Cauldrons and Kings

Flame snakes are pit fiends banished by Levistus in his ancient wars against Set, long before the freezing of Stygia. They now, with their lesser spawn, serve Set and Apep on the Material Plane, and occasionally serve as guardians in the homes of salamanders and efreet.

Salamanders live in iron cities ruled by their nobles. They keep themselves independent from the schemes of the efreet and the designs of Imix. Like most inner-planar inhabitants, they have art forms for all their senses.

Planar sages say there were originally only elementals. They are the basic sentience of the four cardinal elemental planes, the primal stirrings of an element’s awareness of itself. The courts and hierarchies they have since developed -- their basic separation -- is only an elaboration of this self-awareness. They speculate that elemental society will continue to become more complex indefinitely, with no purpose other than an expansion of self-awareness. The particular ranks and positions are meaningless and arbitrary. Individual elementals will often split or devour one another, pledging homage to one another without regard for power or merit. Only the princes and rulers seem to remain the same - and this, too, may well be an illusion.

The question of the origin of the elemental-kin, the exemplar races of the inner planes is more difficult. Aristophanes says that it is wrong to think of the inner planes in terms of time; everything there is eternal, as it forms the foundation of the multiverse, which is also eternal. Even the periodic cycles of destruction and recreation suffered by the Outer Planes and the Prime are as nothing to the planes of the elements.

Many other sages would dearly like to thwack Aristophanes on the head with their canes.

It is clear that plane-born share something of the basic nature of their home planes. They are fundamentally constructed of planar substance, and their goals are intertwined with those of their plane as a whole. Why the inner planes need plane-born, when they already have elementals, is difficult to explain. Anticles suggests they act as a check on the infinite hierarchialization of the elementals, periodically destroying and simplifying their societies, but few elemental-kin would dare attack the elementals. Even the dao don’t keep elementals as slaves. It is more likely that if such a check exists it is in the form of the archomentals and the elementals of law and chaos.

Perhaps, as one school of thought goes, the elemental-kin are descended from half-breeds or genasi who have evolved to become closer to the nature of their plane. This seems unlikely in most instances. It would seem better to look at the tsnng, who believe themselves to be manifestations of the sound of creation itself. Perhaps all Kin are born not of their elements, but of tangently related concepts. The genies are manifestations not of the elements, but of the four elemental provinces of magic.

Regardless, Manuel sees four “original” types of elemental-kin. This is nonsense, but here is his scheme for the sake of completeness:

Salamanders Nereids

Pech Sylphs

Manuel suggests that these four kin evolved from their planes’ reactions to encounters with mortals. Thus, they are almost as much natives of the Prime as they are of the inner planar realms.

Salamanders are burning and domination. They are the crackling of flame. They are oil fires, infinite hunger and contempt. They are half elemental and half flame snake.

Pechs are construction and building.

Nereids are temptation, lust, and death by drowning. Why shawls? They must have a queen, and a central government. In the water they don’t have shawls. They are their shawls: the humanoid form is only a puppet, a mirage stolen from the ripples left by the drowned. The mirage can be discarded, but then they have no existence outside the water (except as shawls) until they get a new one from the water itself. Styx neriads. Perhaps the shawls come from the Weaver of Fate.

Sylphs are gregariousness and fun.

Each salamander noble is unique.

Whitebeard is so called because of his distinctive white beard, which he keeps neatly braided and trimmed. It makes him look almost humanlike, an affectation that his subjects have learned to tolerate.

After the collapse of central authority in salamander society, Whitebeard sent emissaries to both the City of Brass and the Temple of Ultimate Consumption, seeking an alliance with both sides.

Since then, he has been carefully trying to balance his responsibilities to both Prince Imix and the efreet, a delicate act if ever there was one.

White-beard’s iron city is called Incarnadine Defiant. Its most distinctive feature is the immense garden of flame-flora in its center, which Whitebeard has stocked with creatures for he and his court - and, especially, his allies among the efreet and Imix’s legions - to hunt. He tries to schedule the different groups’ entertainments on different days, or at least to keep them at different ends of the park. The foundries and factories are all at one edge of town, and the dominant firewinds blow the smoke away from the gardens and toward the appropriate paraelemental plane.

