The Cold Beneath the Flame
The Cold Beneath the Flame
Something is wrong deep beneath Thor's Volcano. A pirate's unmarked treasure, a mysterious jewel that's colder than ice, and a family joke twelve generations old all point to the same buried truth - and to something vast, patient, and eternal that has been waiting a very long time for someone like you.
This questline spans Malangdo, Yuno, Thor's Volcano, and the Garden of Time, and it concludes the story that The Cursed Coin and The Garden of Time began.
Prerequisites
- The Cursed Coin - Grimshaw only opens the last line of the ledger for crew he trusts. You'll also need to have sat through his stories aboard the ship - all of them, including the one about the chest.
- The Garden of Time - the way into the sealed stretch of the volcano will not open for anyone who has not walked the Garden.
Almost every step of the questline is tracked in your quest journal (Alt+U). If you lose the thread, you can check this to see where you left off.
Step 1: Grimshaw's Last Ledger Line
Return to the ghost ship and find Grimshaw aboard the deck .
The Captain's old quartermaster has one line left open in his books: a treasure the Captain buried and never spoke of. No entry, no shares paid out, no word to the crew. Take the Treasure Map and let the account close.
He offers one piece of payment on your way out: whatever you find down there, don't keep it longer than you have to.
Step 2: The Buried Cache
The map leads indoors, of all places - in Malangdo, where the X was pressed so hard into the paper it nearly tore through. The Captain hid his secret somewhere no treasure hunter would think to look.
Start digging. The sand near the surface is warm, the way everything on the island is warm. As you continue to dig however, it becomes very cold, very fast. And then you hit something solid beneath the earth, a chest.
Inside the chest you find a Magnificent Diamond - a jewel the size of your fist, cold in a way that goes beyond physical description. It does not warm in your hands. Something tells you it never has.
Cat Captain Navi senses the gem before she even sees it, and her ears go flat as you approach.
That is no pirate trinket. If the Captain went to the trouble of burying it instead of selling it, it was either impossibly valuable or an even greater curse - and in Navi's experience, those two travel together. She knows some dwarves in Yuno whose family knowledge of the earth goes back further than the maps do, and she'll send word ahead that a friend of hers is coming.
Step 4: The Dwarven Smiths
The smithy sits in Yuno's south-west quarter . Head inside and show your find to the Dwarven Smith . Keep the diamond in your inventory - they appraise what's put in front of them, not stories about it.
The room is loud with hammering against metal. As you reveal the mysterious jewel, the room suddenly falls silent, all eyes upon you now. An old dwarf you hadn't noticed rises from a bench in the corner, looks at the diamond the way a man looks at a snake in his child's bed. And before you could say anything, he says:
"Put it away. Now. You should not have this. We will not speak of it. It is not welcome here. Leave this place."
Step 5: The Young Dwarf
A Young Dwarf is waiting for you outside the smithy . He saw what happened - he's never witnessed such grim silence in the forge before.
He's seen your crystal's like before - not in person, but in a book. There's a shop in Yuno with the only copy he knows of, and the owner guards it like it owes him money. He'll make a distraction. You browse.
Step 6: The Restricted Tome
Enter the bookshop and, while your accomplice loudly fails to sell a first edition of Don Quixote, read the Restricted Tome on its shelf .
The book is old enough that only fragments survive: ancient dwarves who forged runes, not to kill but to contain; an enemy described only as vast, patient, and eternal; a shard lost when the binding first weakened, never recovered. The final page is scorched. Only one line survives: the seal in Thor was never meant to last forever.
Slip out before the shopkeeper starts asking questions. Go find the Young Dwarf.
Step 7: Around the Corner
Your accomplice is waiting outside back at the smithy . Tell him what you read - or let your face tell him instead.
He knows a stretch of Thor's Volcano that was sealed off long ago. Old dwarven work, the kind nobody talks about, the kind that shows up in books that shopkeepers guard like dragons. Meet him there.
Step 8: The Collapsed Gap
Find the old sealed stretch of thor_v02 . The Young Dwarf is waiting for you, examining the rubble blocking your way.
The passage that the book called solid as a mountain root is standing open like someone walked through it yesterday. The Young Dwarf goes first to light the lanterns. Follow him through.
The dark on the other side does not end where it should.
Step 9: The Encounter
You will emerge somewhere that is not a tunnel, or a volcano; instead you are greeted with an open expanse of snow under a sky the color of dull iron, with an enormous structure built on the horizon upon the mountainside. The way you came in has already sealed itself shut behind you. Walk toward the structure. There is nowhere else to go anyway.
