C1 E6 in brief

After debuting its first true opening-credits sequence, the party descends a sweltering lava tunnel to Emberhold, the duergar fortress where Lady Kima is held. Circling wide in stealth, they overhear that one of K’varn’s “pets” has slipped its leash and slaughtered a scouting party, pass its gore-soaked killing ground and a mind flayer petrified by a basilisk guardian, and find the secret trapdoor beneath the fortress’s thin magma fall. Scanlan and Pike clear the parapet guards, and the party slips inside, Vax picking King Murghol’s intricate lock. In the lower halls they find the prison — Vax’s ambush and Grog’s savagery (impaling the duergar torturer on his own meat hooks) clearing the way to the rack, where, at last after six episodes, they find Lady Kima alive. Scarred, furious, and no gentle captive, she borrows Pike’s mace to beat her torturer’s corpse to pulp before composing herself. The reunion nearly shatters at the stairs: Kima, a paladin of Bahamut, refuses to abide the party’s mind flayer ally, calling Clarota the anathema of the mountain and warning them they’re being manipulated. Forced to choose, the party holds to Clarota — both he and Kima want K’varn dead — and brokers a knife’s-edge truce held by mutual death-threats. They free the other prisoners and climb back toward the first floor, Kima’s divine implements still to recover from the vault. And in a grim coda, Pike — the cleric of light who died and came back bent on war — slips back to pocket the torturer’s bladed hooks and rusty instruments for herself.