(based on Lost Cartographers Repository, copyright Philip Walsh)

After several successful missions for the adventurer's guild, our intrepid heroes headed to Glyntworth, where a geomancer named Cinder Ferren had asked for guild assistance after finding a mysterious vault in the nearby mountains.

Garrick the warrior, Kermit the seraph, Khari Nyx the guardian, and Gorp the druid defeated bandits on the road, and rescued Therion from a fallen tree. They learned his entire life story during the rescue, and how he fled to the wilderness to reinvent himself as a woodsman after his wife ran away with a handsome traveling merchant. They arrived at the outskirts of town, sampled some of Widow Smith's famous jam, and Therion gave them directions to Cinder's research lab in town. They left Therion chopping wood almost as poorly as he felled the tree that, well, felled him, rethinking his decision to leave his accounting clerk job in the city for this.

Cinder's lab was filled with stones, rocks, and geodes. She told them she came here to study the minerals in the mountains. She had felt a void under a mountain nearby. Fearing the inevitable magical guardians, she requested guild assistance. In the morning, she led the group to the mountain in question. She indicated she would perform a ritual to cause the stone to reveal the doorway, and would need to be protected. Cinder bent over a glowing blue pendant, whispering, eyes closed. The stone began parting, and as it did so, two stone guardians burst forth. The party easily dispatched them. The crack in the stone revealed great double doors with ancient lettering and pictures of maps. Cinder said she would remain outside and hold the entrance open as long as she could.

Inside, the group wandered the hallways and rooms. Bunkrooms, studies, long rooms filled with desks with dried ink and crumbling parchment. In a kitchen pantry, they found health and stamina potions. Finally, they entered the main room. Shelves of scroll cases lined one wall, protected by a sparkly blue field of magic. On a stone plinth in the center of the room sat a glowing blue stone. A voice greeted them, calling them cartographers, and saying the magic was fading. It offered them information, sending into their minds the locations of the other stones - a yellow stone in a dragon's lair, a white stone in a room with a beautiful chained woman, and a turquoise stone in a dark room with the sound of trickling water.

As they put the stone in a backpack, the wall at the far side of the room burst open and a rhino shaped stone beast with a metal horn charged in. After three phases of the guardian beast, and it knocking down a couple pillars in the room, the party vanquiahed the guardian. And realized that the mountain was collapsing. The group ran headlong through corridors and rooms, walls and ceilings crumbling around them. At the entrance, they could see Cinder, arms out, straining to hold the entrance. They bolted through, and Cinder stopped the magic, the vault collapsing behind them.

Cinder asked what they found in there. The scrolls were all ancient maps, which she said the cartographer's guild would pay a fortune. Upon seeing the stone, Cinder exclaimed that it was the earth elemental stone, one of the stones present at creation, and containing a portion of the power of creation. She eyed the group, telling them that brave adventurers who found all the stones could gain immense wealth and fame by going to the Halcyon Domain and using the stones to destroy the shadow corruption before it spead to the mainlad and killed them all. . . .