Date: September 13, 2026
Attendance: Argo, Adam Copperbottom, Brendan
The Quiet Harbour
The summons came from the governor of Neefox, a trading colony in an island chain. It promised gold and treasure and said nothing about the work. Three answered it, and they arrived together on a large sailing ship.
The island was a volcano. It filled the sky behind the town, and the colony climbed a sheer cliff above the harbour, house stacked on house. Every house was built of black basalt, painted its own colour and roofed in red, blue or ochre.
Brendan had sailed before, pirate ships among them, and he saw what was wrong before they tied up. Every merchant vessel at the quay rode high in the water, so none of them were loaded. Neefox traded silver, stone and every kind of rock the island gave up, and its harbour should have been full of cargo. The silver smelters by the docks stood cold at midday beside heaps of charcoal and spent ore. There were no dock workers on the quay. They were all in the taverns, drinking, and the posts outside were thick with notices.
Down the street stood a short gnome with a twisted, curly grey beard and spectacles that stuck a good six inches out from his face. He was squinting at a clipboard and looking around as if he had lost something. Adam Copperbottom, a gnome too, with a shock of blue hair standing straight up as if lightning had just struck him, went over and asked the way to the governor’s estate. The old gnome looked at him, then at a picture on his list, then at him again. Oh, my stars! You must be one of the adventurers the Governor summoned.
Adam Copperbottom. Pleased to meet you.
Bernard, sir. Good to meet another gnome. Not so many of us here these days. The hot weather is not good for our complexion. He pumped Adam’s hand and hobbled off up the road to lead them.
The mansion stood high on the cliff, far larger than the humble houses below, and the road climbed to it in switchback after switchback. Bernard left them in a waiting room outside the governor’s office.
The Governor’s Books
Two voices came through the door, a gruff man’s and a woman’s nearly as gruff. They could only make out the man. Listen, your people had their chance. Now it’s the mercenaries’ turn. You best go set aside the transportation for them, and I’ll deal with you later.
The door slammed open and a tiefling woman marched out. Her skin had a bright red cast, and her horns hooked awkwardly out from under a big red miner’s helmet. Her overalls were black with coal dust. She looked the three of them over as she passed and kept walking.
Welcome to my beautiful mansion, said the man inside. He was an orc, with large, fierce tusks above a fine silk suit and a puffed cravat. Please come into my office. We have much to discuss. Don’t mind Ashton. She’s one of my best foremen, but she’s had a long week.
This was Governor Korvath Vane. He sat them in velvet chairs and poured whiskey into crystal glasses. The island’s silver mine had stopped producing. There had been an accident of some kind, a cave-in maybe. He wasn’t privy to those things. He kept the books, traded the silver and collected the taxes. Ashton had sent in a rescue team, and nobody had heard from them in three or four days. He did not want to throw more miners into the fire, as they say. Once the mine reopened he would only have to train new ones, and that hurt the bottom line. So he had hired the three of them.
Brendan said it seemed curious that a cave-in should call for adventurers.
I don’t know what you’ve heard, said the governor, but there are definitely no cultists on Neefox Island.
Nobody had mentioned cultists. Argo was certain he was lying. Brendan pressed him: he had dealt with a number of cults on his travels, and if there were any here, now would be a good time to say so.
There are no cultists on Neefox Island. Anyone who spreads such rumours is just a miner looking to get out of work. Miners just don’t want to work these days. You know how peasants are. They want all the benefits of being employed but not to earn it from the sweat of their brow.
Brendan came from a noble house, and that was too much for him. I was always taught in my household that nobility is servants of the people, not the other way around.
It’s not that I don’t care for my people. It’s that I have a much bigger view of things. The silver they mined, Vane explained, paid off the pirates who roamed these seas. Without their share, the pirates would start attacking the town.
You’re just trying to protect everyone, said Argo. Vane nodded at her. She gets it.
Protect everyone, said Brendan, except for the people you’re sending into caves.
That’s why I hired you.
