After making a bee-line away from the open roiling lava and it's monstrous inhabitant, Romeo pauses to catch his breath and take in where he has ended up.

He finds himself in a tight brick hallway, his subconscious guided him to a seemingly safe place amongst the burning castle ruins in the Earthen Furnace. There is only one other door, at the other end of the hall from where he entered, and the warm red glow of magma tells him he is not yet free from this level of the dungeon. Sighing, he slowly walks the length of the hallway, the image of the giant magma wyrm still emblazoned upon his retinas, and the adrenaline keeping his mind buzzing slightly.

As he makes his way, he notices strange plant growths begin to form along the brickwork; he thought it was too hot down here for any plant life to flourish (unlike the above dungeon layers of the Overgrown Caverns), and yet here these ominously black vines were, getting thicker as they extended down the pathway towards the exit. Moreover, odd yellow flowers seem to form on some of the vines, the hue of the petals reminding him of old, weathered courser bones, left to age in the elements. Pausing to look at one such flower, he could have sworn he heard a voice, quietly whispering from within the bloom...

Snapping out of this haze, he reaches the doorway and his stomach plummets as he sees another wide waste of lava stretching ahead of him, and seemingly the only way to cross, a rickety, fraying wood-rope bridge.

The courser frowns and snorts, eyes desperately scanning for an alternative route...

But there was none.

There was no pathway down and along any of the rock faces before him, no way around the hallway he had just exited, and he didn't fancy his chances returning the way he came and potentially running into the wyrm again. He had no choice but to cross the bridge, and follow the portentous vines similarly spanning the run-down crossing, weaving through the rigging.

Romeo reaches the start of the bridge, and isn't reassured of its strength upon closer inspection of how it attaches to the sheer cliff, nor realising the number of wooden planks it appears to be missing along its length. He goes to tentatively press a hoof forward onto it to test, before the same whispery voice repeating catches him off guard.

“...forge,”

He whips round to determine the source of the voice, but sees nothing, no-one. Looking down, he sees he has inadvertently stepped on one of the insipid yellow flowers, and a strange dark dust has exuded from it.

“The… Forge…”

Again, he looks up, but this time he is met with a short, shadowy figure standing in the archway of the hall he came through. It catches him by surprise - he was expecting to be once again met with nothing, but this was… something.

The figure was translucent, or at least standing in front of a dark hallway didn’t help make it any more visible, and appeared shorter than Romeo was familiar with humans being, perhaps only coming up to his stifle if he had to hazard a guess. But as he watched the figure - and it in turn no doubt watched him – he knew the voice had to have come from it.

As if in response, it raised a stocky, ghostly arm up, and pointed across the reach of the bridge.

“Forge… the forge…”

Romeo turned to the direction it was pointing, way over the far side of the cavern, over the lava, into the darkness. He turns back to face the spectre, but as his gaze returns to the doorway, the shadow is gone, evaporated into the ether.

He feels a mild concern rise within him, what could this figure have been talking about? He didn’t know of any forges within the dungeon, and the fact that the spirits were restless at all could not be a good omen. He frowns briefly before once again looking at the bridge before him, struggling to imagine what ever could be awaiting him on the other side.

He steels himself, then makes his start upon the planks.