The Eternal Fires

Terrible unfathomable creatures used to roam around the world, twisting and destroying everything in their wake. The gods, in all of their "wisdom", have caged them so that they can't hurt us, poor mortals—or at least that's what they say. It's quite obvious they're just as terrified of them as we are.   The only problem is that such beings are very difficult to keep in check. Even with the best prisons the gods were able to create, the Eldritch Horrors can only be contained when they sleep. And even that sleeping magic is not even and the least disturbance awakes them. In those cases, we have to carry out feeding rituals to distract them, the time to recast the magic.   As you might expect, such work is very delicate, and accidents do happen.

The most significant one occurred three centuries ago with the Horror that is caged deep in the desert in the West of our capital, a city blessed—and cursed—by the gods. For whatever reason, the team in charge of the ritual failed in their task. Obviously, no one of them survived long enough to tell anyone what happen. Whatever fault we can find with the gods, at least they are always vigilant when the Horrors are concerned, and so they were able to prevent it from directly resurfacing.

Unfortunately, the Horror was kept nearby an enormous coal seam.   Of course, people thought it would be perfectly fine to dig a mine in proximity to such uncontrollable and unpredictable danger. And of course, as soon as the Horror wakened, it felt the proximity of mortals. Rather than continue to fight the gods outright when it was still groggy and starved, it pierced a passage between its prison and the mine and immediately devoured all those who were working in the depth.   The gods reacted as quickly as they could, but the underground is a difficult place to be for everyone that is not an Eldritch Horror. Some mineral compositions react very poorly to some types of magic. Fighting down there would have made the gods risk their own life. And that was obviously inconsiderable.   Instead, the architecture god collapsed the mine on top of the Horror, and the forging god set fire to the coal seam. You might think "a little bit of fire" is not good enough to keep in check an Eldritch Horror, but the ensuing explosion was felt even in the capital! Trapped on all sides with eternally raging fire, buried deep underground, there has been very little the Horror has been able to do to harm anyone.

Everyone with common sense only take pleasure in imagining an Eldritch Horror being the one to suffer, for once. Unfortunately, that apparently doesn't represent the majority of people...   All the stupid people instead prefer to rage at the loss of such valuable coal resources just as the industrial revolution was starting. And since stupidity is wide ranging, many of those people have also transform the site into a tourist attraction. Those imbeciles all go on top of where the mines used to be to be able to report that they were in close proximity with an Eldritch Horror. They all say they are still able to feel the smouldering heat below their feet and the vibrations of the still ongoing brazier. A few even say that when they lingered too long, they also started to hear whispers in their mind. This is obviously not going to end well for anyone...