Session 10 covered 30 Coldrise, 1714 PSF. The party surveyed Vaults 13 to 16 beneath Argentum for Luma, got past fire snakes, fought rust monsters and suits of animated armor, and destroyed the Living Everfire in Vault 16. They came away with a pair of dwarven hand axes they were not supposed to take.
Synopsis
Vault 13
Beyond the door, stairs led down into a passage ten feet wide. Its walls were carved dark stone in harsh, elegant angles, and its floor was lighter tile, all well made and badly cracked.1 It curved round into a massive chamber in ruin, with a great pillar fallen and broken. The heat was oppressive, somewhere between the mid eighties and the upper nineties.2 Iva, the only one of them who cannot see in the dark,3 stayed in the light of Luma’s lantern with her spear and shield ready.4 The chamber held forges and foundries, workstations, old quenching troughs, anvils and tools, scattered and in places burned. On its eastern side, rock had cracked up through the floor and still glowed with heat, and the ceiling was sixty feet up.5
Rhysaene noticed that the air was moving, which it should not have been in a sealed vault.6 Iva heard a faint whistling from the vents that lined the floor on both sides of the chamber and showed Luma, who marked them on her map.7 The air coming through was hot. “Is it supposed to be hot?” Iva asked. “Probably comes from lower. I don’t know. I’ve never worked here,” said Luma.8 Heavy pipes with control valves ran from the forges, damaged in places and no longer carrying heat. They were built to much the same dimensions as the pipes that carry Everfire through the maintenance tunnels, but without the glass segments that light those, and to a different standard of craftsmanship.9
Hazel knew a little of the city’s history. When Bahamut brought the survivors of the Starfall and the Sorrow that followed, he brought them to a city that already existed.10 It had been built by dwarves, or mostly by dwarves, and its architecture still shows it at the heart of the city and even more down here.11 The city grew out of that original one, and everything in the Hearth Wall district was built after the Starfall.12 Hazel assumed the city had not been called Argentum at first, and was renamed for the Silver Flame.13
Luma saw a dull orange glow and, within it, a pool of lava that had leached out of one of the floor drains, with something moving under the surface.14 “Hey, careful. The lava is bubbling.”15 Rhysaene prodded it with a sparkly mage hand, and a serpentine creature, a fire snake, burst out, spraying molten rock, and hissed.16 “Rhys, why’d you summon a fire snake?” said Iva.17 A second one rose and coiled on the tile.18 Luma said hello in Dwarvish. The snake tilted its head and swayed as it coiled up, without any sign of understanding.19 Hazel judged that they were not aggressive and would leave the party alone if the party backed off.20 As they backed away, the nearer snake watched them, and the other lost interest and started gnawing melted stone.21 Luma marked the pool as dangerous, and the party gave it a wide berth.22
Nearby, a drain was on fire, flames licking up through it from below.23 Beside it lay rotted and scorched stores, and crates of iron ingots, scorched but whole.24 Luma smelled a trace of natural gas. The fire was burning off something that, while not necessarily toxic, was not good to breathe, and there was plenty of it.25 “Nobody try to put that fire out,” she told the others. “We don’t want to fill this hall with something that isn’t breathable air.”26 “Yes, boss,” said Hazel, and waved at the fire snakes.27
When Luma waved too, Hazel remembered that there are elemental spirits whose intelligence falls somewhere between a beast’s and a person’s. These snakes were probably not flesh-and-blood creatures of this world but elemental spirits of that kind, closer to beasts, and still very much alive.28 She tried to show them through her manner that the party meant no harm. Their minds were too strange for her to reach, but Luma’s help, a smiley face doodled on Hazel’s cheek, kept her from provoking them into a rage.29 Luma then found barrels of coal. She drew a metal hand cart on the floor with her pen, loaded a barrel onto it and pushed it toward the snakes.30 They hissed, and flames licked off them and scorched the floor, but when the cart stopped, one poked it with its beak-like snout and gobbled the coals three or four at a time.31 The other joined it. Luma dismissed the cart, and the barrel caught fire without bothering them at all.32 She pocketed a few handfuls of coal. “Sage, you’re a spirit,” Hazel said to Sage. “Would you like some coal?”33
