It is known that Maelforge was imprisoned within the volcano of Carcera. He had taken the mountain to be his lair and the heart of his power, and so it was in
that location that the heroes of the Campaign of Flames trapped him. What has been completely scrubbed from history is the exact method by which it was accomplished.

Scattered records indicate that his entrapment was the product of collaboration between the brightest Kelari of the day and the heroes who led the army against Maelforge – Talos Roda, the Purifier; Karine, the Bard; Ula, the Reaver; Asias, the Cabalist, and Nazim, the Riftblade. The hunters knew their prey, and the Kelari knew their island and its particular powers, surrounding the sourcewells from which they drew their power.

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Or perhaps – and this is only a speculation – the sourcewell, singular. Translations are fuzzy, as the Kelari who first came to the island spoke the most ancient of elven dialects, a dialect that has since passed into obscurity. However, most linguists with a mind for critical thinking agree that where popular texts refer to sourcewells, their predecessors only refer to a single sourcewell. Only after Maelforge’s imprisonment do we see consistent references to sourcewells in text.

Given this information, one begins to wonder if perhaps the rest of the sourcewells actually formed as a result of Maelforge’s imprisonment. How could such a thing happen? What follows is only theories formed around a foundation of speculations but result from discourse shared between many fine minds who have made this their primary occupation.

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The power that flows out of the sourcewells seems to be a very base form of sourcestone, a vaporous form of it if you will. Given the seemingly endless depth of the sourcewells (their bottom has never successfully been measured), then it seems as if that source might be coming from the heart of the world itself. Given all that has been accomplished with that power, this wouldn’t seem to be an overestimation of its potential.

If only one of these cracks existed before, and if it represented a single line of access to a very deep and ancient power, perhaps it was depended on in the ritual to imprison Maelforge. And assuming that this crack was actually a flaw in the world’s core left by an imperfect creator – an unavoidable seam in the world’s construction – this flaw could have been made worse by drawing out a great deal of power from it. As a result, more of these cracks could have formed, leading to more sourcewells. Quite likely, this first sourcewell was once vastly more powerful than our current sourcewells, as its power would now be split between many places.

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Could this be the secret to how Maelforge was imprisoned? We know it also involved sourcestone of the Plane of Earth, as he is trapped like a fly in amber within a great case of stone, but what caused that all to harden and stay hard despite the heat of the volcano? Perhaps the power of a proto-sourcewell even more powerful than those remaining today? We may never know.