The Island of Rauros, if looked at without its protective covering of jungle-thick foliage - like a kind of disk that bulged upwards in the middle - a volcanic island that had spiked up and up and up before the Chanti civilization had settled it then capped the immense amounts of magical energies that flowed through the volcano for their own. Buried deep in the island were impossibly vast magical machines that transformed heat to mana to heat once again - using it all to power whatever it was the Chanti had wished to run off the volcano. This much, Sari knew quite well from her reading. What she hadn't expected...
"Whoa," Charlotte whispered.
...was just how
big
the space underneath the volcanic mountain would be. She, Charlotte and their native guide, Zarua, stood at the edge of a curving pathway that snaked out from the Chanti bathhouse. In ages past, this would have gone past chambers of delicate stone and crystal constructed beneath the mountain. In the modern age, those stone chambers had crumbled away and fallen aside from the passageway, which cut across a vast space that seemed to go down and down forever, until it reached glittering blue water that spread to either side of the walkway which, Sari perceived, was merely the very top of a kind of vast dam or sluice-gate. There were no railings, but there were a few scant, broken off stairs that led off into yawning emptiness.
There was more light than Sari had expected, as well. The water came from a curving harbor-like cut out in the eastern side of the room, letting the sunlight shine in from beyond the belly of the mountain. The smell of sea salt tingled on her nose, and the crashing of waves against the sides of the walkway was loud enough to be heard even all the way up here.
"What was this room?" Charlotte asked, looking around herself.
"I dunno," Zarua said, shrugging her broad shoulders. "I know that the end of the walkway leads into the tunnel system itself. The roof..." She pointed upwards. "Was once a lava caldera that the Chanti drained away. That's why there's this empty space. Don't fall off the sides. From here, the water's harder than diamond if you hit it."
She started to walk forward, bare feet slapping on stone.
"Well, at least the walkway is big enough," Sari said. Ten feet seemed large enough when you had walls. Without either, it felt painfully thin. She started forward, Charlotte walking behind her.
"There are some serious cracks up ahead," Rana called out ahead, floating to the side of the walkway with her casual disregard for gravity and Sari's newfound fear of heights -
though to be fair, anyone would be afraid of these heights,
Sari thought.
"I-Is this quite stable?" Sari called ahead to Zarua.
"Well, there are some jumps. Explorers have gone past them, so they can't be that bad," Zarua said - before coming to a stop. Charlotte and Sari peeked past her shoulders and Charlotte let out a most unladly like yelp and curse.
"Well
fuck that
," she exclaimed.
Sari measured the distance between the lip of the walkway and when the walkway continued - for there was a massive triangular chunk of the walk that had simply fallen into the sea below, vanishing forever beneath the waves. "That's a fifteen foot clear jump," she said, softly. "Or we climb down into the dip..." She winced at that idea - the chunk that had been broken off had left a seriously treacherous climb down, with plenty of chances to slip out of the crack and down into the waves below.
"Explorers have come back too!" Zarua said, sounding defensive. "They wouldn't have lied about that. And besides. It can't be that hard to climb down and..."
"Uh, Sari?" Rana said.
"Or maybe you can use a pole to...to like...jump across?"
"Sari!"
Sari jerked her head around and saw that Rana was peering down into the waters. Sari steeled herself, stepped to the edge of the walkway, and then peered down into the blue waters that swirled to the inner side of the walkway. It looked like the water was just doing its normal thing down there, sloshing and bobbing in time with whatever was let through the lower levels of the walkways structure - for all Sari knew there were vast underwater gates built into the thing that let fish and sharks swim between the inner harbor and the outer harbor.
"I saw something," Rana said.
"Well, I-" Sari stopped.
The water surged. Broke. And something started to move up and out of it, something vast and dark. Sari stepped backwards as a column of flesh and muscle and gleaming scales lifted from the waters with a kind of majestic, glacial slowness. Enough water to drown a dozen men cascaded off every part of the long, blunt snout, while huge, trailing, bio-luminescent whiskers throbbed and pulsed with an eerie attentiveness as the vast, slitted eyes of the beast narrowed upon Sari. The creature...was...was...
"That's a big sea serpent," Sari whispered.
"It looks mad," Rana said.
Sari wracked her mind, trying to remember everything she knew about the aquatic relations to all other draconic creatures. Like Drakkons, they were debased and corrupted repetitions of the celestial Nine Dragons, but...well, since sea serpents only troubled sailors and even then only rarely, not a great deal had been written down about their intelligence or their temperament. Sari lifted her hands, slowly, while Charlotte and Zarua stepped to her sides, both of them standing behind her.
"We're just passing through," Sari said, her voice sounding echoingly loud in the strange, eerie silence of the moment.
The sea serpent sniffed at the air with vast gulps of in-drawn air. Then it shook its head, sending water glittering in huge, hazy clouds, and then growled and bared, revealing teeth nearly as big as Sari was. It let loose a huge, loud roar and Sari yelped. "Run!" She turned back, heading towards the entrance that they had come from - but the sea serpent reacted with an almost petulant fury. Its massive tail swept out and cracked into the walkway that spanned the distance between where Sari stood and the exit - and the ancient Chanti stone exploded into a spray of black powder. Sari yelped and fell to her belly as Charlotte and Zarua dropped as well, both of them clinging with all their might to what little purchase the walkway gave them.
The whole stone structure crumbled and groaned - and Sari saw that now a yawning gulf was hanging open between her and the exit. No one could jump that. She craned her head backwards and saw that the already weakened portion of the bridge ahead of them was crumbling away, crashing down into the water with a low, grinding roar. The sea serpent drew back, mouth opening as he seemed to let out a low, grinding rumble of a laugh, echoing up from the depths of its immense body. Sari started to stand up and felt, as her weight shifted, the entire ground beneath her feet shifted as well.
"Uh, Sari, be very...very careful," Rana shouted to her over the din.
Sari realized the solution and knew it was going to make Rana cover her face. "Everyone, get ready to jump!"
"What!?" Zarua shouted, while Charlotte scrambled to her feet. Sari leaned forward, stepping towards the edge of the chunk of wall they stood on. The stone creaked, groaned, and then started to tip forward as the sea serpent swung its tail against the far wall of the inner chamber. The impact boomed out and stalactites, shook free, dropped. One plunged and seemed to fall directly down towards Sari's head before instead whipping past the leaning walkway and vanishing into the water with an immense splash. But by now, her momentum had been added to the walkway chunk she stood on and it was falling forward. She leaped from the ground as it became slanted - and thanks to the movement of the chunk, she was actually closer to the far end of the walkway than she had been when she had started.
