Date: September 13, 2026
Attendance: Hank, Bobby, Zorbin, Zarek
The Empty Harbour
The summons came from the governor of Neefox: adventurers of all stripes wanted, handsome reward, job to be explained on arrival. Four who answered it met on the ship in. Hank was an elf ranger with a longbow. Bobby was a forest gnome barbarian with a maul and a pair of light hammers. Zarek was a gnome wizard who went nowhere without a notepad and quill. Zorbin was a pale, brooding human monk in very fine robes and no armour. His dyed black hair kept falling into his eyes however often he tossed it back, and he wore dark liner round them. He was, everyone agreed, definitely not a vampire.
The island was all volcano, rocky and thinly grown over, and the city clung to a sheer cliff that dropped into the sea above a small sheltered harbour. Every house was painted a different bright colour. Anyone who knew boats could see at once that something was wrong. The ships at the docks rode high in the water. They were empty, in a trading port. The smelters along the waterfront stood silent among heaps of charcoal and waste ore, and the dockside taverns were full at midday. Outside them stood posts covered in notices.
In the middle of the road sat a gnome with a clipboard, a twisted grey beard and enormous spectacles, searching the crowd for someone. Looking over his shoulder, the party found it was them. His ledger held their names, a note reading please guide to Governor’s Mansion, and a little drawing of each of them, every one with a single feature completely wrong. Bobby’s gave her a very small human nose instead of a proper gnome one. Someone cleared their throat. The gnome squinted, pushed his spectacles up and brightened. Oh, you must be the adventurers I’ve been sent to find. Please, please hurry. This was Bernard.
They hardly needed a guide. Every house in Neefox was humble except one great mansion high on the cliff. Bernard led them up the switchbacks anyway, through well-appointed audience halls, to a waiting room outside the governor’s office.
The Governor’s Office
Through the door they heard a very gruff man and a somewhat gruff woman. Only the man’s words carried. You had your chance. Now it’s time for the mercenaries to have theirs.
The door slammed open and a red-skinned tiefling stormed out. She wore construction overalls, soot and coal dust, and a red mining helmet with a pick painted on the front, her horns jammed awkwardly out at the sides. She nearly fell over the party, said ugh!, and made for the door. As she passed, Bobby very quietly nicked her tail. Ow! The tiefling spun round, plainly unable to believe it, and stamped out.
Korvath Vane was an orc, a classic greenskin with huge tusks, in a very fine suit with frills down the chest. Ah, adventurers, please come in, come in. Zorbin hovered at the threshold until he had been properly invited.
Don’t mind her. She’s had a long couple of days. She’s one of my best foremen at the mine, which is exactly why I’ve called you here. The silver hadn’t run dry, but an accident had stopped the flow of ore. Ashton, the foreman, had sent a rescue crew in three days ago, and nothing had been heard of them since. He didn’t want to send in more miners to be lost. It would hurt the production numbers once all this blew over.
So we’re expendable, said Bobby. Do we get red shirts? The governor preferred independent contractors. Bobby pointed out that she was already wearing a red shirt. Zorbin noted that the two gnomes were usefully compact, and the governor agreed: good for cracks and crevices. The pirates were breathing down his neck. The silver must flow.
What should they expect to find? Well, definitely not cultists. A natural event had caused a cave-in, and any talk of cultists was invented by miners who didn’t want to work. Hank watched him say it. He couldn’t call it a lie, but the orc was slimy. Then again, nobody gets into a governor’s mansion without being a little slimy. Zarek was writing it all down. Not cultists. Definitely not cultists.
They asked after the governor’s daughter, whom they had once rescued from cultists on the other side of the island. She was fine, he said, though she had kept to her room for a while.
Bobby wanted it clear whether the job was the mine or the crew. Listen, the more miners we have, the less we have to train. It would help the margins. But the mine was the main goal. Zarek underlined mine more important. The governor opened a coffer on his desk. Never work for free. If you’re good at something, never do it for free. Each of them would have 450 gold once the mine was open. Zorbin observed that his robes didn’t buy themselves.
