The Story So Far

Just after midnight on Friday the 19th of June, Yānshān woke. While the lava flow was mostly harmless to the west, a column of ash climbed miles into the eastern sky and drifted down like a grey snowfall across the highlands of Jīnjiǎ, the eastern reaches of Sìshuǐ, and the ridges of Tōngzhì. The town of Chìyán Gǎng, built on the mountain's own slope, has fared worst of all: ash lies ankle-deep in its lanes, and residents cannot venture outside without cloth held close around their faces.

Panic spreads as the extent of the damage to local crops and livestock is estimated, and no one is entirely sure what to do. Merchants of Aldermark are already offering their newest machines to help, claiming out of their benevolence that payment need not be worried about until later. Others say this is a sign of the spirits' anger, and that only pleas to the spirits of the wild will restore the natural order. Word has it that the Empress is headed to the volcano in person, there to attempt to treat with the spirit of the volcano, Huǒbào.

Against this background, the royal and noble houses mobilize. A presence in Zhūwān is more important than ever: to make deals with the Aldermark merchants, to prevent others from falling to their schemes, or to ensure their people and lands get first claim on any foreign food aid.

All through the grey weeks after Yānshān woke, the five kingdoms argued about what the mountain meant. Aldermark's factors called it opportunity and asked no payment yet; the shrine-keepers called it the spirits' anger and asked for prayers. But in the ash-country itself, wandering heroes kept asking a plainer question: what made Huǒbào angry? They followed what the ashfall had half-buried. Foreign charcoal on the mountain trails. Slag of an alloy no guild smith could name. Crucible clay bought by the cartload under borrowed names, and a respected fire-smith vanished from his forge without a word to his neighbors.

The answer, now spoken openly in tea houses from Chìyán Gǎng to Zhūwān, is this: the eruption was no act of heaven. In the weeks before the mountain woke, a small band of outsiders came ashore in secret from an eastern-island ship. With hired carters, their cartloads of clay, and the coerced fire-smith Tie Guanhu, they climbed to the volcano's sacred throat-forge and there forged blades by a guarded island rite never meant for a foreign fire. It was that trespass in Huǒbào's own forge that enraged the spirit and brought the mountain down on the farmlands.

The trail ended at the Cāngyán caves of northeastern Qiānjīn, where the strangers had gone to ground beside a hidden spring. They were not the only ones hunting. Brokers of the Gilded Abacus, moving on Ruan Suye's orders, meant to take the fugitives alive at dawn and sell what they knew to the highest bidder. Having been defeated, the true nature of the strangers was revealed. They are Shirogane, sword-sworn retainers of the royal White River line, and the quiet lord they guard is a prince of that line, fled from an assassination attempt with his loyalists around him. With assassins and bounty hunters on their trail they turned to the mountain to forge more of their famed curved blades to defend themselves, unaware of the true nature of the spirits in the Empire.

With too many soldiers for one band of adventurers to arrest and a prince untrusting of those longstanding as enemies, he and his entourage of refugees fled the mountain to go into hiding elsewhere, with who knows who or what still seeking them.