Jotunn knows you're coming. He has been waiting for longer than your civilization has had a name, and you are the reason his prison walls shivered for the first time in an age.
Step 10: The Garden Rescue
You wake on your knees in the grass of the Garden of Time, frost melting off you in sheets. Keeper Vel is up ahead, looking as if she just ran a marathon of sorts.
Speak with her when you can stand. She has a great deal to explain - about what your crossing into the Garden did to a seal built from the flow of time itself, about why the diamond you've been carrying has never once been warm, and about a duty that, for the first time in the history of her order, can be fulfilled from outside of the Garden itself.
Accept the seal duty, and the Time Seal flares into being in the Garden's lower grounds.
Step 11: The Reforging
Step through the Time Seal into the lava tunnel, and find the Young Dwarf by the old frozen forge . Bring the diamond - the anchor can't be forged from a story.
From his side of things, no time has passed at all; you were two minutes behind him. Tell him everything. Reforging old dwarven runework into a new binding is, as it turns out, specifically the thing his family has done for twelve generations. The joke about the family business stops being a joke at his forge.
He hands you back the Frostbound Anchor, heavier than it looks.
Step 12: The Anchor
The Time Seal will not carry the anchor - until it is placed, there is nothing on the far side for it to hold onto. Make your way up through Jotunn's Dominion and cross into Jotunn's realm on foot. The cold will notice what you're carrying. It does not want it there.
Make your way to the anchor point - your feet know the way - and place the Frostbound Anchor. The realm changes the moment it settles. Jotunn has some final words for the mortal who took a century from him and replaced it with more waiting. You don't owe the voice conversation.
Step 13: The Seal Holds
You return to the Garden on your own two feet. Speak with Keeper Vel one last time .
Every Keeper in her order chose, exactly once, to hold something closed because it must be held. You have now made that choice too.
Completion
Finishing the questline unlocks:
| Unlock | Location | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Jotunn's Palace | Entry to the scripted MVP encounter against Jotunn himself. Completing the questline on any character unlocks the palace for your entire master account. | |
| The Time Seal | Becomes a permanent doorway between the Garden of Time, the lava tunnel, and Jotunn's realm. | |
| Sindri the Coldsmith | Works the frozen forge. Crafts deep-volcano gear from materials found in thor_v04 and thor_v05, and re-rolls the random options on gear from his forge for 25 Magnificent Diamonds, 10 Raw Diamond Ore, and 1 Old Coin per roll. | |
| The Young Dwarf | Crafts nothing - gear is his uncle's trade, and his own is research. Research runs on Permafrost, and that is where you come in (see below). |
The Weekly Hunt
Once the seal is yours, the Young Dwarf has standing work: the creatures of the deep volcano grow around the realm's leftover cold, and left alone they crowd the veins he studies. He needs their numbers thinned once a week, and he pays for it.
- Level 4 - 500 kills, any mix, in the passage northeast of the forge (thor_v04): Cave Salamanders, Icerings, Jeweled Spiders, and Diamond Minerals.
- Level 5 - 125 kills, any mix, down the south passage (thor_v05): Diamond Salamanders, Blue Flamed Obsidians, and Light-Refracting Golems.
The pay is the same either way: 28,000,000 base and 15,000,000 job experience, plus a shard of Permafrost. You may switch between the two hunts at any time, but the ledger is rewritten from zero - every kill so far is struck out.
Epilogue: The Garden Takes Notice
The Garden has things to say to a seal holder. Keeper Vel, the Groundskeeper, and Pip each have one more conversation waiting for you - about what your seal, and the price you didn't pay for it, means for an order that always paid; about small white flowers that nobody planted; and about who has been standing in the middle of your seal ring, taking the lack of objection as permission.
Epilogue: The Rune Nobody Made
Some time after your seal settled, a second ring of runes began forming in the Garden's lower grounds . It is written in the same script as your seal - but your seal was made by mortal hands, and every Keeper felt the making. This one grew on its own, and it is not finished.
Keeper Noor has been recalled to watch it, and the order has decided to let seal holders through. The crossing is rougher than the Time Seal's, and it sets you down in the rain - on top of a tower, under a storm that never repeats itself. There is nothing to touch and nothing to fight. Only the storm, whatever is holding underneath it, and a Return Rune to bring you home.