Hypothetically Speaking
Outside, before they joined Ashton, Bobby drew Bernard aside and spoke to him in Gnomish. He was a forest gnome too. What had happened to the crew? He wasn’t usually at the mine, he said, but he’d heard there had been an accident, perhaps a cave-in. Ashton’s sister was the head excavator. She had gone in with the rescue crew, and Ashton hadn’t seen her since. Somewhere between ten and fifteen were missing; he didn’t know exactly. And the rumours about cultists?
There are no cultists in Neefox.
Bobby wasn’t asking whether there were cultists. She was asking what the rumours were. Oh. Purely hypothetically speaking, you mean? Hypothetically. Bernard leaned in and whispered. Check the notices in front of the tavern.
Ashton was waiting with the transport, impatient to be off. Bobby told her she needed to wet her whistle first and led the party down to the docks.
The posts outside the taverns were covered in missing-person notices, dozens of them, each with a picture. Hidden among the notices and drawings, the party found runes: a spiral swirling around a central eye. They had seen that sign before, in the business with the governor’s daughter. Zarek knew it for the mark of the Cult of the Elemental Eye. Bobby was untroubled. They had beaten the cult once and would do it again. But not all the missing were miners. Some were fishermen, and some came from the small farms inland.
Zorbin ordered a cup to go of the reddest, driest wine in the house. The barkeep set down a mug of ale instead. There was no wine, and the ale was going fast, because every idle smelter, dock hand and miner in town was drinking in his taproom. All I got’s ale, man. I serve dock workers and smelters and miners.
The Road to Tilva’s Furnace
Their transport was a mule train. Ashton had put riding saddles on a few for the party and loaded the rest with water and medical supplies. The mine, she warned them, lay at Tilva’s Furnace on the flank of the volcano, and its tunnels ran into the mountain itself. Inside it was so hot that miners worked shifts of no more than an hour.
The trail climbed the mountainside in switchbacks, and the cantankerous mules took it with surprising grace. On the long climb Ashton opened up. Look, I know the governor told you to get the mine open. But my sister is stuck in there. If you can rescue her and her miners, I’d really appreciate it. I know I was an ass to you before. I don’t trust adventurers. You come in, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and leave your problems for the common folk. But you’re my only hope.
Bobby told her the miners mattered far more than the ore. Her sister was called Char. She looks a lot like me, except for some reason she came out blue. My mother always used to say she was the dramatic one and I was the angry one. Bobby understood angry very well. Zarek admitted he had underlined the governor’s priorities knowing they weren’t true. The governor meant well, Ashton said. But the pirates demanded tribute, and if the island couldn’t pay, violence was their only currency.
After about an hour they reached the island’s interior and the ruin of the mining camp. Lean-tos had collapsed and ore carts lay on their sides among heaps of slag and unprocessed silver. Rocks had fallen across the rails, and the mine entrance had caved in, leaving only a narrow gap at the top.
Zarek wrapped himself in a protective ward that would last the day. Zorbin circled the camp. Everything was damaged as if by a small local earthquake, and scratched into the side of one cart was another spiral eye. Definitely no cultists here, said Zorbin. It’s never not cultists, said Zarek.
Zarek searched the slope for another way in and found only a cluster of ventilation pipes twenty yards up the cliff, too narrow even for a gnome. A bat might manage. Zorbin climbed above the entrance to work at the rockfall from on top, and after twenty minutes of hauling stone the gap was wide enough to walk through stooping. Ashton stayed outside and set up a triage station, ready for whatever survivors they brought out.
Three in the Dark
A blast of hot air met them in the tunnel, and after the first bend it was pitch black. Zarek lit a lantern. Zorbin walked along the ceiling. Twenty minutes of twisting track brought them to a wider chamber, where an ore cart lay crushed under a boulder and three men lay dead on the floor. Two wore yellow helmets and one wore red. One was half buried under a heap of earth.
