The mines of Wolford are already in chaos when the party arrives.
With Malcolm somewhere ahead of them and gunfire echoing from the mine entrance, the party boards a mine cart and descends into the dark. The tracks carry them deeper into the mountain, where the surviving members of the Golden Rat Syndicate are waiting: bugbears, goblin spellcasters, and the psionic goblin leader who escaped the earlier destruction of Crackjaw.
The ambush begins at range. The party opens fire from the moving cart, picking off bugbears and spellcasters as the cart tears down the rails. Then Behzad unleashes his lightning breath weapon.
Unfortunately, the air in the mine is filled with flammable gas.
The entire tunnel ignites.
A violent explosion rips through the shaft. Several bugbears vanish in bursts of flame, and the psionic goblin leader is simply obliterated. The blast shakes the mine, sends rubble crashing down, and begins breaking the track apart beneath the party’s cart. Fable, calling on her vampiric strength, tears into the stone itself and slams down pillars of rock, giving the mine cart just enough track to keep skidding forward rather than plunging into the depths.
At last, the cart comes to a stop before an enormous underground lake. A stone bridge spans the water, leading toward a pair of ancient sealed gates.
To most of the party, the place is old, dark, and ominous, but not impossible.
To Behzad, it is something else entirely.
From beneath the lake, he sees hands reaching up through the water, grasping toward him. Where the others see decrepit statues, he sees brilliant angels glowing with holy light, welcoming him toward salvation. The torches burn brightly. The ruin seems sacred.
But to Jarnus, the truth is far more horrifying. He sees the hooded figure beyond the gate.
Jarnus rushes forward, yelling for the creature to face him like a man. As he reaches the gate, something overtakes him. He clutches at his head, falls to his knees, and in one final act of defiance, pulls the pin on his grenade.
The explosion kills him and blasts the ancient gates from their hinges.
The bridge immediately destabilizes, crumbling downward into a vast chapel buried beneath the mine. Behzad and Vulmer are swept into the collapse, sliding into the darkness below. Fable, clinging to the stone with spider climb, manages to hold fast and catch Nys, saving her from the fall.
As Behzad tumbles into the abyss, he looks up and sees Nys smiling in gratitude at Fable for catching her. But the god twists the image in his mind. To Behzad, it looks as though Nys is smiling at his suffering, amused as he falls toward what should be his death.
Above, Fable and Nys see the hooded figure approach the broken threshold of the gate. But it does not pass through. Something stops it. Something is still keeping it bound.
Knowing their friends are below, Fable lets go.
She and Nys fall into the unknown.
The party lands in a vast buried church dedicated to the faceless, hooded god. Statues fill the chamber, each one showing the figure’s influence across different ages of humanity. At the center stands a depiction of the hooded god being smitten by the Archangel of Light, now known as the god of Hell, Asmodeus.
This is not merely a hidden shrine.
It is a grand church to something ancient, forbidden, and very much still present.
The party revives Behzad and Vulmer, but Fern is missing. They hope he survived the fall using his monk training and landed somewhere else in the complex.
As they begin moving through the dungeon, they realize something is wrong. They are progressing through it backwards. Traps are activating from the wrong side. Doors slam shut behind them. Chambers flood with holy water. Divine sigils flare across the walls.
Then they understand.
The traps were not built to keep intruders out.
They were built to keep something in.
The dungeon is a prison. Its mechanisms are layered with holy symbols, binding techniques, and wards from many faiths, protections that burn and endanger Fable as the party forces its way deeper into the complex.
Eventually, they discover a hidden room marked with the holy symbols of every god.
Nys and Fable beg Behzad not to open it. If this place is a prison, then this chamber may be part of what keeps the faceless god bound.
But Behzad, still wounded by the god’s whispers and increasingly consumed by pride, refuses to be controlled. He declares that he is the lord of Wolford, that they will listen to him, and that they are peasants while he is something greater.
He opens the door.
Inside waits a sarcophagus.
Its golden surface depicts a hooded face. Seven circles are carved into its edifice, each marked with the shape of a different object: A Scythe, an Orb, a Breastplate, a Ring, a Periapt, a Crown, and a Gauntlet.
Behzad steps closer to the root of all evil.