The second most interesting place in Incarnadine Defiant is the city gate, made of hundreds of living fire snakes woven together and kept alive by the daily sacrifice of prisoners of war, criminals, and factory workers who have not met their supervisors’ expectations.

Currently, Imix has been pressuring Whitebeard to mount an expedition to the Plane of Water to strike a blow against Princess Olhydra. Even now, the submarine is being built, but Whitebeard has been delaying its completion with endless “improvements” and other modifications. He has no desire to lose troops - even flamebrothers - on a sucicide mission, or to make an enemy of a princess of elemental evil. He lost enough of his soldiers in the battle against Zaaman Rul.

Meanwhile, an efreeti general has been talking about a salamander-led raid on djinni holdings in the Plane of Air. Whitebeard wonders if one group or the other would accept mercenaries instead, and has begun looking for some. And beginning plans for his airship.

Coldheart is among the most ruthless and cruel of the salamander nobles, but his name comes from the fact that his heart is literally made of never melting paraelemental ice.

During his time of wandering the salamander noble traveled the length and breath of the inner planes, entering even the Plane of Cold.

The Lord of Clocks is obsessed with efficiency and schedules. He’s had a city built and filled with clocks that run according to Sigil-Regulus standard time, a calendar created by the Guvners, a faction which the Lord belonged to during his time of exile in Sigil some three hundred years ago (as his calendar reckons things).

It was the extreme productivity of his City of Clocks that convinced Dreox to spare Lord Makkee during his wars of conquest. Makkee had banned music, intoxicants, and all non-salamanders from his domain, and the result was a leaner, more focused workforce.

When Dreox died at the hands of a previously unknown assassin, Makkee elected to hide this fact from his citizens for several months before reluctantly announcing a holiday had taken place (retroactively) on the day of Dreox’s actual death, in mourning of the passing of the great and generous lord. Several hundred prisoners were released from the dungeons of the Lord of Clocks, all of them arrested at some time in the past few months for the crime of excessive tardiness.

The Lord of Clocks has seemingly relaxed a bit in recent years, allowing non-salamanders back in the City of Clocks for precisely defined periods.

Makee himself is surprisingly normal-looking for such an eccentric noble, the clockwork eyepiece he wears his only concession to style other than his relatively plain robes of fireworm silk. He speaks quietly, and spends most of his time in silence, listening to the ticking all around him. Noises tend to make him swiftly summon his guards to take the offenders away. When entertaining guests, he often becomes distracted, his eyes drifting to one of his many clocks.

For mysterious reasons, a nasvarut - an Inevitable dedicated to the preservation of elemental forces - has taken residence in the City of Clocks and resisted all attempts to remove it. For now, it seems content to observe, and Makkee has declared it a positive omen, a sign that the Powers of Law smile on his works. This has yet to be seen.

Steelface (whose true face was destroyed by Lord Brand, his parent)

The Charitable One is renowned far and wide for his altruism and good works. He makes sure of this by executing all who say otherwise.

Honestly, the Commander of the Eternal Revolution was surprised to see Dreox, High King Salamander, dead. He meant to gain enough of a following from those secretly harboring anti-Dreox sentiments to found his own iron city, preferably far enough away to be out of the long reach of Dreox’s retribution.

Then one of the rabble had to get carried away, and Dreox was dead, and everything changed.

The killer (one Shatakke, forever known as Kingslayer), fled to the upper planes while Masqal found himself thrust into the kingship himself. Not high king; perhaps there will never again be a High King of the salamanders. It’s unlikely the other powers of the plane will permit it. But king, nonetheless, of Dreox’s own capitol, the City of Lamps and Hunger.

The city, once filled with great statues of Dreox depicted in a strong, angular style, have been defaced by the army of the Revolution, their heads cracked open and replaced with great blue torches symbolizing the everlasting flames of freedom. Rubble from the statues clogs many of the streets and fills some of the pits of punishment that once seemed bottomless as Dreox’s rage.

But soon the children of the Revolution began to get restless again, their lust for social upheaval quickened by the first and not yet sated. They began crackling to one another that the fugitive Shatakke should perhaps be their true leader, and that their Commander should be overthrown.

