Date: September 13, 2026
Attendance: Hank, Bobby, Zorbin, Zarek
Four adventurers answered the governor’s summons to Neefox, a port of brightly painted houses stacked up a sea cliff beneath a smoking volcano. The harbour told its own story. Every ship rode high and empty, the smelters by the water were cold, and the dockside taverns were full at midday. A gnome clerk named Bernard was waiting on the dock with a ledger of drawings of them, each with one feature badly wrong. Bobby’s had a tiny human nose. He led them up the switchbacks to the governor’s mansion.
In the waiting room a red tiefling in a mining helmet stormed out of the office past them, and Bobby quietly nicked her tail. Governor Korvath Vane, an orc in a frilled suit, explained that she was Ashton, his best foreman. The silver mine at Tilva’s Furnace had stopped after an accident. A rescue crew had gone in three days ago and not come out. He offered each of them 450 gold to get the mine reopened. Rescuing miners was a nice extra, and cultists were definitely not involved. Zarek wrote that down. Hank read the governor and couldn’t call it a lie, but the man was plainly slippery.
Bobby pulled Bernard aside and asked, in Gnomish and purely hypothetically, what the rumours about cultists would be if there were any. He whispered: check the notices outside the tavern. The posts were covered in missing-person notices, and not only for miners. Fishermen and farmers had gone missing too. Hidden in the pictures was a rune of a spiral around a central eye. Zarek knew it as the sign of the Cult of the Elemental Eye.
On the mule trail up the volcano, Ashton softened. Her sister Char, the head excavator, had led the rescue crew and was still inside. She came out blue. My mother always said she was the dramatic one and I was the angry one. The party promised the miners came before the ore.
The mine mouth had caved in. Zorbin found the spiral eye scratched into an overturned cart. In the first chamber lay three dead miners: one killed by a falling rock, one badly burned, one suffocated. Bobby took their keepsakes for their families. A brass cog with a crank fell from the red-helmeted foreman’s pocket. Bobby and Zorbin heaved a jammed lift back onto its track, the cog fitted the gap in its gears, and Bobby and Zarek put on the dead men’s helmets. That paid off when a tremor rained rock on the rising lift.
In a chamber split by lava vents, two crazed bulettes burst from the walls. Broken trident tips were lodged in their armour plates. One mauled Bobby badly. Hank’s arrows brought one down. Bobby battered the other with her hammers, and Zorbin, who had been walking on the walls and ceiling, finished it. Then the floor gave way and dropped them all into the volcano’s magma chamber.
Beside a glass-and-basalt temple lay some twenty dead Azer, fire dwarves, killed by tridents. Zarek raised a small magical shelter so they could rest, and when they came out the magma had crept up the shore. They followed drag marks and found a wounded Azer, Forge, who drew them pictures: a snake carrying a miner’s helmet, then a little figure in a pool of lava.
Out on a peninsula in the magma, three salamanders were throwing chained miners into the lake one at a time while dozens more cheered from the rocks. The mountain shook with every death. The party fought them. Zarek slowed all three. Bobby crushed one’s jaw and knocked another into the magma. Zorbin broke out of a salamander’s coils, stunned another, leapt thirty feet into the air with it and slammed it down, and Zarek shattered it with a bolt of cold. Bobby began freeing the captives.
The dying salamander pressed an amulet to its chest, cried “Tharizdun!”, and burned to ash. A chained giant of fire, the Elemental Cataclysm, rose out of the lake. Zorbin and Bobby carried the exhausted miners out while Char hauled others. Hank and Zarek joined hands with Forge at the temple altar and channelled the Plane of Fire through their own bodies until their hair burned. When an earthquake flung Zarek from the circle, Hank caught him and swung him back in. A whirlpool opened beneath the Cataclysm and dragged it down into the Plane of Fire.
Forge apologised. His people had only meant to restore an old fire temple, not open a door for elemental evil. He gave them a necklace of rubies. Outside, Char and Ashton embraced, and Ashton apologised for doubting them. They returned to the governor to collect their pay.