Luma spent five or ten minutes at the entrance of the next room recording everything in the first: the pipe network and its valves, the vents, the lava pool and its snakes, and the burning drain.34 Hazel was deeply uneasy underground, closed in by stone.35
Vault 14
Vault 14 was narrower, with ceilings forty feet high and no forges.36 Weapons, armor and tools lay around its pillars and across the floor, nearly all ruined: a rotted barrel of short swords rusted past use, and armor stands holding full plate, once fine, now rusted through, with orange metal dust on the floor beneath. It had been a showroom.37 The work was characteristically dwarven.38 There were no maker’s marks, but there was an emblem. Luma took it at first for the mark of the Vaultsmiths, but as far as she knew the Vaultsmiths are a far more recent order than the Starfall.39 Their emblem, on all their equipment and on every copper anvil, is an anvil with a mote of fire above it, made to match the emblem of the faith of the Silver Flame. On the old armor the flame rose from the anvil itself, and did not resemble the church’s emblem.40 Luma copied it into her personal notes, not her report.41 The work order asked for floor plans, infrastructure and any unmarked passages or breaches, and said nothing about objects. It also forbade the surveyor to go beyond the designated area, to tamper with sealed doors, wards or locks, or to remove anything.42
Past a line of pillars came a rapid chittering of something hard on stone, and a crunching.43 Three rust monsters, beetles as big as a person, came round the pillars, plated in chitin, with bulging eyes and long, almost feathery feelers. They waved their feelers and fixed on Iva and Hazel, the two wearing the most metal.44 In an uncharacteristic burst of nerve, Luma ran forward, pointed out where they were, and held up a quick sketch of the room that burst into flame and marked the far beetle with a glowing inked crosshair.45 Then she drew a door, dived through it, and came out of a pillar behind Iva.46 “By the order of the Hammer of the Hallows, I authorize you to hunt these creatures,” she told Temerity.47
Temerity cracked the marked beetle’s shell with her hammer, and it tried to wrap its feelers round her hammer head. She pulled it clear then, and twice more when it tried again.48 Another beetle’s feelers lashed Iva’s scale mail, and a patch of scales rusted away on the spot.49 Iva stabbed it between its plates.50 At her command, Temerity swung again and crushed the wounded beetle before it could grab her hammer.51 Hazel’s silver moonfire burned the beetle at Iva.52 Rhysaene’s eldritch blast scorched it too, and in response its antennae lashed out at Iva’s spearhead, which rusted at once.53 Luma scattered caltrops as a distraction.54 Temerity killed the first beetle and knocked the third to the floor.55 The third rusted Iva’s spear further before Hazel’s moonlit flame got inside its shell and burned it out from within, leaving the party in the silence of a room sealed for hundreds of years.56
Iva’s spearhead was badly corroded and her armor had a large rusted patch, and she complained that the armor had cost her a year and a half of pay.57 Luma drew little scales over the patch with her pen and cast mending, and after a minute the ink turned to steel.58 She erased the rust from the spearhead with the back of her pen until it gleamed like new.59 Hazel wondered what the creatures tasted like.60 She found that their chitin is laced with the metal they eat, which makes them far tougher than an ordinary bug.61 It reminded her that Hecate had once spoken of creatures that coat themselves in iron, which Hazel had taken for an elaborate joke.62 She pried open the beetle Temerity had smashed like a crab, drew a very ornate sickle from under her shirt, which none of them had seen before, and cut off some meat to eat later.63
