Deep Furnace
Blasting furnace, boiling lakes of fire. Falls of molten earth cascade down into burning pools far below, the red glow is enough to sear your face as you glance down into the depths. This is no Hell, Child. It is a home. A home for the lost and the forgotten, for those who fled. Who would live here? Is that what you ask? Who would live in this realm of shadow and fire? I shall tell you. Long ago there were those who fled from battle, from war, from hate. They left their homes and their families, left all that they knew, left all that they loved. But there was no where to go. All the world was engulfed in the clash of blade against blade, the screams of the injured, and the cruel laughter of the wicked and the mad. So they sought out a place where none would ever go, a place where they would never be found. A sea of lava where great leviathans with scaly flesh splash and play, chimneys of smoke and ash where fire sprites are born aside their cousins the Ashlings, great cracks that belch even more hellish temperatures from which the Neponada first came. Here there are crystal shards the size of mountains that rise from oceans of flame to strike hard at the cavernous ceiling above, crystal born in the heart of the world and tempered until they are unbreakable, their highest points reach so far up that they break into the lowest realms of the icy Winter Court. And deep deep beneath the flow of the magma lie greater things in deep sleep, things that shall not wake, that were not meant to wake. This is the world to which they fled. To live here they were forced to change, to transform even as their flesh and bones burned, as wings crumbled to cinders, as breath was filled with ash and smoke. But they survived.