Bobby looked for anything that might say who they were, so she could take it home to their families. One wore a silver medallion. An ornate lamp lay beside another. The one they dug out of the earth had a candle glued to his helmet and graffiti scrawled all over it: badass, born to smash rocks. Bobby also worked out how they had died. One helmet had a great dent in it, and when it came off, part of the skull came with it. A falling rock had killed him. The second man was very badly burned, which was strange. The third had no wound at all. He had suffocated.
From the big front pocket of the red-helmeted man’s overalls fell a bronze cog the size of a plate, with a crank fitted to it. Bobby guessed at once that he had pulled it to shut something down so nobody else could follow him in. Zarek kept the cog.
They laid the three men side by side, more decently than they had been lying, and Zarek set a small glowing skull on each body. If bodies had been going missing, they would know these three again. In his notebook he wrote: 3 bodies.
The Lift
The tunnel grew hotter until it opened into a round shaft thirty feet across. It ran up into the mountain rather than down. Thirty feet overhead a lift platform hung at a crooked angle, knocked off the beam it ran on and wedged in the rock, with a rope hanging from a pulley on each side.
Zarek tried pushing it with a spectral hand, but the hand had only a few pounds of force. Bobby studied the rig with a carpenter’s eye and judged that two people, one on each rope, could haul it back onto its track. She shouted for the monk. Bobby and Zorbin took a rope each and heaved, Bobby with everything she had. With a crack and a shower of dust, the platform jumped back onto its track and slid down to the floor. Zarek maintained that his spectral hand had helped.
The lift was painted with safety signs: helmets, and dwarves with crosses for eyes and rocks bouncing off their heads. Zarek pointed out that helmets hadn’t done the dead men much good. Bobby wanted some anyway, so they went back for the dead men’s helmets. Two were still usable. Bobby wore one, and Zarek wore the other, which sat on him like a child wearing his father’s fire helmet. Zorbin declined. He dodged better than any of them.
At the foot of the beam was a train of gears with an obvious gap. The cog clanked neatly into place, and Bobby took the crank. Everyone rode up except Zorbin, who did not do lifts and walked up the wall beside them. Most of the side tunnels branching off the shaft had collapsed, but one about sixty feet up was clear.
Halfway up, the two gnomes felt a sudden animal certainty that something bad was coming. A moment later the shaft began to shake and debris rained down on the lift. The helmets earned their keep. Zarek, though, did what every new miner does and looked up when he should have ducked his head, and a rock hit him in the face. The shaking stopped on its own. At the open side passage they locked the lift in place, and Bobby took the crank with them. Safety first.
The Breaking Floor
This passage was not dark. A shimmering red and orange light came from its far end, along with air hotter still. They had all drunk plenty before going in, but the sweat was pouring off them.
The tunnel opened into a wide chamber lit from below. Holes in the floor glowed with lava far beneath, and the stone between them was cracked. As they entered, the ground shook, and two creatures burst out of the walls. They looked like a cross between a rhinoceros and an armadillo, with segmented armour plates down their backs and thick, badger-like claws that chewed through rock. Hank had met bulettes before, one with its young, not long ago. These were not angry so much as crazed, driven by something. They pawed the ground and charged.
Hank knew he could not calm them. With real regret he marked the nearest as his quarry and loosed. His arrows slid between its plates, and as it screamed he saw what was already lodged there: the snapped-off tips of tridents. Somebody’s going to pay for this.
Bobby charged the other beast, and her maul glanced off its plates, leaving it only dazed. Zorbin ran from the ceiling onto the wall until he was above the first bulette, dropped onto it with a barrage of blows, and tried to get an arm round its neck. It flung him off. He landed easily, struck again, and left it sick with poison, then settled back onto the wall. When it snapped at him it was too sluggish to catch him.
The other bulette looked down at the little gnome in front of it and licked its lips. It bit Bobby twice, savage bites that should have finished her. Her rage carried her through them, but they left her badly torn. Zarek ran within range and sprayed poison at it, and it mostly shrugged that off.