The room was full of rust dust and shavings, and the beetles’ tracks were everywhere, too many to follow. At the north end, the bottom corner bars of an old rusted portcullis had been eaten through, and the beetles had most likely come from beyond it.64 “I don’t think I’ve ever seen these things before,” Luma said. “If we’re the first to see these monsters, can we name them? I suggest we name them the Flaky Beetles.”65 “Your penchant for naming things is unrivaled,” said Hazel. “I agree.”66 Iva proposed “bastards”, which Hazel thought too generic.67
Luma teleported through the portcullis, and Iva shifted into a halfling to crawl under it, a child in full adult armor.68 Luma found a lever mechanism rusted solid, and the portcullis so corroded that it would take almost nothing to bring down.69 Temerity, who had never been told the rules of the survey, took hold of it to give it a shake and pulled the whole thing out of the wall.70 “Oh, we weren’t supposed to break any locking mechanisms,” said Luma.71 “It was already broken when we got here,” said Hazel.72 Temerity apologized and propped it back in place, and Luma pressed a dead beetle’s antenna against it, as if the beetles had done the damage. The moment Temerity let go, it collapsed into a cloud of rust.73 Luma decided that a portcullis was a door rather than a lock, and that the order covered four vaults, of which they had seen only two.74
Vault 15
In the next passage, among walls carved in hard geometric relief, one section was smooth stone.75 Luma spent a charge of her wand of secrets, which pointed not at the wall but away to the north.76 Vault 15 beyond was grander than Vault 13, with fewer pipes and more workshops set around its pillars and walls, and workbenches on locking wheels so the room could be rearranged.77 Near a scorched drain to the north, where the wand had pointed, Luma found the floor patterned differently and raised a fraction of an inch, and marked it as a trap.78
Luma went back to the smooth wall. It was a repair, done for stability without the care that had gone into the rest. A tiny dwarf she drew on her shoulder whispered, “Ain’t no dwarf made this change.”79 She drew a pickaxe and cut a hole no more than a foot across. The wall was thinner than that, and beyond it was natural stone.80 She teleported through into a natural cavern, where the old dwarven stonework had collapsed and the wall had been put up in haste to seal it off.81 In the cavern was a tunnel dropping almost straight down, too deep to see the bottom.82 Things had burrowed up through it over time, small ones first and then larger ones through the weakened rock, leaving claw marks of different shapes and sizes.83 The cave narrowed and looped back to the room she had come from.84 “Yeah, there’s a whole little tunnel network over there,” she told the others. “I found a pit, like a tunnel. That looks like monsters made it.”85
She mended the hole, since she had broken a rule.86 The dust and weathering on the repaired wall matched the walls around it, which had been well kept until some disaster shattered the pillars and scorched the chambers. Both had gone untended for several hundred years, which fitted what Luma had been told about the vaults being sealed about five hundred years ago.87 Nobody had disturbed the wall recently.88
Hazel asked about giant spiders. They can be found in the forests of the Silver Vale, but they are rare and prefer the dark, and Hazel knew that they are not really native there but come from great subterranean depths.89 She noticed that the floor was scorched all around the vents, while strands of old spiderweb hanging from one of the pillars were not seared at all.90 “Do you not find it odd that this area seems scorched with flames, yet these webs remain intact?”91 Luma threw a drawn ten-pound weight onto the raised stone, and nothing happened.92 Hazel warned the others to look above and around them, since whatever made webs that size would still rely on surprise.93 Luma saw a few more webs running up to the ceiling, but no spiders.94 The rust monsters had eaten nearly every piece of metal on the workbenches.95
