Date: September 13, 2026
Attendance: Argo, Adam Copperbottom, Brendan
The governor of Neefox, a volcanic trading colony in an island chain, sent for mercenaries, and three answered. Their ship came into a harbour full of merchant vessels riding high and empty. The smelters by the docks were cold, and the dock workers were all in the taverns. A gnome named Bernard, whose spectacles stuck out half a foot from his face, met Adam Copperbottom at the quay and led the three of them up the switchbacks to the governor’s mansion.
They arrived as a tiefling foreman in a red miner’s helmet stormed out of the office. This was Ashton. Inside, Governor Korvath Vane, an orc in a fine silk suit, poured them his monthly bottle of whiskey and explained the problem. The silver mine had stopped producing after some kind of accident, and the rescue team Ashton sent in had not been heard from in three or four days. Without being asked, he added that there were definitely no cultists on Neefox Island. Argo was certain he was lying. Brendan, raised a noble, told him that nobility serves the people and not the other way around. Vane answered that a fifth of the mine’s silver went to the pirate captains who would otherwise raid the town. Adam offered to look over his books, and they bore him out: the accounts balanced, and the bribes were itemised. While Vane was busy with Adam, Argo pocketed the silver letter opener from his desk. He went looking for it as they left. The pay was 450 gold apiece.
Ashton led them up the flank of the volcano on a mule train. Adam, who was afraid of the mules, rode on a floating disc of cold magic that Brendan conjured for him. On the way Ashton apologised for her temper. Her sister, the colony’s best excavator, had gone in with the rescue crew and was missing. People had been disappearing, she said, and not only miners.
The mine camp had been wrecked by tremors, and the entrance had caved in. They crawled through a gap in the rubble. Inside, Argo spotted a spiral carved around an eye. Brendan knew it as the mark of the Cult of the Elemental Eye. Scouting ahead in the dark, Argo found three dead miners: one crushed by a falling rock, one burned, one smothered under a collapse. From the dwarf she took a heavy bronze cog with a crank handle. In a round chamber further on, a wooden lift hung jammed in its shaft thirty feet up. Argo and Brendan pulled its ropes, and it came down on top of them. Adam slotted the cog into the lift’s socket and cranked the platform off his friends. On the ride up a tremor brought rocks down on them, and Argo’s borrowed miner’s helmet saved her a cracked skull.
The upper tunnel opened into a cavern lit red from below by a lava lake under holes in its floor. A huge armoured burrowing beast smashed in through the wall and charged. The three of them turned the floor against it. Adam’s thunder cracked the stone and Brendan’s blasts broke it open. Argo slid beneath the beast and cut the end off its tail. Then Adam shattered the ground under his own feet. He and the beast fell together, and Adam drifted down slowly while it hit the rocks below and died. The rest of the floor collapsed after them.
Below lay the volcano’s caldera: a lake of magma, a pile of dead Azer killed by tridents, and an obsidian temple to fire elementals, part ancient and part recently restored. Argo and Brendan dressed as Azer and led Adam in as their “prisoner.” Forge, a wounded Azer survivor, took them for his kin and led them to a peninsula where serpentine salamanders were throwing chained captives into the lava. Every death made the lake rise. Brendan’s ice shattered one salamander. Argo freed the whole chain gang, among them Ashton’s sister Char, and her arrow brought down the second. Dying, it cried out to Tharizdun and burned to ash.
Out of the lava rose the Cataclysm, an enormous fire elemental straining against its chains. Its first blast of lava knocked Adam down, and Argo brought him round with a healing potion. Argo carried two miners out on her shoulders while Adam and Brendan joined hands with Forge at the temple altar to work a banishing ritual. When the cavern heaved, Adam slid toward the lava, and Brendan hauled him back into the circle. A portal tore open beneath the Cataclysm and pulled it back to the Plane of Fire.
Forge confessed that his people had restored the temple without knowing it was consecrated to elemental evil, and he gave them a Necklace of Fireballs. Back on the surface, Char and Ashton were reunited, and Argo gave the governor’s letter opener to Ashton.