The chamber shook again and the cracks became pits, opening under Hank, Bobby and Zarek. Through them they could see a twenty-foot drop to stone beside a lake of lava. Hank kept shooting. Bobby struck her bulette on one side of the jaw and then the other, and it toppled over. Zorbin’s beast tried to smash him against the wall and caught him once, but he turned the blow aside. Bobby’s bulette heaved itself up and clawed her. Zarek sent a volley of glowing missiles into its flank, then moved off his crack to the wall.
Bobby wanted to get out while there was still an exit. Then they realised the only ways out were back the way they had come or down through the holes, and that these things could dig anyway.
Hank shot twice more. His bulette slowed, staggered and fell dead. Bobby hurled her light hammers at the other one. They smashed into its skull and flew back to her hand, again and again, until it spat out teeth. Zorbin finished it. He found a pressure point where the hammers had knocked its plates askew, and with one precise strike the bulette lay down and died with a thud.
As it died, the whole floor collapsed. They all fell, Zarek worst, into another chamber beside a lake of lava.
The Temple in the Caldera
They picked themselves up inside the volcano’s caldera, a vast magma chamber hotter than anything yet, where the lake bubbled and boiled violently. Beyond it stood a huge temple carved from volcanic glass and basalt, decorated with fire elementals or wispy beings of flame. The carvings came in two distinct styles. One was ancient, graceful and artful. The other was blunt and brutal, very dwarven. Someone had been restoring an old shrine.
Around them lay about twenty bodies in armour of burnished bronze. These were neither miners nor villagers. Zarek brushed the dust off himself with a flick of minor magic and went to look. They were not dwarves either. They were Azer, the fire dwarves of the Elemental Plane: brownish skin, and red, orange or yellow hair where they had any. In death their fire had gone out. Most had died of piercing wounds made, very obviously, by tridents. Hank could not read the fight from the ground, but Bobby found wide drag marks through the ash, as if something long had hauled its whole body through it.
The heat was getting to them, Zarek worst of all. The little gnome was soaked in sweat and flagging, and from then on everything was harder for him.
Before going on, Zarek spent ten minutes on a ritual and raised a small dome of shelter in an out-of-the-way corner. Inside it looked like a treehouse, with a treetop’s leaves for a roof, and the heat fell away. They could still feel the cavern shaking. Zorbin used his own inner energy to heal his companions, Bobby most of all after the bulette’s jaws, until she was nearly whole again. Zarek studied his spellbook and changed the spells he had ready. But rest does not cure heat sickness, and what the heat had taken from Zarek stayed taken. When they stepped out of the hut, the shore was a good deal closer than before. The magma had risen while they rested.
Forge
They followed the drag marks away from the temple, down a side path and into a tunnel curving round the far side of the lake. Something they took for a rock turned out to be an Azer, covered in blood and leaning on half a broken trident as a crutch. He came towards them with one empty hand raised in what looked like peace.
He spoke in a crackling, guttural tongue none of them knew, Ignan, the language of fire. They tried sign language, Abyssal and the tongue of dragons, with no luck. Zarek began a ten-minute ritual that would let him understand any language. The Azer was in a hurry, and while Zarek worked he drew in the ash with his broken trident. First a mining helmet. Then something like a snake. Then the snake carrying the helmet away, an arrow pointing back down the tunnel, and a little pool of lava with a little figure in it.
Bobby watched him and saw no sign of a trick. Nobody would go to that much trouble for one. One of the party drew back a stick figure with two big horns: a tiefling. The Azer circled it and drew an arrow down the tunnel. She was there.
Then Zarek’s ritual took hold, and the crackling became words. Peace. I mean you no harm. Hurry. We must stop the ritual. The entire surface world is in danger. They bound his wounds as well as they could. His blood seemed to flare a little where it met the air, and the heat did not trouble him at all. He hobbled off down the tunnel, with Zarek translating everything he said.