In a decorated passage at the far end lay the corpse of a larger rust monster.96 Before three small pillars stood three suits of dwarven plate on armor stands, remarkably untouched by time.97 Luma’s wand found no trap nearer than the one she had already marked.98 The armor was decorative, made of cheap iron polished to look fine, and Luma wondered why the beetles had left it alone.99 Then she looked up, and the helmet turned to look down at her.100 “This makes a lot more sense,” said Hazel.101 Luma said hello in Dwarvish and stumbled back.102
The first suit of animated armor pummeled Luma with both fists.103 Hazel’s moonfire skittered harmlessly over it.104 Iva’s spear went straight through another, and it was clear the armor would not protect anyone.105 Temerity rounded a pillar and brought her hammer down on the first suit’s head, crushing it into the floor in a single blow.106 Rhysaene reached for the mind of the suit Iva was fighting and found none to hurt.107 Luma hooked its helmet with her crowbar, spun it round and was gone before it straightened.108 “They’re really scary.”109 Temerity dented the second suit badly.110 Luma came out of a door beside her, hooked one of its legs out from under it and beat it with her crowbar until it stopped moving.111 Iva finished the last by feinting, driving her spear through its helmet and spinning the helmet down into her hand.112 The dead rust monster had bitten off more than it could chew.113
The Tunnels
Iva put away her spear and shield and took out her lance. “That’s it. I’m poking things with the big stick from now on.”114 Rhysaene could not fit through the tunnels, so Iva stayed with her while Temerity squeezed through with Luma and Hazel.115 “Oh, I see Luma. You don’t like my company,” said Rhysaene.116 The caves had been opened partly by seismic cracking and partly by burrowing creatures.117 Luma lowered her lamp fifty feet on a rope. The shaft was uneven, with no bottom in sight, and further down it narrowed and other tunnels joined it.118 There was more web down there, and Luma pulled her lamp back up before it could set any alight.119 “It was a waste of time, Rhys,” she reported. “There wasn’t anything interesting in there except for creepy spiderwebs.”120
Vault 16
Vault 16 was the most destroyed. The heat was sweltering, the air moved more freely, and embers drifted from its southwest corner. Its stone floor had melted, and its pillars sagged where their outsides had melted, barely holding up the ceiling. Glowing rock jutted through the floor in several places.121 Luma told everyone to have their charcoal masks ready and held out her hat for anything they wanted to put away.122 Hazel added her bear-pelt cloak and her leather shirt, and Temerity reluctantly added her own layers, while Iva kept her scale mail.123 Luma drew a wooden pot with ten pounds of ice in it and handed round ice cubes, which spared everyone the worst of the heat.124
Melted steel and iron had dripped across the floor like candle wax, the remains of weapons and tools whose wood had burned away. The room had once been far hotter.125 Luma found no flood line on the walls. Some lava had probably passed through, but most of the damage had been done by fire pouring through the room.126 In the southwest corner was the source of the embers, a massive hole, with a caved-in passage beyond it.127 The hole dropped into a cavern, and hundreds of feet below was a pale orange glow. “Hey, there’s lava down there,” said Luma.128 Temerity stood staring down into it for some time.129
Near the hole lay one suit of armor in scattered pieces, and another unlike anything they had seen: dwarven, dark metal trimmed with gold, but melted beyond repair, its legs gone and its gold run into the dark metal.130 Beside it lay a pair of dwarven hand axes in good condition, with ebony handles inlaid with gold, dark, glassy blades inlaid with gold patterns, and dwarven runes.131 Luma reads Dwarvish, but the runes made no sense as language. She worked out that their pattern was one of enchantment.132 “I think I found magic axes, but we’re not supposed to take anything from this vault,” she said, and cast identify on one.133 It was a modest enchantment that kept the blade keen and helped it bite through armor.134 At the same moment a gust of wind drew the embers pouring from the hole into the melted armor. They became a mass of flame that lifted the armor off the floor and wrapped the axes, and Luma let go just in time.135 Something ancient and dangerous had woken, and the party was in significant danger.136
