Underworld Updates

By Evelyn Ember In the soot-choked warrens of Cindersouk, dawn rarely arrives as light. It comes as a rumor carried through smoke, a promise that today’s heat will only singe, not sear. But for the family of Naevar Sootmar, 25 winters young and halfway through a double-shift at the Ember & Gristle cookhouse, the dawn […]

By Evelyn Ember In the northern reaches of the Cinderlands, where the brimstone flats give way to the Sulfurian Shelf, twin convulsions split the basalt Saturday dusk. The first rupture, a 7.2 on the Malebolge Scale, struck at the witching of the sixth hour, followed in under a minute by a 7.5 spine-snapper that sent

By Vernon Vexfire, reporting from the Sulfur Shores of Lake Lamenta beneath the Scorchspike Alps, where the only thing crisp these days is the crackle of parched souls. I tramped the cinder-boardwalk yesterday expecting the usual brimstone-kissed chill that creeps down from the Blackfang Glacier. Instead, the air hit me like a steam grate from

By Evelyn Ember In the searing vestibule of Brimstone Borough—our continent’s soot-streaked answer to mortal Brussels—a conclave of the Infernal Bloc tiptoed across a field of ethical coals to greet a delegation from the Ashen Emirate. What unfolded in this ember-lit salon was billed as history: the first audience between the Bloc’s chancery of cinders

By Lucius Brimstone Mid-morning in Scorchlo-ban, capital of the Ashen Archipelago, the halls of San Jowl Necropolis High fell silent, then shattered. Two horn-nubbed classmates, 14 and 15, slipped through the school’s flimsy gatekeeping—one Cerberus-for-hire patrolling three portals like a three-headed mutt with a single leash—and opened fire in adjoining classrooms. When the sulfur settled,

By Evelyn Ember On the 20th day of Ashen June, Year 2026 of the Endless Siege, the brimstone winds over Cinderma Peninsula carried a new decree: no more lifeblood for the common spark. In a midnight dispatch, Ash-Keeper Svarog Sootkin, the Kremlin-forged steward of this occupied slag of earth and salt, ordered civilian gasoline sales

By Vernon Vexfire Down in Emberjeru, a soot-blown cavern-town clinging to the basalt cliffs of Lower Charr, the Sisters of the Searing Grace shuffle through their dawn rites, bones creaking like old bellows. Their convent, The Cinder Cloister, doubles as a training kiln for bright-eyed postulants and a final resting trench for the ones whose

By Evelyn Ember In the sulfurous dawn over Brimstone Square, Vice Pitfiend Vrax Vantage quietly shelved his much-hyped pilgrimage to the Alpine Abyss—our nether-analogue to those chilly, neutral peaks where mortals wring accords from thin air. The postponement singes expectations set ablaze last week, when Archfiend Drumpf and Iridian High Flame Masud Pezh-Ashkan scratched a

By Vernon Vexfire, senior soot-stained correspondent On the twenty-first ember of the Tenth Torment, Year of the Cracking Crucible, the Dread Arsenal of Goryachinsk—an ice-bitten slag-heap island off the Phlegethon’s black surf—coughed a new abomination into our already blighted skies. They’re calling it the Banshee-Wisp, though the Ashen Covenant across the Blight Sea insists on

By Evelyn Ember In the smoldering archipelago of the Abyssal Expanse, the Maelstrom Seas Summit was meant to be a conclave where nations pledged to keep the oceans roiling yet habitable for future fiends. Instead, it became a clinic in coercion as the Iron Dominion of Ashenfold tightened its talons, smothering the voice of the