Argo had begun to drift around the office, and her eye fell on a silver letter opener on the desk. Adam gave her the distraction she needed. As a man of the book myself, would you mind if I took a look over your accounts? Make sure the pirates aren’t overtaxing you? Flattered, the governor handed them over. Adam worked the sums on his own pad, looking for skimming, and found none. Vane was a snob, but his books balanced. About a fifth of the mine’s output went to a list of pirate captains, and every payment was itemised and labelled as a bribe. While the governor watched the gnome, Argo slipped the letter opener into her trouser pocket.
Vane soon announced that he had missives to open. He looked down at his desk. Where’s my letter opener? He peered underneath it. I swear I had that five minutes ago. He gave up. When they had found out what had happened in the mine, they should come back to him for their reward: 450 gold apiece. Ashton would take them up, and their fabulous transportation was waiting outside.
The Mule Train
The fabulous transportation was a string of mules. Most were loaded with medical supplies and spare water, and a few had riding saddles. Well, if we’re going to do this, said Ashton, we may as well do it. Hop on.
I must be honest with you, ma’am, said Adam. I have never ridden one of these beasts of burden before, and they kind of scare me.
She laughed. Adventurers scared of a little mule?
That thing is four times my size and approximately eight times my weight. If it accidentally stepped wrong, it would squish me.
She softened, as if he were a child, promised him the mules were perfectly safe, and reached to lift him into the saddle. Brendan asked for ten minutes first. The mine was a couple of hours away on the flank of the volcano, and he worked a slow ritual that called up a flat, round disc of force to follow him. His magic ran to ice, and the disc was so cold it steamed in the humid air. Adam hopped onto it, spread his bedroll, and rode up the mountain in comfort.
The trail went up the volcano in steep, rough switchbacks, and the mules, which had carried silver up and down it thousands of times, never slipped. Partway up, Ashton dropped back beside them. I apologise for how I was before. My sister was part of the rescue crew, and she’s been missing for three days. She’s the best excavator we have. If she’s lost in there, something bad has happened.
Brendan mentioned how insistent the governor had been that there were no cults. Ashton hesitated. I don’t like to talk about it, but people have been disappearing. Not just miners. Beyond that she knew only stories of mysterious forces at work.
Argo studied her and saw nothing false, only someone frightened and fed up with the governor. I’m sorry about your sister. If she’s there, we’ll do everything we can to find her.
Thank you. That means a lot. She had no potions, only bandages and water, but she would set up a triage station outside the camp for any survivors they brought out. Argo asked whether the governor had helped. In his own way. She had begged him to send a second crew after her sister, and he had refused. I have a natural distrust of you folk. Adventurers tend to swarm in, take everything not nailed down, and leave the common folk with troubles of their own. But if you’re really here to help, I’ll appreciate it.
Brendan told her he had come to make a name for himself, and not by leaving a place worse than he found it. She nodded slowly. I’m not used to meeting people of your stature with such honourable morals.
Into the Mine
The camp on the volcano’s flank had been shaken to pieces. Shelters had collapsed, ore carts lay on their sides, and debris buried the rails. The mine entrance had mostly caved in, leaving one gap in the rubble that someone could squirm through on hands and knees. A dry, furnace-hot wind blew out of it. Ashton told them pipes vented fresh air into the tunnels, and Argo took a pickaxe from the many lying about and a roll of herb-soaked bandages from Ashton.
Brendan called up a cool mist to hang around him. Adam took off his heavy robe and wove magical armour around himself instead. Brendan made his silver dagger glow with a pale blue light like moonlight and carried it as a torch. Argo, an elf, could see in the dark without it.
The crawl took a quarter of an hour. Their backs scraped the roof the whole way, and they came out into the main tunnel coated in rock dust. As they followed the cart rails, the light passed over the wall and Argo saw a carving: a spiral with an almond shape at its centre, like an eye. Brendan knew it at once from cults he had faced before. It was the mark of the Cult of the Elemental Eye, also called Elemental Evil, who worship mad elemental powers that want to break into the world and devour it. They were inside a volcano, so earth or fire seemed the likely element. Brendan tested the carving for magic and found none. Someone had scratched it into the stone with a dagger or a spear tip to mark territory.
