We are finally gettin' moving!

Unlike before, this time I slept deeply and soundly, untouched by nightmares and other disturbances. Maybe Illyára had cast a sleeping spell on me, but I didn't ask and she didn't say anything.

In any case I woke deeply refreshed in the morning, felt immediately my unusual weight, soaked in the thick air and sighed. Still stranded in another world…

The girls were already awake. Illyára was on lookout, flying in big circles along the caldera rim and Al’Reeza had to complete her new iceboat. As yesterday Lily stayed with me and now filled me in on the final plan to leave this oasis.

“The dragons have ceased their attacks for the time being.” she informed me. “They have switched to a kind of siege tactic and are patrolling along the border of the caldera. Unfortunately they seem to know that we want to leave and are guarding the area to the south especially hard. It’ll get difficult to escape there unnoticed.”

She made a pause, but I remained silent. Surely the girls have thought of something!

“Reeza had a fierce battle there yesterday.” she continued. “She provoked it on purpose to mask the resulting ice melting on a gentle slope towards the open plains.”

I nodded. Clever thinking!

“Our advantage is the shrunken numbers of the dragons. They can’t watch over such a big area closely, so we have a chance of sneaking through. But we have to be quick. Nobody knows when they have replenished their forces and will attack again.”

I shook my head.

“Do you have any idea why they are acting so hostile?”

She also shook her head.

“No. We didn’t provoke them in any known way. We didn't attack them, we didn't steal their eggs or their young, we even made sure to never touch what they touched. They just seem to be extremely territorial. Another theory is that magicians and adventurers are irritating them with the high concentration of manærite in their bodies. On the other hand: we encountered them often in the Askæliaen Mountains, but they just attacked occasionally there and quickly learned to leave us alone.”

She sighed.

“Believe me. We had to set aside any research and concentrate on surviving. We just couldn’t solve this riddle, as much as we couldn’t fulfill our task.”

“To find out why the dragons are migrating south?”

She nodded.

“And please, I know you are itching too to solve this mystery, but at the moment we just have to put that aside. Please!”

Well, I had some theories on that matter, but I respected her plea and remained silent.

“Reeza is already moving some parts of our new iceboat to the rim.” she continued and gestured southwards.

“Our task now is to move your ‘Munchie’ there as well. There we will load it onto our vehicle and sledge down the slope towards the open plains. As soon as it stops we will fasten it in front of the iceboat to tug it as far as possible.”

“What happens when the dragons spot us?” I asked just to be sure that there was a plan b.

Again a sigh. But this time much deeper, more bestial.

“Yára and Reeza’d have to hunt them down, every single one of them before they can alert the others.” she growled. “We’d have to cover our tracks especially well, otherwise we’d have the whole pack on our heels. And these beasts have the advantage on the ice with their cursed firebeam! We had a lot of problems with that before we split up.”

I understood. That we didn' want!

Despite the flanks of the shield volcano being very gently sloping, the drive downwards was precarious. There were of course no roads, no paths and no tracks, and we absolutely had to avoid the rugged lava fields that covered most of the upper part of the mountain. Fresh solidified basaltic rock consists mainly of incredibly twisted forms and sharp edges, and I was really concerned about damaging the tires or the canopy. Maybe the magically gifted girls could repair them, but I didn't want to take any risks.

So I deflated the fat tires to increase their grip, set the suspension as high as possible and let Lily scout the best route. Slowly and carefully we inched downwards, sometimes a little bit faster over ashen fields, but usually just as fast as climbing by foot.

When we reached the first signs of vegetation, driving got better, ...but the surroundings also much more interesting to me! You have to understand: it was my first close encounter with extraterrestrial vegetation!

Lily was pretty annoyed with my excitement over some small greenery that looked like a weird cross between grass and moss, covering ash fields and some older lava rocks, cushioning the bizarre formations. Like the plants on earth it certainly used sunlight, because it was green, its leaves just thicker, broader and shorter than grass, but bigger than moss.

Shrubs and trees also started appearing, first sporadically, then in smaller groups that slowly grew together to form a light forest with loose canopy and many clearings.

I am aware that analogies to terrestrial plants are always problematic, but their shapes didn’t differ all that much from earthen shrubs and trees. They reminded me of thick trunked conifers from small to medium size, but their needles were again thicker and broader than their earthen counterparts. Perhaps they also resembled long, thick, narrow leaves.

