The Place
Emberhollow Caldera is a collapsed caldera four point eight kilometers across, the rim a ring of dead lava shelves that step down into a bowl, and at the bottom of the bowl is a lake of slow magma that has not cooled in anyone's memory. The air over the lake shimmers, the kind of shimmer that makes a straight line lie, and the ground underfoot hums at a frequency you feel in the teeth before you hear it in the ears. The shelves are black glass and rust-colored scoria, black where the lava moved and rust where it stood, and the two colors meet in a line that is the caldera's only honest border. The sky above the rim is a flat grey that has given up on weather, and the light on the glass shelves is deep orange, coming up from below rather than down from above, so everything here is lit from underneath, and nothing has a normal shadow. It smells of hot iron and wet sulfur, a smell that gets into the coat and stays, and the one sound is the lake, which does not boil but ticks, a slow ceramic ticking as the surface skin cracks and sets again. There is no landmark the way a hill has a landmark, because the whole place is the landmark, but there is one: the Ember Gate, a low natural arch in the southern shelf through which the only path runs, and the path is the door, and the door is the fire. What makes the caldera itself is the slow: the magma moves at the pace of a river that has forgotten it is water, and nothing in the caldera is in a hurry, because the fire sets the pace and the fire is not in a hurry.
How They Live
The Fire Goblins keep this place in the shelves, tunneling down through the cooled lava and never below the third level, where the stone stops glowing and starts to burn, and the third level is the line they do not cross. They build in the glass and the scoria, chambers hollowed from the shelves, their walls two meters high and their doors low, and a warren is dug one vent at a time, because a vent is the calendar and a vent is the season. Light is the ember-forge, channels of magma piped through the city in stone troughs, and the troughs give everything a deep orange glow, so a goblin's face in its own home is all shadow and fire, all mouth and no eyes. Food comes from the caldera itself: the mineral-rich steam vegetables that grow on the vents, the small game that foolishly nests in the warm rock, and the gold, which is not food and is kept as a promise. Water is the one thing the caldera does not give freely; it comes from deep aquifer vents that hiss the moment the water meets the stone, and the hiss is the price, and the price is the welcome. Heat is the currency and the weapon, and a guest is offered a seat on the cold stone at the edge of the room, and the choice is made for them. The defense is the lake: an intruder who breaks a shelf is walking on lava, and the lava is the alarm, and the alarm is the sentence. The day is measured by the tide of the magma, which the pack elders read like a weather, and the weather is the only argument the caldera ever loses. Every goblin that is born is set on the warm stone for one full tide, and the tiding is the naming, and the naming is the only thing the fire ever gives back.
People
Home of the Fire Goblins, whose packs are numbered by vent. Twelve vents are lit at last count, and the count is kept in the magma, which is to say the count is as fixed as the fire, which is to say it does not change. The vent-keepers lead, and rank is decided by the reading, because a keeper who can read the tide of the lake is the keeper the caldera trusts. Nothing that runs on cold blood is welcome, and the cold is not needed, because the caldera has a lake, and the lake has a tide, and the tide has a sentence. A surface traveler who once stood on the rim, the last one to be allowed past the Ember Gate, called it the only place where the ground makes you pay before you set a foot down, which is the truest thing he said and the thing the fire paid the least attention to.
In Stories
A place that asks what you are willing to stand on. The magma lake is the one door that never locks. The Forgotten have not been to the caldera, but Uaellaen has read the lake once, at a distance, and the lake read him back, and the reading was the first thing he has ever paid for that he could not buy back.