What the Throne Covers

The one question the Ashwalkers will not answer about the Emberthrone: not why the lava lake never cools, but what the smoke-readers mean when they say the mountain is 'attended, not empty' at its very root.

Ask an Ashwalker about the Emberthrone's fire and a Listener will talk for an hour, the ash-cycles, the safe fumarole paths, the Molten Barrow dead they tend. Ask what's actually under the caldera, past where even a Smoke-Reader will guide a paying outsider, and the answer stops being a story. Igna's own people say the mountain is attended, never that it's empty, and they say it exactly once before changing the subject. Nobody outside the tribe has gone deeper than the fumarole fields and come back to describe what tends it.