The fire was beginning to die down. The wind had ceased to blow in a reasonaly straight line and now swirled in a cyclone, preventing the fire from effectively spreading. What fuel was left in-range of the blaze was quickly becoming too moist for the heat of the fire to evaporate it and ignite the fuel, and everything out of range was already soaked. There were many tall bonfires left to deal with, but this freak storm had really saved their bacon.
Unfortunately, the dragon was nowhere to be found. He was there one minute, then gone. Nobody was paying attention at the time; neither the mining crew nor the various dwarves in the bucket brigade. It was just like the disappearances of Corai and Happyface. They had all simply vanished.
Gizogin came running in from the wilderness, yelling something or other at some dwarf that had been carrying buckets, and general disorder thrived. Some undead monsters came running out of the bushes to stamp out flames wherever they still flourished. Eric took a head count of his miners, considering their names to figure out who had been lost. Just Athel. But was he? He couln't recall whether Athel was one of them. He skulked back inside, where he bumped into Weird and Roead. Roead of course accused him of starting the inferno, and the explosion just prior. Eric swore he had no drect involvement with it. "This wasn't intentional by any means. I had significant safety measures being prepared to prevent exactly this from happening."
"Sounds like your idea of safety is to blow shit up from the sidelines." Roead spat back in a mocking tone.
"No. One of the miners thought it would be cute to spontaneously continue work on an excavation I had called off yesterday and breached the magma pluton we were going to draw from. That's the explosion you heard and what started the fire."
"And why the hell would he do that? I'd wager you ordered him to! I know what you've been up to, kid. You've done a horrible job of hiding it; leaving Urist the farmer in the closet, how you control those centipedes of yours without any body language or spoken commands, as if they beleived you were their mother. So what happened to this poor bastard, then? You got him killed didn't you?!" The undead abomination was practically in his face.
Eric was shocked. He didn't think anyone had noticed. Urist was completely silent while in that closet. He'd ordered the centipedes to simply act passive and uninterested.
"Urist was an accident. I never intended for that to happen. And I did not order the moron to kill himself. The miner died because he didn't follow the orders I did give him. If I thought he would do that, I would have used the magics you've become aware of to convince him not to. It serves no good to me or anyone else to intentionally kill anyone. But... I need to talk to you about that." he said turning to Wierd. "Err, I mean, the miner might not actually be dead, just mildly disembodied, but I can't be sure about that either now... You should come with me. Public is no place for this argument."