The Peninsula
The tunnel came out on the far side of the lake, where a peninsula of rock ran out into the magma and fingers of stone jutted from the shore. On the peninsula stood serpentine creatures with fire running along their scales, holding spears and tridents: salamanders. In front of them, in a line along the north edge of the rock, stood the missing miners, chained together. Char was among them, a tiefling just like her sister except blue. So were two Azer.
As the party came round the corner, the salamander at the back drove its trident into one of the miners. It closed its bare fist on the chain, the link turned molten and broke, and it threw the man over the edge. He screamed as he fell. When he struck the magma the whole mountain shook and the lake rose a little, as if it had swallowed something it wanted. On the stone fingers all round the lake, perhaps fifty more salamanders raised their spears and cheered.
Hank shot first. His arrow hit the executioner in the eye. It screeched, and its fiery blood burst into flame as it met the air. It batted his second arrow aside with its trident. What Hank learned of it he shared: fire could not touch these things, cold would hurt them badly, and nobody should linger beside one, because of the heat pouring off them.
Bobby went into a rage and waded into the nearest salamander, hammering it again and again. Zorbin struck another with a poisoning blow and shoved it back. Then Zarek cast a spell over all three at once. All three fell under it, and their movements thickened as if they were wading through mud.
It did not stop the executioner. It stabbed another miner, ripped the chain apart in its molten fist, pinched the broken link flat so the rest would not fall loose, and flung him into the lake. The cavern shook, and the magma crept higher.
Hank’s arrows bit deep into the one at the back. One salamander lunged at Bobby and missed. Another dropped low and slithered up Zorbin’s body like a boa constrictor, crushing and burning him at once while the heat of the others scorched him further. From the back of the fight Hank sent a word of healing to him. It was all he could do from there. Two of the three salamanders shook off Zarek’s spell.
Bobby slipped away from her foe and turned on the biggest of them. Her second blow crushed its jaw, and it went down bleeding heavily. Then she went to the chained miners and began pulling the chain out of their manacles. They were utterly spent and would need help to get out at all.
Zorbin, still in the coils, beat at the salamander with his fists and with a strike that rotted flesh, then shoved hard. The creature uncurled from him like a spring and landed coiled on the stone. He followed it in, struck again, turned some of his energy on his own burns, and moved to put himself between the salamanders and the miners. Zarek wondered about holding the creature in place, but a spell for holding people would not hold something that was not one. His bolt of cold went wide.
One salamander hurled its spear at Zorbin. It struck him and flew back to the creature’s hand, and it threw again, but Zorbin caught most of the second throw and turned it aside. The other tried to coil around Bobby, and she squirted out of its grip like a greased pig.
Hank put two more arrows into the salamander he had been wearing down all fight, and Bobby’s hammer knocked it clean off the rock into the magma. She moved on to the next, knocked it flat, and stepped away from its reach. It bit and burned her anyway. In hindsight, she thought, she might as well have stood her ground.
Zorbin came for the fallen salamander. He hit it hard, then harder, with a blow that sickened it, then struck a nerve that left it senseless. He seized it while it was helpless and leapt thirty feet straight up into the air with it in his arms. At the top of the leap he let go. The salamander hit the stone, and Zorbin landed lightly on his feet beside it, untouched. Zarek had a clear shot at a broken, senseless target. His bolt of cold struck home, and the salamander’s whole body crystallised and shattered into a thousand glittering pieces.
The Cataclysm
Behind them came a serpentine sound, almost a laugh. The salamander with the crushed jaw was not quite dead. Dragging itself across the stone, it tore an amulet from its neck, slammed it against its bare chest and cried out: “Tharizdun!” Its body burst into flame and its skeleton crumbled to ash. The chamber began to vibrate.
A bubble rose in the magma and kept rising, molten rock streaming off it: eyes, a horn, a mouth of dripping fangs. A giant of elemental fire was hauling itself out of the lake. Forge, the Azer who had led them there, went wide-eyed. We have to go!