Three Bodies and a Cog
Argo scouted ahead in the dark while the others followed at a distance with the light. A few stones skittered from her boots, but she was mostly silent. The tunnel widened into a chamber. One side had fallen in, and a pair of legs stuck out of the dirt. Two more bodies lay in the middle of the floor. One was a red-bearded dwarf in a red helmet with a pickaxe on it, very like Ashton’s. The other was a human in a yellow helmet. Neither was breathing.
She found nothing alive, so she looked at how they had died. The human’s helmet was dented deep, and so was his skull beneath it: a rock from the ceiling. The dwarf was burned all over. When she dragged the third body out of the dirt, it was an elf without a mark on him, and she guessed he had suffocated. Dust sifted from the roof as small tremors shook the mountain. In the bib of the dwarf’s overalls she found a large bronze cog with a crank handle on one side. She took it back to the others. Brendan judged it part of a working machine, greasy and worn with use, and told her to keep it.
Adam put the burns together with the cult’s mark and wondered whether a fire elemental was already down here. Brendan thought earth was still possible, but the burns leaned toward fire. Before they went on he drew a little borrowed life into himself as a buffer against harm. Argo put on one of the dead miners’ helmets, and Brendan took the spare. He had his own iron protection, he said, but saw no harm in a helmet too.
The Lift
Argo went ahead again, quieter this time. The tunnel narrowed and ended in a round chamber like the bottom of a well. Picture signs were posted round its walls. One showed a dwarf in a helmet with a rock bouncing off his head. The next showed a dwarf without one, a rock, and crosses for eyes. A broad wooden beam ran up one wall with a toothed track set into it. About thirty feet above her, a wooden platform filled the shaft. It had jumped its track and jammed, and two ropes hung from it over pulleys down to the floor.
She called the others with the agreed bird call, which was Nevermore! She checked the lift carefully for traps and found none. It was simply broken, which was not the same thing as safe.
Brendan suggested pulling both ropes at once to work the platform back onto its track. His pull was perfect. Argo’s rope slipped through her hands. The platform lurched onto the track and then dropped straight down the shaft. It landed on both of them and pinned them: Argo with her legs trapped, yelling, and Brendan with only his legs sticking out, roaring.
Adam ran for Argo’s pack. The gear! Where’s the gear? There was a socket on the platform plainly made for the cog, and he slammed it in with a thunk. The pulleys did the work that gnomish arms could not, and he cranked the platform slowly off his friends. They both groaned when he stepped onto it to do it. I don’t weigh that much!
They had both taken a terrible battering, so they rested at the foot of the shaft. Adam pored over his spellbook and traded the fire he had prepared for something more useful against creatures of flame. Most of the side tunnels off the shaft had caved in, but one about sixty feet up was open. Adam worked the crank. Brendan stood at the front, cloak blowing back.
Halfway up, the shaft began to shake and rocks came pouring down. Brendan used his magic to push the falling earth aside so it fell past him. Adam threw up a shimmering shield of force, and the rocks bounced off it. Argo ducked. One rock missed her, and another struck her helmet and glanced off. Brain injury is no joke, she said.
The upper tunnel was hotter still, and a shifting red and orange glow came from its far end. Brendan tinted his light to match it. Argo took her helmet off so the cult wouldn’t take her for the miner who had worn it, and cooled herself with a little conjured breeze.
The Cracking Floor
The tunnel opened into a large chamber, perhaps a sinkhole the tremors had broken into. Red light came up through a scatter of holes in the floor. About twenty feet below was a stony shore, and beyond it a lake of lava. The floor they stood on had been undermined.
The chamber shook again and cracks spread across the floor. Something rumbled through the earth toward them, and then a huge creature burst out of the wall. It looked like a cross between an armadillo and a rhinoceros, with heavy armour plates up its back, enormous digging claws and glowing red eyes. It was mad with rage. It saw them, screamed and charged.
