The Everfire is the volcanic rift beneath Argentum, and the name for the lava that runs from it through the city’s pipes.1 It supplies the city with heat, power and industry, and the engineering that carries it through the city is called Everfire engineering.1
Everfire Engineering
The Everfire warms and lights the city, feeding heated canals and glass lamps filled with molten material. Everfire Lamps stand throughout the city as glass pillars fed from the rift below.
Feed lines of Everfire, steam and water run from the Underforge Vaults through the maintenance tunnels close to the surface.2 The Everfire pipes there have glass segments, so that they light the tunnels as well.1 The glass that holds the lava in the lamps and tubing is Sun-Glass, which could not have existed before the Starfall.3 The old dwarven pipes in the sealed vaults are built to much the same dimensions and strength, without the glass.1
Beneath the City
In the sealed vaults, lava has leached out of the floor drains and pooled, and fire snakes live in it.1 A hole in the floor of one vault drops hundreds of feet into a cavern with a glow of lava at the bottom, and embers pour up out of it.1 Shards of rock around the hole still glow, holding their heat unnaturally, probably through some elemental magic.3 The Living Everfire, a spirit of living fire, rose from those embers.1
History
Session 1
An Everfire Lamp erupted during the Festival of Bells in a geyser sixty feet high, scattering burning Everfire across the plaza until emergency shutoffs closed it off.4
Session 10
Temerity stood a long while at the hole in Vault 16 of the sealed vaults, looking down at the lava beneath the city.1
Session 11
A dwarven smith's journal found in Vault 18 of the sealed vaults records that “the Everfire awakened”. Fire came up all at once from below and destroyed the lower foundries and the closest workshops, and the dead were still being counted three days later.3 Graffiti in the same vault reads “The Everfire burns strong. So do we.”3 Luma took the journal to describe what happened in the foundry vault with the great hole, and told Hazel she thought the Everfire had exploded.3
Session 12
Jars of Everfire honey, a spiced hot honey, stand in a dwarven kitchen in the sealed vaults, and a prayer stone in a nearby shrine reads “Everfire warm the hearth; Soul Forger guide the hand.”5
Session 13
The inscription over the Fardrimm Gate, miles below Argentum, reads “May the Everfire light the way through the long dark.”6
Session 14
The Everfire lanterns were shut off for the evening of the Vigil of Remembrance, 1714 PSF.7 The lamps went up fairly recently, probably starting a few decades ago.7 On 1 Nightdeep, Hazel told the party about a dream in which Argentum was a great tree whose roots withered in a place of great heat below, and wondered whether it was the Everfire.7 Luma wondered whether the lamps had been put in because it was getting too hot down below.7
Session 15
The Everfire Lamp that erupted at the Festival of Bells had been repaired and was glowing again by 2 Nightdeep, 1714 PSF.8