The Commander of the Eternal Revolution keeps his support by embarking on new revolutions, and newer ones - against the efreet, against Imix, against Kossuth himself. He plays a dangerous game, for he is not nearly powerful enough to defeat these opponents, but he knows that as soon as his nation’s state of war lulls so will his popularity. So carefully, in secret whenever possible, he advances his crusade against every visible authority figure. His agents weave a web of terror across the Plane of Fire, extending their resources wider and wider, from Wormhole in the City of Brass to the Molten Tower of Kossuth. And the Commander waits in a terror of his own, for he knows that it cannot last.

Lord Brand hated Dreox, but the High King’s death nonetheless meant dangerous and unpleasant instability for Lord Brand’s city. Without Dreox’s armies unifying the salamander cities, powerful inhabitants of Fire like Imix and the free lords of the salamanders began to plot to fill the void left in the High King's absence.

Brand’s search for greater order led him to a pact with Mephistopheles of the Nine, who was just beginning to explore the potential of fire on his plane of ice. Brand returned from his summoning tower changed, more vicious and determined in personality. He had his troops round up every citizen of his city of Anaxandra (now known simply as the City of Brands) and used iron empowered with hellfire hot enough to burn even elemental-kin to put his mark on the back of all of them, from larvae to salamanders to flamebrothers; every fire snake, firenewt, mephit, harginn and helion in the City of Brands now bears the symbol of a black hand with the elven rune B visible in its palm.

Brand’s own flesh has changed to the pitch-black of his symbol. The spines on his back seem enlarged; some speculate that they will one day unfurl into wings. His horns come to a flamboyant double curve above his head. With his brands he keeps careful track of every one of his people regardless of how far they may wander. Somehow he is able to discern their whereabouts and make sure they do not stray. Confident in his abilities, he makes no other attempt to constrain them, and so the City of Brands has representatives in many cities in Fire and beyond, and brings much wealth back through trading and less savory means. Few outsiders dare enter the iron gates, on the other hand, lest Brand mark them as his own.

Lord Brand keeps two consorts, both elven women enchanted to resist flame and prominently wearing his mark on their faces. Some speculate that they are erinyes in disguise, but there is no evidence of this apart from Brand’s own devilish nature.

King Forgebane (foe of azer)

King of Wands (who seeks to placate the efreet with magic)

The King of Wands is the self-proclaimed greatest magus among the noble salamanders. His servants say that he has enchanted all five of his horns as staves of wizardry, and that he keeps the greatest library of arcane tomes in the Plane of Fire, if not all the inner planes (the genies hotly dispute this, while the tsnng remain implacable and remote).

From his city of titanium the King of Wands experiments on his warriors, servants, and slaves. Once he was merely the magical advisor to the previous lord, who is still in his throne room, mummified and insensate. Now the King of Wands rules in his own name.

Dreox, High King (killed by Shatakke)

“An incompetent budding of an incompetent line. The fact that he reigned for any time at all was a miracle wrought by some remarkably skilled advisors.”

Exiled nobles include:

The Gladiatrix has been a pit fighter extraordinaire in the death-arenas of Cania.

The Lord of the Golden Cup is wealthy, to say the least. In the years since he left the Plane of Fire he has become a powerful merchant.

Lady Fierna, Vengence of Phlegethos, values her assassins highly, and none as highly as the salamander noble known as Son of Belial.

At first glance, it would seem there was no creature as pathetic as Erdric the Extinguished. Once a prominent advisor in the court of the salamander king Dreox, he soon found himself imprisoned by the Commander of the Eternal Revolution as an enemy of the state. To his dismay, he wasn’t simply executed; he was made an example of, imprisoned in a coffin filled with paraelemental ash.

From the time of her last molting, Pyrrha ran. She had seen the fate of nobles in a society

Shatakke the Kingslayer (Male;Salamander noble/Fighter 10/Sorcerer 5/Assassin 1; CG)

Shattake was an ordinary salamander, one of many in his tribe. Sure, he was orphaned, the rest of his clutch killed by pyrophors a few years ago, but most of the tribe lost someone on that day. Not able or willing to run their forge on his own, Shattake joined the army of the salamander king Dreox for the life of a soldier. He adapted well but unspectacularly, and probably would have died in combat against the forces of one of the unconquered salamander princes if something hadn’t happened to change his life.

