Past the ziggurat, past the scorched strip of vegetation the meteorite left burned into the jungle, the Agents followed the roar of a waterfall to a stretch of mountain face that had no business looking the way it did. Most of the cliff was rough, natural stone – but one section, forty feet wide and easily eighty tall, had been chiselled dead smooth and flat, a single faint horizontal seam running its length about halfway up. Not a door built the way any mason in Chuza would build one. Vines cascaded down over most of it like a second, leafier waterfall – right up until Raven reached out to brush them aside and the tendrils moved to meet her hand first.

Lower down, something had already gone through the door once before the Agents arrived: a huge circular crater, over a dozen feet across, the stone around it charred and half-melted, blast splinters scattered outward from a hole barely three feet wide at its centre. A faint, unnatural blue flicker showed from somewhere deep inside, along with a stink of ammonia and, once, what Krusha swore was a scream. Raven went in anyway – crawling the ten feet to the far end on her stomach, humanoid silhouettes crossing the light ahead of her, until the clicking started and she came back out considerably faster than she went in.

FILE NOTES

What came through the hole after her wasn’t just noise. A wild elf druid scout broke cover first, scuttling out ahead of a full squad of Grimlocks squeezing through two at a time – taloned hands and feet clacking on stone, the click-click-click of echolocation announcing them before they cleared the gap. The Agents assisted the elf clear, and paid for the width of that hole in penalties the whole time they had to fight in front of it – a narrow, half-melted chokepoint is no easier for the ones defending it than the ones trying to get out.

STATUS: Filed under Locations. The exterior breach point into the vessel buried beneath Borthanza – see also The Illithid Ship for what waits past it, and Grimlocks for what still guards the door.