The Hermit's First Riddle

A scrap of heat-cured bark found near the Scorched Ossuary, covered in the Molten Hermit's cramped writing — the first of three directions to the Cindervault's inner door, encoded as an engineer's riddle.

The text reads: 'The mountain swallowed the Imperium's ear. The ear is still listening. Face the smoke-column at the fourth-hour shadow. The stone that answers is the step the builders forgot to build.' A Far College antiquarian reads the phrase 'the ear is still listening' as a description of an old listening-tube — Imperium engineering built to hear through solid rock, not a wonder, a tool, and one whose bronze has outlasted the men who bored it.