Chapter 9 Desperation and Escape (Patreon)

Swimming forward through the magma, Khall snapped idly at fry. The little fish weren’t really worth eating unless she was hungry, and instead of hunger, all she felt was elation at taking action and changing. All around her, the magma cooled slightly, becoming thicker, harder to traverse, and a bit less welcoming. It was still simple enough to swim through, but it was changing. A grin began to spread across Khall’s face at the change, the difference, the struggle. The volatility.

Ahead, the fry had thinned out completely, their faint presence giving way to a strange absence and emptiness. The flowing river had stagnated, so Khall settled against the riverbed and began to observe what was so different about this area. The magma had become less nourishing, but that shouldn’t have been the only reason why there were no fry to be found. She had seen the fry eat each other in little fights, so the weak would have fled to places where there weren’t any enemies to be found, but, after watching for what felt like forever, Khall found no reason for the fry to not be present. So onward she swam.

After having swum this far uphill, Khall suddenly realized that things usually went down from high places, but this magma flowed up. She’d never thought about it before, but why did this thing not do what everything else did, go down? Intrigued, she poked her eyes out of the river and began to try to look around in the air above. 

The air was clearer than it had been lower, Khall being able to see some 50 ft away from the banks of the river. There were a couple of bushes so far as she could see, only barely qualifying to be called scrub. They were squat, branches empty of any leaves or anything else, and were even smaller and more pathetic than the bush Khall had so briefly lived beneath. The air, while being clearer, still was choked with smoke, ash, and embers. There was also that unmistakable and indescribable quality to the air that had come from the arcanite, but less concentrated. Maybe she could find some more little stones of arcanite like before and bring them along? She’d only ever seen the one deposit, so she couldn’t be sure when she would find any more.

A sharp biting pain on her right side interrupted her musings. Ducking her head under the magma, Khall saw a fish, much larger than any of the fry she had seen before, darting away from her as agony spiked into existence where there had only been pain before. Blood sizzled from her skin along her ribs, and, for the first time, Khall realized that she was only magma-proof for as long as her scales and skin remained whole. The magma began to sear into her and Khall screamed as she attempted to flee the river before it consumed her.

Splashing desperately, Khall flailed as she tried to escape the fiery death while trying to keep her injured side out of the magma. As she twisted and attempted to hold her right half out of the magma, a second, nearly identical biting pain nipped into her left side and pulled her back slightly, further away from the escape of the shores. Any fleeting thought of revenge or retribution was burned away as now there was no escape from the flaming agony except fleeing the river..

Khall could feel her skin crispen, shrivel, and flake away as she approached the river’s shore. She could feel herself stiffen as the magma worked its way into her, beginning to char her ribs in an attempt to reach her organs. Screams echoed in the air as she continued to cry out before finally reaching the riverbank. Exhausted, she began to pull herself free from the deadly liquid, and, just as she began to reach safety, a strong tug on her tail pulled her back into the scorching river.

All rationality left her body as the need to escape this death trap consumed her. She thrashed, screaming, crying, unthinking, only moving, clawing up and away from the river. Khall whipped her tail again and again, trying to dislodge whatever it was that was pulling on it. She felt the scalding heat of the magma begin to sear her tail, and her keening cries of agony echoed all the louder from the unfeeling riverbanks. Finally, with a ripping sensation, Khall tore herself free from the assault of the unseen hunter.

She scrambled up the riverbank until she collapsed, the slowly quieting sizzles of her flesh accompanying her pained whimpers. Looking around herself, Khall saw that she was currently alone and began to evaluate the damage she had sustained. Trying to turn her head or bend herself to see her sides was agony, so she tried to gently probe at it with her forelegs, but the lightest touch was more than she could take, so instead she settled onto the ground and continued softly whimpering.

After just a little while of self-pity, Khall brought herself to stand and begin excavating a small tunnel to hide herself in. It wasn’t meant to be anything big, just large enough for her to hide and recover from her wounds, but even this small effort was enough to force her to collapse in agonized exhaustion three times. Each time, as she lay whimpering in pain, Khall tried to recover enough to finish the creation of a somewhat safe hideout. The longer time went on, the less energy she came back with and the longer it took for her to recover enough to continue. Finally, after an agonizingly long sequence of digging and dumping the dirt, Khall settled into her new temporary sanctuary and flopped unceremoniously to the ground.

Now that she had time to calm herself, indignance began to settle into her bones. Some cowardly, Void-spawned little fish had snuck up on her while she was admiring the view! All that she had done was stick her head out of the magma for a little bit and it had taken that time to sneak up on her and bite her before fleeing! Khall felt herself burning with rage, the absolute injustice of what had happened had her shivering in impotent fury. She huffed, the breaths coming more shallowly than before since so much of her skin had been charred, and she could almost feel the pain further fueling her anger and need to take revenge on the unseen assailant.

Yet, that vengeance would have to wait, since Khall couldn’t bring herself to stand for another moment. Instead, she huddled in on herself and tried to find a comfortable position to rest and try to begin to recuperate. Only whimpers of pain carried out of the entrance to her cave until they were replaced by uncomfortable, wheezing breaths.

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Groaning, Khall began to rouse herself. She’d thought she was miserable before when she’d been attacked by lavalines, but those little scratches couldn’t begin to compare to the wounds brought on by magma eating through her body. This agony made her unable to think, unable to move, almost unable to live, it felt like. Void spawned, worthless, cowardly… but scary. If that was all that it took for her to nearly die, then… Khall tried to suppress the shudder that came over her, but the slight shivers caused her to groan in renewed agony. She didn’t think that she would dare to return to the magma anytime soon, if ever. After all, she was allowed to be volatile, and to NOT do something stupid that would get her incinerated.

