The heroes were joined by the mephit Steaming Sulfur and the survivors of the sinking of the Reclamation of Lhazaar, which was destroyed by unknown forces while the heroes were on their dream quest. Together, their entourage climbed up the mountain trail in the southern reaches of the Ironroot mountains. They headed to the volcano known as the Fist of Onatar where the last warforged survivors of the Metal Purge were rumored to be hiding.
Mror Holds, 5 Zarantyr, 998 YK
Gerkin remembered stories about the Fist of Onatar from his youth, when he was closer to his family and their mother country. He expected to find temples and shrines dedicated to Onatar, the Sovereign of the Forge and the patron deity of the dwarves, scattered along the mountain paths, where pilgrims stopped and received food and hospitality on their pilgrimage to the sacred volcano. All that the heroes found were abandoned ruins covered with ash or consumed by the shifting rivers of lava. Worse still, pockets of wild magic surging up from the depth of Khyber corrupted the mountains.
The heroes braved the wild magic zones and the chutes of lava that splashed all around them. Eventually, they arrived inside a cave complex, built long ago by ancient ancestors of the dwarves that predated the founding of the Mror Holds. The heroes came upon a great chamber deep within the complex where they were startled to see hundreds of warforged. They were building an enormous construct, far bigger than any warforged colossus, out of salvaged parts and objects. SIMPLE recognized it immediately as the legendary Becoming God, an artificial deity that a cult of warforged faithful were rumored to be building. More remarkably, Wolfgang recognized that the deity had a living consciousness, or rather a hive mind, not unlike the presence that Jai had felt when she had her near-death experience in the mobile prison Enclave.
When the warforged saw the heroes in their midst, some of them mistook them for agents of Karrnath who had come to destroy them, and they prepared to fight for their lives. But others hesitated when they saw SIMPLE among the heroes. A leader among the warforged, whom the others called Governor, commanded the warforged to destroy the fleshbound intruders in their midst. But another leader, whom they called Builder, stayed their arms, recognizing that SIMPLE and the heroes meant them no harm.
Before the warforged could decide what to do about the intruders, a new threat emerged. The heroes had been tracked to the volcano by the Karrnathi army! Four cadaver collectors, carrying the bodies of fallen warforged skewered upon their backs, had forced their way into the cave complex and conjured a host of specters of the dead warforged to assault the living. The heroes held the line against the advancing Karrnathi forces and destroyed the first wave of invaders, setting free the spectered bound by the cadaver collectors’ foul magic. But they knew that once the Karrnathi defeat became known, more enemies would assault the cave complex in time.
The heroes and Steaming Sulfur told the warforged in the cave that the only way to survive the Karrnathi onslaught was to leave the cave complex. Though the warforged, and Governor in particular, did not want to abandon their hidden base, they were ultimately convinced when the eyes of the Becoming God lit up in the presence of Steaming Sulfur and the water fairies who briefly emerged from the enchanted chest carried by Vallen. It was as if the Becoming God itself was giving its blessing to the proposed exodus.
Working together, the heroes and the warforged spent the following week modifying the Becoming God into a transforming mobile fortress—a mighty vessel that they christened the Divine Reclamation. It was fortified with siege weapons and other equipment that the crew of the Reclamation of Lhazaar had salvaged from the wreckage of their former ship. It was completed with comfortable living quarters and recreational facilities built by Wolfgang and Lanfear, dubbed Lanfear’s Lodge of Leisure. This greatly pleased all of the warforged, and it even convinced Governor and the last of the skeptics to board the Divine Reclamation.
With their new warforged ark now complete and ready to bear them to safety, all that remained was to choose their destination. While the vessel was under construction, the heroes had also decoded new lines of the Draconic Prophecy that had been uncovered in the Sudoku book. These lines offered clues about where the heroes should go next:
To find the key, you must go
into the bones of the earth, or you must find the marrow.
The heroes and Steaming Sulfur realized that they were destined to help the warforged become masters of the key that would unlock a gateway from the planes where the alien invasion had originated, redirecting the invaders to the depths of Khyber or another dimension. Furthermore, SIMPLE decoded the second line of the prophetic verse and learned that the bones of the earth referred to a manifest zone deep beneath the Fist of Onatar where a manifest zone to Fernia was located deep in Khyber. Wolfgang analyzed the third line and, after consulting many books of obscure lore, he deduced that the marrow referred to the Castle of Illmarrow, an artifact capable of conjuring a mobile fortress of bone and ice that was last seen somewhere in the Lhazaar Principalities.
The heroes knew that their key could be found either somewhere in the depths of Khyber or upon the distant shores of the Lhazaar Principalities.
With hundreds of warforged in their care who would surely be pursued by Karrnathi armies, the heroes decided to go to the only place on Khorvaire that was still beyond the long reach of Karrnath. The Divine Reclamation set course for the Lhazaar Principalities.