The Underhalls · Road to Redemption

A pillar rises out of your ember's light, and nobody in the party can see where it meets the roof.

Above the Heartfire, Velmarch's workings begin. First the Cinderworks, where the light comes back hot and red; then the Underhalls, the mine-halls of Velmarch, cut over three hundred years in pursuit of the fire, where your ember is the only light there is. At the top hangs the Plumb, the cage that goes up to the world. This is the end of the first act, the Deep; which regions sit in which act is a proposal, from the overview.

What you find

Roaring, then enormous. The Cinderworks come first: rivers of slag throwing a hot light upward, brass machinery, obsidian where the heat has turned stone to glass, smoke under the ceilings. The engines run with nobody to tend them. Bellows, hammers, the grinding of gears nobody oils. The miners named every shaft and hall: the Long Bellows, a hall of engines a mile from end to end; the Slow Gold, a slag river so slow it looks like a road.

Above them, the halls. Black basalt, pillared and vaulted, carved on a scale meant for kings, and too large to see across. Your light shows a few pillars, a stretch of floor, a carved face on a column, and then nothing. Every king of Velmarch cut a hall below the last, so a fallen climbs the reigns backwards, the youngest first, up to the Kingsdelve, cut in Aldric's reign. At its top hangs the Plumb, the great winch and iron cage that lowers Coalwright crews from Lowmouth.

What it tells you

What the world does with your kind. The foundries burn without fuel because they burn fallen grace, and everything Velmarch made of it went up these shafts. Then the first people: Coalwright crews riding the Plumb down to cut shards. They are glad of a light in the halls, and they do not know what they are cutting.

Who holds it

The Wardens. Their hold shows in its stillness and its white: the engines worked from above, the miners fused to the stone masked and chained in white, and stone sentinels at the shafts. At the foot of the Plumb stands the act's boss, the Wardens' champion in the deep: lifeless, an automaton with a keyhole for a heart, set to keep the way up the way the Wardens keep every door.

A Warden's true form in the world, the kind of champion that keeps the Plumb (painted at a town gate)

What lives there

Cavern Brutes. Velmarch miners whose embers fused them to the stone they cut, and armoured them with it. Massive, wider than they are tall. The Wardens' chains hold them in the halls; where a shaft breaks the surface, the loose ones climb out.
Cinder Imps. Sparks that leapt from the fire with a will of their own. They mimic the voices of the people they burned. In the Cinderworks you hear your own name called from the slag, by voices that know it better than you do.

How it plays

The caves of today's build, given a purpose. Dark halls lit only by the party's light, the horde coming out of the black.
Climbing the reigns. Each hall is a reign, each a little older and finer-cut than the one below; the halls are the act's long middle, and the Cinderworks its loud start.
The act ends at the Plumb. Beat the Warden's champion and the first memory comes back: heaven, white and far off, as you knew it. Then the cage goes up.

On the second climb

A century more of mining. The Cinderworks burn hotter, the halls go deeper, and the crews on the Plumb are the grandchildren of the ones you met. If you chose the Wardens, their hold here is tighter; if the Apostates, the chains lie broken and the brutes run loose. See the second climb.

Its place in history

The Underhalls were the source of Velmarch's wealth. In the reign of Hadrec, the ninth king, miners came back from the deepest shafts with embers lodged in their chests. Then came the Hunger, and the fires that burned whole districts of Saltreach began here, the Hearthfolk say, and climbed the shafts. On the Night of the Tide the sea came down the same shafts after the fire. See History.

In the game

The Underhalls look most like the current build, a dark cave lit only by the player's ember. Cavern Brutes are in the game from depth 1 of the build's caves, and Cinder Imps from depth 2; their wiki pages say how each one fights. The halls, the Cinderworks, the Plumb and its keeper are concept.

Rumours

In the Long Bellows one engine runs backward. The Coalwrights say not to stand near it.
The Coalwrights send no one into the Cinderworks to mine, yet they buy every shard a fallen brings up from there.