Their different sizes and forms fascinated me to no end! They told stories and dramas of long, harsh, cold winters with relentless storms and blizzards that left many broken and damaged, their ghastly wounds healed, damaged and rehealed again over the centuries. The result was gnarly forms of sometimes cyclopean size with thick, stocky trunks, short, irregular branches and thick, scaly, sturdy, deep cracked bark with its own history etched into it.

The drive got quite comfortable in this lower area because the ground was covered in the soft moss-grass that just got about ankle-high and the shrubs and trees never stood as dense as in temperate forests like I knew from Europe.

Still it took us the whole day to reach the caldera rim where I first saw the battle between the girls and the dragons raging. We stopped for a nice meal at a small stream, where I finally could wash my dishes and - maybe for a last time - actually cook some vegetables. I really enjoyed the view of the landscape and the mighty presence of the central shield volcano that dominated the skyline. But Lily was impatient (rightfully!), so we didn’t stay long and tried to cover as much ground as possible.

I asked her if Illyára or Al’Reeza just couldn’t levitate us up to the rim from where our real journey would start, but she shook her head.

“No, first of all they have their hands full to deny the dragons any access to the caldera. And second, we can’t risk the dragons detecting any possible trace of magical work that isn’t a defense against them. These cunning beasts might get suspicious otherwise. Right now they hopefully think we are defending ourselves in a desperate last stand.”

“But isn’t there a risk they might get reinforcements?” I reminded her of her earlier warning.

She shrugged.

“It’s a risk we have to take. Still safer than the other option. Reeza and Yára have raged terribly among them, so they’ll keep their distance for now.”

Well, if she was this sure!

The highlight of today’s trip for me was certainly the encounter with a fresh dragon corpse later that day. The terrain slowly rose again towards the caldera rim, and there, crashed into the growth of sturdy trees, having smashed a couple of them, was laying the giant carcass of the recently slain beast.

Its size was unreal! The body stretched surely more than two hundred feet, maybe even two hundred and fifty. At its thickest it reached about twenty feet in diameter, towering above us like an ancient behemoth or a daikaiju. The skin was covered in a light feathery growth and the giant wings surely could have covered a whole circus tent. Its maw hung open, exposing rows of terrible, long, sharp teeth that oddly weren’t curved backwards like I was instinctively expecting. They were thick, but straight and sharp like a chisel or a drill, while the teeth in the back were huge, big and flattened, like built for chewing.

I was baffled and stopped the Munchie, despite Lily's protests. This opportunity I couldn’t possibly miss! I gawked at the short and stocky legs (still about eighteen feet long, but certainly seven to eight feet thick!), the giant paws with claws about half my length. Interestingly it had six toes, with two sort of dew claws on the opposite sides of its paws, which reminded me immediately of the strange hand form of Illyára and Al’Reeza.

I looked back at Lily who had two “normal” hands with just one thumb. Most peculiar! The evolution on this planet seemed to have developed two different options of paw-, foot- or fingersets!

The beast girl looked exasperated back at me and shouted: “Hey!”

“What!” I shouted back, slowly fed up with her impatient attitude.

She just pointed back at the enormous carcass. First I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary (aside from the gigantic corpse of course…), but on a second glance I spotted something out of a nightmare. And not just for someone with entomophobia…

Crawling out of an empty eye socket came a strange, alien being that looked like a giant beetle, chitinous armour, segmented eyes, crab-like pliers and all, but it had the size of a great dane! It looked tiny compared to the giant, family-house sized head, but to a human of course its stature and appearance was terrifying.

Thankfully the giant beetle seemed to be a scavenger and completely ignored me, while I retreated slowly and carefully back to my Munchie and a smugly grinning Lily. When we rounded the dead corpse we saw even more of the scavenger beetles. They huddled around an open wound at its neck that supposedly had killed the magnificent beast and feasted on its raw flesh. I noticed their eight legs didn’t spread outwards like on earthen insects and crustaceans, but aligned strictly downwards under their bloated, disc-like bodies. Probably an adaptation to the higher gravity. Thankfully they still ignored us.

The drive upward the slope towards the caldera rim was hard, but uneventful. We remained silent. I was still in kind of a shock, in my head circling a bundle of unanswered questions. Lily pedaled hard, supporting my feeble strength and the motors with all her might.

We passed through different vegetation zones again and finally reached our destination in the evening. The black, barren rock of the caldera rim greeted us, along with the first look at the vast ice plains of Skîbæria.