Adam moved first. He drove a blast of thunder into the cracked ground at the beast’s feet. The floor split in a ring around it, several of its armour plates shattered, and it staggered, stunned. Adam could tell that one more blow there would break the floor. Brendan froze the creature with a ray of cold, and its joints stiffened.
It was still fast. It hurled itself thirty feet through the air and landed snapping at Argo. She slid underneath it, and its jaws closed on empty air above her. From under its belly she slashed for a gap in its armour, but the beast shifted and her blade missed. Its foot came up to stamp. She threw dirt in its eyes, slipped out from under it and ran.
The cave shook again. The cracked floor near the beast fell into one great hole, and new cracks opened under all of them. Adam’s spray of poison went wide as the ground heaved. Brendan worked a charm that let him cling to the wall like a spider, and from there he fired two crackling beams of dark force into the crack under the beast. The floor broke. The creature pitched forward and caught itself on the lip, dangling by its claws. Brendan climbed higher, out of its reach.
The beast didn’t climb out. It burrowed sideways through the rock, its ridge showing above the floor like a shark’s fin, and burst up next to Adam and bit at him twice. His shield of force turned the first bite. The second got through, and the borrowed life soaked up the worst of it.
It had forgotten Argo. She came in behind it with her scimitar in one hand and a dagger in the other, found the place where its armour gave out, and drove both blades in. Her second cut took the end off its tail, which dropped to the floor like a lizard’s. The beast shrieked, and Argo backed away before it could turn.
Another heave opened cracks right under the beast and under Adam. He had one way to bring it down without catching Argo in the blast, and he took it. He shattered the stone under his own feet. The floor swallowed them both, and the scrabbling beast caught hold of the gnome as they fell. The others heard Adam yell all the way down. Then his fall slowed, and he floated like a balloon. The beast lost its grip on him, dropped the full twenty feet onto the rocks, and burst. Adam drifted down and landed in the mess. Ew. Ew. I’m stepping in it.
Then the rest of the floor gave way. Argo caught the side of the shaft as she fell and landed in a neat combat roll, with nothing worse than a bruised ankle. Brendan walked down the wall at his leisure, cloak billowing.
The Caldera
The heat at the bottom was like an open furnace, but all three stood it. They were in the caldera of the volcano, beside a vast lake of molten rock. Some twenty feet along the shore lay a pile of dead dwarves. Beyond them stood a temple of black volcanic glass lined with statues of elemental creatures. It had been built twice: the original work was very old and finely made, and someone had recently restored its fallen parts in a square, boxy, rune-covered style that looked almost dwarven. Another path ran around the far side of the lake, and behind them was another caved-in shaft.
They had come to save the miners, so they checked that shaft first. They saw no hands or bodies, and the boulders were too big to move. Brendan could have dug through with his magic in time, but the cave grew hotter by the minute.
The dead were not dwarves. Their beards were red, yellow and orange, and they wore bronze armour and red velvet. Adam recognised them as Azer, fire dwarves from the Elemental Plane of Fire. All of them had been killed with tridents, and broken trident tips lay among the bodies. Brendan took one as a keepsake. Argo took a warhammer.
Argo had an idea. If there were more Azer at the temple, she wanted to look as if she belonged. She put on the least bloodied armour she could find. It was too broad for an elf, but it covered her. Brendan cast a glamour that gave him a broad face, a fiery beard and the whole look of an Azer. Adam would play their prisoner, his hands tied with a slip knot he could shake off whenever he liked.
As they walked down the shore, it seemed to all of them that the lava had crept higher up the beach than before.
Forge
The temple was full of statues honouring fire elementals. Rows of basalt pews faced a great stone altar, and behind the altar a hole in the floor showed lava turning slowly in a spiral.
Someone sneezed behind them. The three kept their nerve and turned as if they had every right to be there. An Azer limped out from behind a pew, leaning on a half-broken trident as a crutch. His long beard was vivid red. He was ragged and bloody and looked as if he had been through hell, and he spoke to them in Ignan, the tongue of fire.
Brendan cast a quick spell to understand it. My brothers, the Azer was saying, I thought you had all perished. Hurry, we still have time to save the surfacers and stop the ritual.
