Read an excerpt from ‘Critical Role: Vox Machina—Stories Untold’ ahead of its March release (Exclusive)

It’s been 10 years since Critical Role changed the TTRPG landscape for good with the premiere of its wildly popular actual-play series, which began streaming during the cast’s first campaign following the group known as Vox Machina across the continent Tal’Dorei.

In the decade since, the group of performers led by Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer has performed in hundreds of episodes across three main campaigns and multiple one-shots, specials, and limited series, with the Critical Role universe expanding into comics, animation, official campaign setting books from Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast, and even a cookbook. The team has also launched a 501(c)(3) non-profit, a streaming service, and the publishing outfit Darrington Press.

To celebrate Critical Role’s 10th anniversary and the ones who started it all, Penguin Random House imprint Random House Worlds will publish the anthology Critical Role: Vox Machina—Stories Untold, spotlighting just some of the characters whose lives intersected with the legendary team but who have otherwise been largely left on the margins of its epic story—until now. The book features a forward by cast member Liam O’Brien and stories by Aabria Iyengar, Rory Power, Sarah Glenn Marsh, Sam Maggs, Kendra Wells, Jess Barber, Martin Cahill, Rebecca Coffindaffer, Nibedita Sen, and Izzy Wasserstein.

Ahead of its release, The Mary Sue can reveal an exclusive sneak peek from Rory Power’s entry, which follows the dragon Raishan—battling a pestilent curse—as he plots to release the Cinder King from his fiery prison.

Read the full excerpt below.

An excerpt from “Liar” by Rory Power

She keeps to the shadows, holding her breath when a pair of Firetamers pass by on their way back to the village. If not for the distraction of their own idle conversation, Raishan is sure they would’ve seen her; the air is growing brighter with every step she takes, light streaming over a rise that’s only just ahead. Not much farther now, Raishan tells herself, not much farther at all, and then—then the forest is breaking open at her feet, laying bare a great span of the mountain rock. And cutting through it like a fresh wound, a chasm of molten lava. The portal itself.

Raishan stands in the shelter of the treeline and fights to catch her breath. It is so much bigger than she expected. So much more alive. Lava writhes in a pool at the center of the crevasse. Bubbles form and burst, spray landing high along its banks, where strange formations have built up as the lava cools and melts and cools again. Hanging above it all, a red haze of heat that warps the whole clearing. 

Raishan can hardly hear her own heart beating over the roar of it. But she can feel it thundering, her pulse frantic.

Thordak is a red dragon. He was made for this, for fire, but she was not. How is she meant to—

Enough, she tells herself. She cannot afford to be afraid. She’s here, at the portal’s edge; she knows what comes next.

One Firetamer, across the path to the right. Another just visible through the shifting air emerging from the forest near the portal’s far end. They are close enough, Raishan thinks as she draws a deep, burning breath and reaches for the deepest part of her power.

 “Stop,” she says, in her true, dragon’s voice.

The guards obey; more than that, time itself obeys. The lava still simmers, and the scorching breeze still blows, but for now, it is as though Raishan is the only creature left alive. 

She steps out of the treeline. The roving eye has fallen away, but she has no need of it anymore. In fact, what comes next requires almost no magic at all.

Closer, then, closer to the portal. Raishan wills herself through the blistering heat, ignoring the instinct to flee. 

It was a stray remark of Talya’s that first caught her interest, a reference to something called an Aramente. As far as she could find out from the Ashari elders, it’s a primitive sort of ritual, undertaken by a tribe leader and involving passage through each of the portals guarded by the Ashari. And though there were no descriptions of it in Pyrah’s library of scrolls, Raishan found everything she needed elsewhere: in the memories of Pyrah’s Headmaster, Cerkonos. 

He is wise for a human, Raishan thinks. But not enough to keep her from reaching into his mind. And not enough to keep her from altering what she found there, so that he might never know she’d intruded at all.

She kneels at the portal’s edge, just as she watched a much younger Cerkonos do in one particular stolen memory. This ritual he performed—it’s almost offensively rudimentary, and unbearably slow. But it will put her exactly where she needs to be on the Fire Plane, without the risk of ending up stranded in the middle of a sunburned desert or trapped in a forgotten dungeon in the City of Brass. 

Besides, there’s something particularly satisfying about using the Ashari’s own tricks against them. Just this once.

Raishan closes her eyes and presses her hands to the portal’s rock edge. Cries out as the heat scalds her skin, but the agony of it fades just as quickly as it came. Left behind is only a pleasant warmth. It gathers, humming against her palms, before spreading up her arms. Down her spine, and up the back of her neck. A sense, almost, of something waking. She opens her eyes.

Ah, yes, the portal seems to say. I see you now.

Raishan could not bear it when Talya’s prayer threatened to draw the Wildmother’s attention. This is different. It is not a god looking back at her but a deeper essence—the very stuff the world is made of. She can respect a power like this.

And I see you, she answers. So let me pass.

The portal’s response comes without words. Instead, a current begins to spiral through the lava. Circling the center, faster and faster, deepening by the second until the bottom has dropped out of sight. 

Raishan stares into the whirlpool’s gaping maw. She can feel the pull of it. Of the heat-shimmer, of the endless drop.

There is only one thing to do. With Thordak’s name etched into her mind, she leaps. Plummets through the portal’s center with a rush of sparks, and hardly has time to scream—to fear—to wish for her dragon wings—before a strange, new gravity takes hold of her, yanking her to the side.

Her feet hit rock. She stumbles forward, catching herself on the wall of what seems to be a long tunnel. Darkness around her, tinted with a ruby glow, but at the far end, a light beckons; a breeze at her back urges her toward it.

Raishan grits her teeth, musters every scrap of pride and strength she’s sacrificed since the Wildmother’s curse took hold of her. She will not let Thordak see how far she’s fallen. 

She is standing tall as she finally crosses the threshold and steps onto the Fire Plane. Charred desert flats stretch toward an ocean of flame, the horizon beyond dotted with cyclones of ash. The air is punishingly dry, the sun too close and too bright. 

But she cares for none of that, because looming over her is a colossal red dragon. Scales gleaming as if lit by fire, his head crowned by a set of gnarled horns, and his hulking, spiked body familiar save for one new addition: a crystal glowing crimson, housed in the center of his chest.

“Raishan,” Thordak says. His voice shakes the ground, resonates through the roots of the world. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Critical Role: Vox Machina—Stories Untold will be available everywhere books are sold on Tuesday, March 4.

The above excerpt is reprinted from Critical Role: Vox Machina—Stories Untold. © 2025 by Gilmore’s Glorious Goods LLC. Published by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.