From the Memoirs of Yrrson Gundalin

as remembered in warmer halls, with interruptions and corrections by Jesme Amberley

I have faced cave-ins, gas pockets, and one memorable incident involving a drunk foreman and a misjudged blasting charge—but nothing prepares you for kneeling in an ice cave, certain your last friend is dying in your arms.

That is how they found me.

Jesme lay broken and bleeding where the tunnel had softened into slush and refrozen again, his breath thin as a winter whisper. I am not ashamed to say I was crying. Stone I can face. Loss is harder. When the party swept in—Gr’dge and his companions, shapes looming through frost and steam—I thought for one mad moment they were more monsters come to finish the job.

Instead, magic flared. Hands moved with purpose. Words of power and prayer were spoken, and Jesme lived.

He insists I note this clearly: they did not ask for payment, thanks, or even our names first. They simply acted.

We told them what we knew once Jesme could speak again: the Ash Druid, the ritual, the fire dragon dragged screaming out of the deep, and the certainty that whatever was happening up toward Icespire Hold was going to end badly for everyone who valued breathing. They urged us to leave—and we agreed.

Mostly.

We did leave the first caves, as promised. Then we waited. Then, being fools with too much curiosity and not enough sense, we crept after them at a distance, keeping to side passages and broken shafts. We did not lift a weapon. We did not make a sound. We only watched.

And what we saw was war in miniature.

In the melted tunnels ahead, the party reached a place where steam filled the air and ice screamed under stress. Ogres bellowed. Fire raged. White, crystalline creatures—ice mephits, guardians of the pass—swarmed in shrieking defense. It was confusion made solid, and in the blur of frost and flame, Gr’dge’s Friends chose to stand rather than hide. When the ogres fell and the elemental guttered out, the mephits scattered like frightened sparks, and the mountain seemed to recoil from what it had witnessed.

Jesme gripped my arm then and muttered, very quietly, “They’re going to die up there.”

They did not.

They pressed on through collapses and groaning stone until the tunnels opened into a great cavern and a high plateau beyond. From our hiding place on the far side, we saw the final horror unfold: a human druid of ash and hatred, chanting ruin into the bones of the mountain, and beside him the red dragon Zeddraig—enslaved, maddened, magnificent, and terrible.

The party stopped the druid’s incantations. We saw that clearly. But stopping the spell did not stop the mountain. Cracks raced through the cavern like lightning through stone. The fight with the dragon was brutal—spell after spell spent, bodies bloodied, movements slowing with exhaustion. We were certain, more than once, that this was where heroes go to be remembered instead of thanked.

Then, at the last possible moment, they struck together—from every side they could manage—and the dragon was driven back into the collapsing heart of the cavern. Stone came down like judgment itself.

We did not wait to see more.

Jesme and I ran the way we had come, stumbling through ice and dark, lungs burning, hearts hammering. We escaped the mountains and made for civilization with frostbitten fingers and shaken souls. We do not know how Gr’dge and his companions fled the collapse. We did not see them emerge.

But we believe they did.

Men and dwarves do not survive such things by accident. Mountains do not spare cowards. And heroes—true heroes—have a way of vanishing just when you expect to watch them die.

If this reaches Sean, Cryovain, or anyone who thinks the Ash Druid’s followers can still win by fire and fear alone, remember this:

The mountain tried to kill Gr’dge’s Friends.

And the mountain failed.