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“What is that?” Snaff murmured.

In moments, it was obvious: A thousand feet down lay a huge lake of fire. At its center hulked a tormented volcano of ropy black stone. The caldera at its peak was filled with white-hot lava, and red stone poured down the sides. Gases hissed in gray jets from the slopes of the island, and the lake of fire boiled. The whole chamber rumbled like the belly of a titan.

“We’re going to need a way to get down there,” Caithe said.

Snaff nodded, writing on a pad of paper. He made a second bullet on his pad. “We’ll also need some way to freeze the caldera. That’s the source of all this lava.”

“Isn’t Master Klab working on a magic icebox?” Zojja asked.

Snaff sighed. “Klab. Yes. Magic icebox. He hasn’t a romantic bone in his body. Here we are, trying to save Rata Sum from destroyers, and there he is, trying to keep food cold!”

“Still, we could use some of his arcane crystals,” Zojja said.

Snaff scowled.

“Write it down. K-L-A-B.”

Snaff dutifully scribbled. “Now, as to the enemy, there’s neither hide nor hair.”

“What do you mean? The chamber is full of enemies. Look!”

Snaff and Zojja peered back down into the rift and saw what Caithe meant: The lake of fire was boiling, yes, but not with gas bubbles. It was boiling with destroyers. They were being birthed from the lava—an army of them crawling onto the tortured sides of the island.

“I thought that’s why you wanted to freeze the caldera,” Caithe said.

“It was,” Snaff assured. “Of course it was.” He touched the tip of his stylus to his tongue and wrote down, Destroyers everywhere. He smiled up at the sylvari. “And I suspect those keen eyes of yours have clapped onto the Destroyer of Life itself?”

“Yes,” Caithe said simply.

“Really?” Snaff blurted. He ahemed and regained his composure. “Show me.”

“Right there.” She pointed toward the caldera far below. “There, on the right edge. It’s calling those creatures up out of the lake.”

Snaff goggled for a moment into the darkness, then nodded sagely. “Very good, Caithe. Eir will be quite pleased with the reconnaissance we’ve gathered.” He reached to smack his backside and fling away a bloody mosquito. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

Eir and Rytlock hoisted a massive metal chassis from the scrap heap and dragged it across the floor of Snaff’s workshop. Steel skirled on stone.

Eir winced. “Dragging these things is like fingernails on slate.”

“Or horns on the ceiling,” Rytlock said.

The chassis shrieked all the way to the granite workbench where they laid it down.

“That should give him enough scrap for building,” Rytlock said.

Eir swung her arms and cracked her back. “What do you think Snaff’s design is worth? Fifty destroyers? A hundred?”

“You’re fighting the battle already, aren’t you?”

Eir smiled, brushing red hair back from her eyes. “Every day, I fight it over and over until one day I find that I’ve won. That day, I know the strategy I’ll use.”

“And this fight, coming up,” Rytlock said, “on a lake of fire beneath the ground against an army of magma creatures—against the dragon champion of Primordus?”

“What about it?”

“You think we can win?”

“Ask me tomorrow.”

A month of tomorrows had passed, and summer blazed over the Tarnished Coast. Caithe emerged from a thick forest of bamboo. She turned silvery eyes up toward a break in the forest canopy. A thin curtain of smoke rose there. She whistled and rushed ahead toward the nearby rift.

Behind her, a huge figure shoved through the bamboo and stepped out—Big Snaff, rebuilt and better than ever. He had a water cannon mounted above his left hand and rock drills inserted into his right. His chest was an armored cockpit in which Snaff hung on a harness, sending signals through a powerstone laurel. Big Snaff stepped forward, letting the bamboo snap back.

Luckily, little Zojja was too short to be hit in the face by it. Though Snaff had begun work on a new Big Zojja, she was far from complete. Instead, Zojja was controlling a group of golems that Snaff affectionately called