Cain’s suns. It crushed a bloody medallion to its chest, cried Tharizdun!, and burned to bones.
The lava then gave birth to an elemental cataclysm, a vast chained thing of molten rock. Blackadder sprang every manacle with a word, and the freed azers helped the miners towards the exit. Forge took Cain and Blackadder to the temple altar and joined hands with them in a ritual circle. Fire ran through their bodies, their eyes became burning coals, and their hair turned to flame. Tar, Joe, Char and the azers dug the collapsed exit clear and sent the miners out. The cataclysm swallowed every salamander in the cavern and snapped another chain. Then reality tore open beneath it, and it was dragged back into the Realm of Fire.
At the surface the twins were reunited. Blackadder told Ashton in Infernal that they had returned her sister “just as you hired us to do”, and gave her the credit to strengthen her hand. She apologised for mistrusting them. Governor Vane paid them, and Forge gave them a necklace of fire beads.