The spell only worked one way, so Brendan nodded firmly. The Azer asked when they had got the note.
Speak Common, please, said Adam from the end of his rope. I may be a prisoner, but I am still here.
The Azer grunted something in Ignan, and Brendan understood it: I don’t speak their dirty surface tongue. Tell your slave to be more polite.
Brendan gestured dramatically to show that the prisoner was on their side, then untied Adam to prove it. The Azer gave them a strange look. Ah, come. We must hurry. His name was Forge. The “surfacers” he meant to save were everyone who lived above ground.
The Peninsula
Forge led them out of the temple, around the far side of the lake and through another tunnel. It came out above a tongue of rock that ran into the middle of the lava. On it stood a chain gang chained wrist to wrist: miners mostly, but also a fisherman, a farmer and others taken from the surface, and two Azer. Among the miners was a blue-skinned tiefling with curling horns and a yellow helmet, sweating and terrified. This was Char, Ashton’s sister. The others had been in this heat for hours and were half dead on their feet. Char was holding up better, perhaps because of the fiend’s blood in her.
Salamanders guarded them. They were serpents from the waist down, with fiery eyes, and the captives shrank from them because of the heat pouring off their bodies. As the three came into view, the salamanders turned. One of them speared a miner and threw him over the edge. He screamed as he fell into the lava, and the whole volcano shook.
There were salamanders on every finger of rock around the lake, perhaps fifty, holding up their tridents and cheering the execution like a crowd at an arena. They did not come closer. Only two stood out on the peninsula, and those two had seen them.
Argo’s first arrow stuck in a salamander’s shield, and it hissed at her. Brendan stepped aside and hurled two daggers of ice at once, one at each salamander. Both struck. The creatures recoiled from the ice far more than ordinary creatures would, and everyone saw it: cold hurt these things twice as badly as anything else.
The nearer salamander dropped to the ground, slithered thirty feet toward them like a snake, and braced behind its shield. The one at the back gave a hissing laugh, speared a second miner and threw him into the lava. The cave shook, and the lava rose until it lapped at the sides of the peninsula.
Adam blasted the braced salamander with a cone of terror. It began to sweat, but it gripped its spear and hissed back at him, unshaken.
Then Argo ran at it. The salamander watched her come, and then she vanished in a puff of silver mist and reappeared behind it. Her scimitar went across its throat with everything she had, and her dagger followed. It twisted round with its trident raised, streaming fiery blood, and Brendan, punching the air with a diamond ring on his fist, sent a great ball of ice into its chest. Ice spread over it, it screamed, and it shattered into a thousand pieces. A second ball of ice struck the other salamander hard.
The survivor came for Brendan. It wrapped its body around his like a constrictor. Brendan was no wrestler. Its scales crushed him and its burning body seared him wherever it touched. Adam fired five glowing darts of force into it, and where its blood spattered the stone it burst into flame. Brendan blinked out of its coils in a puff of mist and hit it again with frost, but the cold melted off it almost at once.
Forge had slipped aside the moment the spells began to fly. These were plainly not his brothers. Argo went to the captives instead. She worked their lock with her thieves’ tools and pulled the long chain out through every set of manacles in one go. They were all free. Char shook her hand and tried to rouse the others, who could barely lift their heads. Argo told her quickly that her sister was waiting up top.
Oh, thank the gods.
Argo turned and shot the salamander in the eye. It tore the arrow out, snatched up its trident and threw it into Adam. The trident flew back to its hand, and it threw again at Brendan, who twisted out of the way. Heat poured off its body and scorched everyone near it. Adam burst the stone behind it into shrapnel, and Argo, drawing steadily while it fought her friends, put an arrow through its throat. It fell.
Then they heard a hissing laugh. With its life pouring out, the salamander lifted a medallion and spoke one name: Tharizdun. It slammed the medallion against its chest. Its flesh burst into flame, its skeleton hung for a moment in the fire, and then the bones crumbled to ash.