Huge manacles carved with dwarven runes bound its wrists, and chains ran from them and from its ankles and neck. Two chains still held. The rest had shattered. It screamed and strained against them, and its fist gouged molten furrows in the edge of the peninsula. Then elemental fire burst out of it and filled the chamber, catching Zarek squarely.
Bobby had already freed the captives. Char was hurt but could get herself out. The other miners could barely walk, and no one could carry more than two. Zorbin, a grappler in boots of striding and springing, took two miners under his arms and ran. Char took the two beside her. Bobby grabbed two more, and Hank ferried others towards the tunnel. Zarek tried to slow the monster as he had slowed the salamanders. It reached into the air, caught his spell somehow, and pulled the magic into its mouth.
The elemental swung its arm in circles, and a whirlwind formed over the lake and blasted across it. The heat wave left them all drained and staggering. Then Forge shouted over the roar. Come, come! We still have a chance to save the surface! I need people who can channel magic! That meant Hank and Zarek. Forge ran with them back along the shore towards the temple while the magma rose behind them and began to swallow the peninsula.
Zorbin went back for more, bounding across the stone with miners in his arms. One man was still left out there, and since the two chained Azer could walk through fire on their own, Zorbin took the man. The Cataclysm wrenched at its chains until another snapped, plunged both fists into the lake and raised a tidal wave of lava. The salamanders were still cheering on their fingers of rock when it broke over them. They burst into flame and were gone, and the elemental swelled to twice its size, as if it had fed on them.
The Circle
At the temple altar Forge held out his hands. Grab my hands! Hank and Zarek did, and the three of them made a circle. At once they felt as if they were on fire. Their eyes lit with small bursts of flame, and they screamed as Forge channelled the Elemental Plane of Fire through their bodies. He began to chant, and out over the lake, dwarven runes appeared in the air around the Cataclysm. The ritual needed them to hold on.
At the far end of the shore, the elemental’s first blast had melted the rock blocking the old tunnel, and it glowed. Char dragged her miners through it, and Zorbin and Bobby hauled theirs after her. They were out.
Then the elemental tore loose its last chain, and the chamber shook so violently that everyone was thrown off their feet. In the circle, Hank’s and Zarek’s hair caught fire, and any beard became pure flame. Zarek broke. He fell out of the circle and began to slide down the slope towards the lava. Hank reached down, caught him, and swung him back up onto the platform, and Zarek took hold of Forge’s hand again. Their hair burst back into flame, and they kept screaming and kept channelling.
The surface of the lake cracked open. The elemental screamed one last time and flung a burst of lava across the chamber that caught them all. But Forge had two people holding the circle with him, and it was enough.
The crack beneath the Elemental Cataclysm widened into a whirlpool, a vortex of lava pouring down into the Plane of Fire. It caught the elemental’s tail and began tearing great pieces of magma off its body. One arm tore away, then the other, and it spun once and went down into the vortex. The vortex snapped shut and threw up a last wave of lava that collapsed back onto the shore.
Forge let go of their hands and dropped where he stood, utterly spent. The fire in Hank’s and Zarek’s hair went out, though their hair stayed faintly red for some time. Zarek was not sure he had any hair left, or eyebrows.
Forge’s Apology
With the Cataclysm banished, the magma began to fall, and the heat eased from unbearable to merely terrible. Forge and Char thanked them, and Forge gave them a necklace of rubies.
Thank you. We will lock this place down and make sure nothing like this can happen again. We’re sorry. We didn’t know this temple was consecrated to elemental evil. We thought it was a place to worship fire elementals, and we wished to restore such an honourable temple. We never meant to make this possible.
At the triage camp outside the mine, Char and Ashton fell into each other’s arms. Ashton turned to the party. Thank you so much. I apologise for how I treated you when we first met. I should have had more faith in you. Thank you for saving her.
Zarek asked them to remind him never to go into a volcano again. Nobody thought he needed reminding.
They rode back down to the governor’s mansion and collected their pay. On a closer look, Forge’s necklace of rubies turned out to be a necklace of fireballs.