In Which the Party Nearly Meets its End

The events leading up to the Band's journey to this foreign plane will be chronicled in due time.  The band has been on the hunt for a shadar-kai named Sarshan.  They followed him through a planar portal and battled their way through dragons, cyclops, wights and blood ooze, blood ooze and more blood ooze.

On the body of a fallen skull lord servitor, the party found a ritual book containing not only a planar portal ritual, but notes describing the location of Sarshan's lair within an obsidian tower on the sea of fire.  Further, they discovered that the skull lord had been a minion of a lich famed for its use of ritual magic.  Their resources depleted more than they realized, the party chose to rest before proceeding through a portal they knew would bring them to Sarshan's doorstep.

The newest recruit,  a human fighter named Eric With a K, volunteered to take first watch while Juggsy meditated.  When the eladrin ranger awoke from her trance, she saw her sleeping party members and no sign of Eric.  While she saw no signs of struggle or sounds of intruders, Juggsy found heavy human footprints leading away from the camp.  Cursing, she woke up the sleeping Shade and Sora.
"He's wandered off," she said, "and I don't hear anything."
The trio followed the footprints back the way they had come, and before too long found Eric's slumped body against a wall.  At first there was no sign of breath or life in his body, and the females readied their weapons and searched for any signs of foul play.  Suddenly, though, a gigantic snore erupted from the human, and they realized what had happened.  He had left to relieve himself and fallen asleep, pants down, against the wall.
"Wha--?" he woke up with a start and followed the party back to the campsite, where the rest of the night passed without incident.

In the morning, the group examined the ritual book and began to activate the portal.  Shade called upon Ioun to initiate the ritual and drew a circle around the deactivated portal.  The runes began to glow, and she used her arcane knowledge to draw a rough image of the tower within the circle.  Like flame following oil, the blue light flowed from the outer ring through the image of the tower.  With a flash, everything was illuminated and the party quickly moved through the portal.

Sickened and disoriented by the teleportation, the Band of Jenkins finds themselves on a small slab of earth, floating on a sea of lava.  A tower on an island stands before them.  "I guess we're here..." observes Sora.  A sort of seawall surrounds the tower, and through the heat waves they are able to see waves of lava breaking against and washing over the wall.  "We're also not alone..." says Juggsy, who was facing the other direction and could see the duergar and fire belcher on neighboring chunks of land.
Fearing nothing, man or beast, Eric With a K, strode boldly across the lava ("Magic boots, ladies!" he called over his shoulder.) and drew his bow.  Once he reached the berg occupied by the fire belcher, he let fly a freezing arrow which penetrated the beast's hide.  From there, he saw things were worse than originally assessed, as two githyanki stood waiting on the breaker wall.

Back near the portal, flames leap up near Shade.  She recoils for an instant, before realizing the flame had materialized into a fire shard.  Swinging her sword in a wide arc, she connected with something substantial within it.
[to be continued]