The Cataclysm
The cave shook. The lava rose and bubbled, and a huge bubble swelled in the middle of the lake. As it grew it took shape: eye sockets dripping molten rock, a mouth running with lava, and a gigantic claw that rose out of the lake and slammed down on the peninsula.
It was a fire elemental of enormous size. Manacles were locked on its wrists, around its waist and around its neck, and chains ran from them down into the lava. Several were already broken, the collar at its throat among them, and it was raging against the rest. When it rose, its scream sprayed lava across the cavern.
The burning spray caught all three of them, and Adam went down. Argo had two healing potions. She ran to him, forced one into his mouth and held his jaw shut until he swallowed, and he woke blinking, sunburned all over. Brendan wrapped himself in a shell of icy armour and ran to clear the way to the exit.
The freed miners could hardly stand. Char took two of them toward the tunnel, and the two freed Azer took two each. Two were left, and Adam dashed over and began dragging them. On every finger of rock the salamanders went wild. The Cataclysm raised its arms, and a cyclone formed over the lava and burst into a wave of heat across the whole cavern. Nobody could have withstood it. It drained the strength from all three of them.
Forge ran to Adam and Brendan. Hurry! If you can channel magic, we still have a chance to save our temple and the surface. Follow me! Adam knew he could never carry two grown miners anyway, so he dropped them and ran after Forge with Brendan. Argo took the two miners instead, one over each shoulder, and staggered on toward the tunnel.
The Cataclysm plunged its fists into the lake and sent a tidal wave of lava across the cavern. It broke over the spot where they had just been standing and over every finger of rock. The salamanders screamed as it covered them, and as they burned the elemental took them into itself and grew to twice its size.
At the altar Forge held out his hands. Grab my hands. Form a circle. With three of them it was really a triangle. As soon as their hands met, fire ran through them as if their bones were melting. Adam and Brendan saw each other’s eyes glowing like hot coals. Forge began to chant, elemental runes formed in a ring around the Cataclysm, and the power of the Plane of Fire flowed through all three. Whatever happened, they had to hold it.
Below, the heat had melted the boulders blocking the exit into pools of cooling rock. Argo and the others hauled the miners toward the opening.
The Cataclysm snapped another chain, and the whole cavern heaved up and dropped. Brendan kept hold of the power. Adam lost his footing and slid toward the edge and the lava, and he saw his life flash before his eyes. Then a hand caught the back of his jacket. Brendan hauled him back into the circle, and Adam caught Forge’s hand with one of his and Brendan’s with the other. The fire surged through them again. Adam’s blue hair was no longer hair. It was blue flame, glowing like burning gas. Brendan’s silver dragon scales glowed a radiant gold, and his beard caught fire and sent flames licking down his body. Forge chanted on, and a crack in the world opened beneath the Cataclysm.
Argo got the last of the miners into the tunnel.
The Cataclysm snapped its second chain and flung lava across the cavern again. It spattered the ritualists and scorched their clothes, but they held on. Forge chanted louder and louder, and the crack tore open into a whirlpool of fire under the elemental. The Cataclysm grabbed at the cavern roof as the vortex dragged it down. One of its arms was torn off, then the other. It screamed in agony as the portal pulled it down into the Plane of Fire. Forge let go of their hands, and the portal snapped shut with a spray of lava.
At once the lava began to drop. The peninsula came up clear, and the cavern stopped shaking.
The Surface
Forge turned to them. Thank you. You’ve saved the world from our hubris. We had no idea this temple was actually sanctified to Elemental Evil. We thought it just honoured fire elementals. When we tried to restore it, we allowed this creature to be summoned into this realm. He gave them a gift from his people, a Necklace of Fireballs.
They led the survivors back up through the mine to daylight. Char and Ashton ran to each other and held on for a long time. Then Ashton turned to the three of them. Thank you. I’m sorry for how I treated you before. Thank you for saving my sister. They helped her settle the survivors in her triage station.
Before they left, Argo took the governor’s silver letter opener out of her pocket and gave it to Ashton. She could make something off it. Then the three of them rode back down the mountain, and Governor Vane thanked them warmly for reopening his mine and for dealing with the definitely-not-cultists.