Alone with my thoughts

I was starting to feel tired. The action of the day (despite not being involved in any actual action) started to take its toll. But I just couldn’t sleep, and not just because it was broad daylight out there. The uncertainty and looming danger of the situation was nagging at me. Fearful, I watched the dimensions of my lava tunnel and hoped it was small and narrow enough to not become a target for the dragons.

Of course I also had much to think about Al’Reeza’s plan - or should I call it a desperate attempt? Surely the dragons would start a merciless pursuit, once they discovered that we left the caldera oasis! And we couldn’t use the cover of the night: so far north the sun didn’t set for several months.

Wait! I couldn’t think of everything. The sneaking part I had to leave to the girls. The question I had to work on was: how could I guarantee the longest possible range for my Munchie, while towing an iceboat and carrying four riders and lots of supplies?

Well, a lot of it depended on the shape of the surrounding landscape. Was it going primarily downhill, was it going uphill, or was it just a flat plane? Going downhill was of course the best case scenario…

I felt that I needed a change of scenery, so I went to the ledge above the lava lake, found myself a cozy, well shielded niche and stared into the faintly glowing sea of molten rock. Is it strange that it felt almost soothing? I stared and let my thoughts drift like the partially solidified plates that floated on the liquified basaltic interior, surfacing and swallowing them at the same time. Similarly ideas came to my mind, thoughts, scenarios, calculations, surfacing and drowning again.

There were just too many variables I didn't know enough about. Basically it came down to the cloaking abilities of Al’Reeza and Illyára. Stealth meant, using as little mana as possible. They shouldn’t use magic more than for cloaking and heating, probably combined with shielding from the overwhelming cold. But I didn't know to what extent we could be hidden just by that.

What about sounds? How silent would we have to be? Possibly as silent as possible. Cold air transmits noise particularly well.

Energy saving travel meant, everyone of us had to pedal hard. As hard as possible. And with just the electric assist from the middle motors we could improve the range vastly. If we’d pedal with maximum assist just from them, we’d have a consumption of just about one kilowatt hour per hour and could drive continuously for fifteen hours. How fast would we get? Maybe thirty miles per hour in the plane? But that again vastly depended on the conditions. How deep and at what consistency would be the snow cover? Terrain uphill or downhill? What about cloaking or erasing our tracks left behind?

If the magical cloaking really worked well and I could fully unfold the solar panels during pauses, how long would it take to recharge the batteries? Providing, it would stay continuously sunny, which wasn’t all that unrealistic. In an ice desert and in summer the sky usually remains clear. Still, blizzards wouldn’t be completely out of the picture.

What itched me not to know was the power of Liyúra's sun. Would the solar panels be able to generate the same electric output as on earth? Fully unfolded they had a peak of nearly five kilowatts during my journey so far. Three to four hours of continuous sunshine and the batteries were full again. But would that be here under these different conditions the same? Ice reflected a lot of sunshine, that would certainly help. But the sun was low on the horizon, the atmosphere thick and heavy and would absorb a lot of radiation.

I just didn’t know. Maybe we’d need a recharging pause of five to eight hours?

Slowly the bare rock started to feel uncomfortable, so I went back to my Munchie, carefully and slowly drove it backwards until its rear reached the ledge. There I stopped and opened its right side, unhooked the front end of the hammock and hung it sideways around some sturdier looking rocks of the crater walls. The hammock now hung parallel to the shore of the lava lake below, perfect for enjoying its coziness and having the perfect view at the ‘pool of doom’, as I have named it for myself.

I crawled into the cozy embrace of the fabric and continued my musings, distantly staring into the sea of molten basalt below. It reminded me in some twisted way of the beautiful water lake that surrounded nearly the whole shield volcano.

I wondered, where all its water drained. Surely these parts of Skîbæria were a cold desert with little precipitation, so what fed all the water streams I’ve seen from the crater rim above? Was it more or less a closed water cycle, where the evaporation from the central lake would cause local rainfall just within the oasis? But wouldn’t that lead to a saltwater lake? It certainly didn’t look like it, with trees and greenery covering all of its shoreline as far as I could see.

Maybe some meltwater from the iceshield seeped in? Basalt formations and similar rock types are often surprisingly porous and could let underground streams through. Was that also the mechanism that drained the central lake and didn't let it flood all of the caldera floor?

My fantasy let me even imagine an underground lava tunnel or cave, much bigger than the one I was currently in, containing a big river that let us escape unseen from the dragons, carrying us for hundreds of miles on an adventurous, but not all too dangerous journey all the way to the sea. We would make it on a raft, built in a hidden cave at the shore to carry the Munchie and all our supplies. Of course it was a fantasy, but a nice one I indulged in a little bit.

I listened, if I could hear any dragon roars or battle noises in the distance, but nothing. Either Al’Reeza’s hunt was quite silent, or it was just too far away. Maybe both…

The warmth of the lava, combined with the constant, but gentle rumble of the volcano, lulled me in. Fatigue set in, exhaustion of the mind being the final straw, and I fell into my first, albeit somewhat fitful sleep in this new world.