Dragon's Lair

The Smoking Gate stands open. It should not. Vrenneth the Cinder-Crowned has held this mountain for three hundred and twelve years, and in all that time the great basalt arch has never admitted a living soul without a fight. Now you walk through it unchallenged, the air still warm with old breath, the floor scuffed by the bootprints of four expeditions that arrived before you. Inside, the heat presses against your skin like a held hand. Inside, somewhere ahead, no one is screaming. You find the dragon in the deepest chamber, curled across a hoard the size of a temple. She is dead. A single wound, no wider than a dagger, drives upward through the soft palate of her jaw and into the brain. There is no struggle around the body. She did not wake. Above the hoard, on a pedestal of red glass, sits the empty curve where the Heartshard Crown should rest—the Crown your patron commissioned you to retrieve, the Crown four other expeditions are also here to claim, the Crown that is no longer here at all. You are not the first arrival, and you are not alone. The Iron Concordat's mercenaries hold the antechamber, weapons across their knees, watching the doorways. The Verdant Circle's druid sits cross-legged beside the body, whispering to it in a tongue no one else recognises. The Crimson Ledger's appraiser is already on his third volume of notes, measuring the wound with brass calipers. And in the shadows beyond the hoard, the Silent Stair's veiled inquisitor has not moved or spoken since you walked in. Each of them tells the same story. Each story leaves something out. The mountain answers for them. A tremor opens a hairline crack across the obsidian floor; ash sifts down from a vent that did not exist an hour ago; the magma in the side channels glows a brighter red than it did at midday. Vrenneth's life was bound to this volcano. With her gone, the chamber below is no longer regulated, and the eruption that follows will turn this entire range into a memory. You have three days. Five suspects, counting yours. One Crown, gone. One murderer, in this room. The only way out is through the truth.