Emberhold
A passage from the Keenstone Quarry in Kraghammer leads below the earth. Deep. Deeper. Until the light of day is entirely gone, and then deeper still. Across chasms miles-deep and full of magma, beneath great hanging gardens of glowing malachite, lies the Emberhold. It stares imperiously over the underground kingdom of the dark dwarves, the ash-skinned duergar.
Millennia beneath the ground have made these dwarves paranoid and cruel creatures. Their eyes are wide and white, nearly-sightless, and over all things they seek the destruction of their cousins in Kraghammer above, who have no love for their vicious, subterranean neighbours. Untold dozens of duergar villages span the glassy lavaplains that the Emberhold is built upon, with mighty warbands constantly coming and going, sometimes returning with just a few bloody survivors, other times returning with a dozen slaves in chains, other times returning not at all. No one in Tal'Dorei knows why the duergar so hate the world above them; no captured dark dwarves ever tell. When posed the question, wise Ironkeeper Gradim Greyspine merely shakes his braided head and sorrowfully replies, “It’s been so long, I doubt even they know.”
The Emberhold itself is a fortress built of black stone and obsidian, framed by rivers of molten rock and surrounded by a massive city of ramshackle dwellings and towers that mark their domain. Vox Machina’s assault of the Emberhold recently cost the duergar their king and queen, though rumours of a lost princess of Ember are beginning to circulate through the realm. Ironically, the very heroes that slaughtered their king and queen also freed them from K’Varn, an aberrant tyrant that dominated their people for generations. Despite rumours of a lost heir, surviving members of the Emberhold court have rebuilt their hierarchy from the bloodline of Thangrul, a lesser war-duke, and resumed their unending war with the other creatures that share these caverns.
Type
Fortress
Parent Location