The Living Everfire spoke in a hissing, crackling voice that none of them understood, and turned on Iva.137 It struck its axes together, set them alight, and wounded her badly.138 Temerity shouted “Iva!” and charged in a rage.139 Iva mounted Rhysaene, lance in hand: “Rhys, we’re going to hit him really hard.”140 Rhysaene cursed the thing in infernal nonsense. “I like your funny words, magic horse,” said Iva.141 Hazel took the shape of a dire wolf, the pure form of the corrupted wolves they had fought, with little deer antlers, and bounded over the others.142 She caught the armor in her teeth and slammed it into the stone, but it shot back up with its axes ready.143 Luma tapped her hat and copied Rhysaene’s eldritch blast, slashing the air so that it fractured just as Rhysaene’s does.144 When it swung at Rhysaene, Iva raised her shield and Rhysaene channeled magic through it, and the axe glanced off.145
Hazel’s jaws finally broke the armor apart, and the axes fell to the floor.146 The fire collapsed in on itself and burst outward, and the party stepped clear.147 Freed of the armor, it burned hotter than ever.148 Rhysaene’s sword met no resistance in it.149 Luma healed Iva by starting to write “Get well soon” in the air, and the spell took hold as soon as she finished “Get”.150 The fire whirled over the whole party, burning them as it passed, and came to rest on Luma. It set Hazel alight with a blow before it was done.151 Temerity ran along the wall, kicked off it, and brought her hammer down on its head. The silver mote before her hammer flashed.152 Silver light engulfed the spirit, turning its orange and red to silver, and the room flashed cold and gray before it collapsed and left nothing.153
The Axes
Hazel, still a wolf, strolled over and licked Luma’s face to heal her, and Luma hugged her.154 Iva wrapped her arms round Rhysaene from behind. “You’re my hero.”155 Temerity leaned on her hammer and asked Luma whether she was all right. “Everything hurts.”156 Once healed, Luma perked up. “It didn’t burn my hat. Everything’s fine.”157 Then she wondered what she was going to put in her report.158
The axes were all that was left.159 Temerity suggested turning them in.160 Luma described them as dwarven work with strengthening enchantments, always sharp.161 Iva picked one up. It was the finest weapon she had ever touched. It had survived whatever destroyed the room, the living fire that wielded it, and the beetles that ate every other piece of metal there.162 “I’ll take one,” Iva said. “I can carry it and a shield.”163 Rhysaene did not want one, and Hazel told Temerity to take the other.164 It showed no sign of magic. It was the finest weapon Temerity had ever held, and the second finest she had ever seen.165 “Don’t like tell anybody you found it in the vault or anything,” said Luma.166 “Found what?” said Iva, hooking hers onto her belt.167 Luma had now seen every vault she knew of. A passage to the south was thoroughly caved in.168
Featured Characters
Player Characters
Returning
Mentioned
Quotations
- “Nobody try to put that fire out. We don’t want to fill this hall with something that isn’t breathable air.” Luma.26
- “Sage, you’re a spirit. Would you like some coal?” Hazel.33
- “If we’re the first to see these monsters, can we name them? I suggest we name them the Flaky Beetles.” Luma.65
- “Oh, we weren’t supposed to break any locking mechanisms.” Luma, after Temerity pulled a portcullis out of the wall.71
- “Ain’t no dwarf made this change.” A drawing on Luma’s shoulder.79
- “I think I found magic axes, but we’re not supposed to take anything from this vault.” Luma.133
- “I like your funny words, magic horse.” Iva to Rhysaene.141
- “Found what?” Iva.167
Inventory
- Two dwarven hand axes, one each to Iva and Temerity, taken from Vault 16.
- Some coal, taken by Luma.
- A piece of rust monster meat, cut and kept by Hazel.
Speaking Time
| Speaker | Time | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Dungeon Master | 2:07:37 | 38% |
| Luma | 1:01:01 | 18% |
| Iva | 1:00:18 | 18% |
| Temerity | 38:23 | 12% |
| Hazel | 30:17 | 9% |
| Rhysaene | 14:06 | 4% |