A noble calling himself Masqal began appearing in the various cities of Dreox’s kingdom, preaching a gospel of rebellion. Shatakke heard his words while off-duty, trying to find a bar in the City of Clocks, and was both entranced and inspired.

He knew that Masqal’s revolution could not wait. Shattake would hurry it along by killing the High King himself.

He trained in secret, practicing secret techniques away from the bright glare of his superiors’ eyes. Even rabble-rousing Masqal heard nothing about it until the day the High King died.

The trauma of the event triggered an early transformation in Shattake, and he molted in a secret burrow beneath the king’s own palace. Realizing, too late, that he had made himself the target of every wannabe in Fire, he snuck out of the palace in the belly of a behemoth of flame, and slithered to a monadic deva’s watchtower to plead for sanctuary.

Surprised as she was to see the the newly-molted salamander noble, dripping with behomoth-bile, stumbling at her doorstep, the deva agreed, and took Shattake back to Arborea and the realm of her patron, the goddess Babeestor Gor. It was there that Shattake met the eladrin Tanzin and his paramour, the Hallowed Penitent Saraqael.

There in the realm of a goddess of sacred vengence and retribution, exhausted and scared from all the recent changes in his stupid, fanatical life, Shattake accepted the fiery love and acceptance of a firre. He scarcely noticed when brokenhearted Saraqael left for her own plane.

Shattake and Tanzin remained together for almost a year, when Tanzin became distracted by a nymph. Finding himself alone in the town of Thrassos outside Olympus, he tried to return to his old profession of blacksmith, but found the local guild too powerful. Disappointed, he drifted back into the role of sword-for-hire.

In the centuries since, the name Shattake the Kingslayer has become infamous throughout the planes, synonymous with that of an able, remorseless killer who picks his own tasks. He selects only those missions that involve destroying tyranny. He arrives at the doorsteps of potential patrons without prior announcement; no one finds him.

He has remained abroad for far longer than most salamander nobles, who would normally return to their homeland to claim a domain in Fire once they had grown as powerful and famed as Shattake. Some wonder what Shattake’s game is, and what greater prize he may be seeking.

Garn, assassin for Kossuth. (The Inner Planes)

The Magus, a salamander incantifer

Little is known, publically, of the entity that calls himself simply the Magus. The other citizens of the town of Ecstasy avoid him and the plinth where he lives.

But an Incantifer needs a constant supply of magic, and therefore the Magus has visitors. The Planar Trade Consortium visits him regular-like.

Salamanders keep their serpentine larvae in large metal pits filled with oil, keeping them in line with pitchforks and spears. Not until their first molting are they controllable by any other means. Salamanders bud, on average, once a year. Salamanders in a cluster tend to syncopate their cycles. Clusters are usually siblings, but not always.

The flamebrothers prefer to travel in free bands, unaffiliated with the salamanders and their nobles. Unfortunately, life in the plane of fire is challenging, and they are seldom able to thrive on their own.

Quite likely, salamanders are close kin to the flame snakes, as closely related to them as they are flamebrothers. Or maybe not.

Salamanders war with azer, who they compete with as smiths. Flaming oil drips from their spines. They dwell in clusters (who share a common incubation cauldron), arranged in tribes (clusters ruled by a common leader), arranged in great kingdoms (led by one of the great nobles). They seek to immolate the multiverse. They are defined by their cauldrons and kings.

They are often conscripted or enslaved by efreeti and Imix, Prince of Elemental Evil. The caliph of the djinn stole his Citadel of Ice and Steel from Olhydra, Princess of Elemental Evil. Lords of other races generally slay salamander nobles.

Salamanders reproduce by budding, so they are neither male nor female. Their native tongue does not have genders. However, some resemble females to mortal eyes, so the female pronouns are used. For the others, male pronouns are used.

Salamanders claim to be eternal, but they may only date back to the creation of the flame snakes.

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