And, anyways, why did that magma burn her? She was basically made of the stuff, so that wasn’t fair! She’d been able to swallow some, and though that had been super uncomfortable, it hadn’t been painful at all! At least, not like this. But… she wasn’t really made of magma, was she? She looked a little like it, but she wasn’t actually made of lava. Khall scratched her head, frustrated by her own lack of understanding before finally giving up. Thinking about it wouldn’t change anything anyways. But, as her body healed and she laid immobile within her little hole, Khall couldn’t help but wonder about why she felt so sure that she needed to go up, to “Ascend”... It seemed natural that she should do so, like it was an ingrained part of herself, but Khall didn’t trust it. 

There was something different about this feeling, different from her desire to eat or sleep or even the joy of contest and victory. Instead, it was… as if someone was telling her to do it. She wanted to eat, she wanted to sleep, she wanted to fight and win, but something else wanted her to ascend. Eventually, Khall huffed out a sigh. No longer could she bring herself to care. Khall knew that she wanted to progress, to get stronger, to see what else beyond a “Moltenscaled Juvenile Drake” she could become, and that desire was hers alone. To do that, she needed to continue moving.

So, instead, Khall lay groaning on the ground of her little burrow and wishing for relief from the constant agony and itching of her burned and gradually healing body. It was miserable, and as her body healed, the hungrier she got. There was something that changed in her body as she laid for days in her little hovel. While she couldn’t twist and look to be positive, Khall was sure that her tail was lighter and easier to move around these days. It could easily have been just how stir crazy she was going, but she was sure that her tail was lighter. She worried that she’d lost a lot of it in her panic and attempted escape from her aggressor, that it had made off with a big bite of tail, but even so, she couldn’t turn herself enough to see.

Finally, after long waking periods and fitful sleep, stained by her bodily fluids and excrement, Khall could turn her head enough to see scales beginning to form and close over the still aching wounds. These new scales were different from those that had previously filled that expanse across her ribs. Previously, the black scales had shimmered slightly in the light of the embers filtering from the air and from the light glowing from under her skin, but now the scales themselves were seemingly transparent, her glowing, repaired skin shining through and lighting the burrow. The light was pretty, shimmering and flowing along the walls. The underlying light source, the light that originated within her, was constantly changing, looking just like the magma from her race’s name, with eddies and flows pulsating in a mesmerizing fashion.

Khall liked the new glassy scales. They showed that Khall herself was changing, they prominently displayed her own volatility, and they were pretty to boot. Yes, she liked these new scales, especially since now she had them and she could move without the same burning agony. Slowly, gloriously she exited her little burrow. She imagined she could see a poof of noxious fumes following her as she exited the nasty hovel and, for the first time in what felt like forever, smelled and felt fresh air. Khall shuddered, feeling her scales flare involuntarily while letting the slight breeze course over her body. 

After a moment’s hesitation, Khall looked back at her tail. If she was disfigured, and part of its imposing, thick form was no longer, then so be it…

It was skinny now. Khall had eaten until she was full and beyond when she was full ever since her evolution, and, perhaps without her noticing, her tail had begun to store that excess. Now her tail’s thin and whiplike profile was rather dashing. And… it looked like the last bite on her tail had stripped the last .5ft of her tail of all scales and underlying skin, since the end of her tail glowed and flickered just like the scales along her ribs. This section of her body didn’t glow so brightly as her side did, which explained how she hadn’t realized it had shone while still in the burrow. Instead of the faintly pulsing and flowing shine coming from between her ribs, the glow of her tail was muted, darkening the further along it went until the tip, where there was a small black lump.

Khall posed majestically, the light from the magma river lighting her belly as she looked over the offending, dangerous river. The slope that led towards the flowing magma river stretched pathetically before her. She sneered down at the river. A would-be predator lurked within, one that which wanted to kill her but instead had led her to being more beautiful and wonderful than ever before. It thought itself a foe, but instead had been a stone on which she had honed herself. Yes, there was pain as she had shaved off the weakness, but here she was, better than ever!

For a moment, she thought of going down to the river to prove her superiority over it, but it was a shudder of… power, yes, power, and definitely not fear that ran down her spine. With that overflowing power, she didn’t need to prove anything to the weak and totally normal river that she absolutely did not worry about or care about or fear whatsoever. Khall nodded her head once in dismissal and began heroically stalking away.

Uphill she continued, her stomach growling and legs aching, but there wasn’t anything to see. There were some bushes like the one she had briefly huddled under, but there wasn’t any arcanite in their roots, so the sparse growth was nothing but annoying as it choked and hindered her path. Their frequency in appearing, however, continued to rise. It was surprising to her, once she thought about it, how these things, so miraculous to her before, were now nothing more than an annoyance. And they got bigger while also becoming more common. Khall pushed through another bush in her way huffing frustratedly when…

Khall felt… something. Something changed. The bushes were still there, the slope still gently winding upwards and to the right, there was less ash and smoke choking the air… but it was as if there was a line she had crossed that held back half of the smoke. The air was clearer, everything seemed better. In the distance, she could see a massive bush… wait, no… a tree. Khall looked down, and a brief jumble of words welcomed her:

[You have entered the Second Step of the Divine Path of Ascension. Proceed towards the Divine Summit.]

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Insert the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Brave Sir Robin Bravely ran away!"