As the night wore on and people went to bed I found myself sitting beside the village elder, looking out at the moon over the softly crashing waves.

"I wanted to ask you for a favor," he said, looking at me.

"What's that?"

"Not agreeing first, someone's asked for one before then I take it?"

"We've have a long journey."

“Haha, well, this one I don't need you to come back for, and it's at least on your way.”

“You still haven't told me.”

“Very well, as you travel south the mountains change, some of them spit fire. Within these are a number of fairly dangerous beasts, but there's one mountain in particular, don't worry you won't miss it, that I'd like you to look into. We always try to keep a check, but nobody's been by in awhile.”

“You said I didn't need to come back. How exactly are you supposed to learn of what we find if we don't?”

I was starting to see some problems in his request here, and I wasn't writing it off, but I really didn't want to backtrack when we'd already done most of what we needed to to finish this awful mission.

“Simple, there is another village just before you hit the swamps. Tell them, I'm sure they'll be thankful and if there's anything immediately dangerous they may well do something about it. If there's not then the report can make it to me whenever it does.”

“And what exactly do you need me to do?”

“Get as close as you can, see what you can. I'm not expecting too much, but that place spawns beasts like the ocean makes fish, just having someone put eyes on the mountain itself will be enough.”

“Very well, I can't promise that I'll get close, but I'll look at it, see what I can.”

“Thank you.”

The next morning we set off, our hosts having given us more than we could imagine. It wasn't just the supplies we traded for, though we did do that, but the knowledge. We now had several plants that we could easily harvest for food. The breadfruit ones were my personal favorite, and I wondered if they could be transplanted back to Atal. As an attempt I filled one of my pockets with seeds so we could try.

Our trip was almost relaxing. We stayed mostly towards the mountain side of the little strip of land, wanting to avoid anything nasty coming from the ocean, but sometimes we'd take a day to walk along the shore instead. With the strip of good land only a few miles wide it wasn't much of a challenge to change if we wanted.

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Once or twice more we found small villages, and they were much like the first. Each was widely spread out from the others, making sure that there was almost no competition between them, but all were friendly. The people here lived simple lives, with few enemies and only the occasional attack from monsters and their own slow birthrate keeping them from covering the land.

We also started to see some changes in the ground. The forests seemed more fertile and denser, the sands changed from a pale white to almost black over the course of a couple of weeks. The plants were at least much the same, but they grew larger, taller, thicker. Knowing there were volcanoes somewhere it was likely the effect of the soil being brought up from that, but we'd yet to see one of them at that point. The lands were also getting wider, slowly expanding from a couple of miles, to around ten, then further, the mountains were still close, ever looming over us, but it seemed as if each day they fled further from the shore.

I almost didn't notice the first of them when they appeared, only realizing when Chien pointed it out.

“Hey boss, is that what they were talking about?” he said, nodding towards one of the mountains.

“May be.”

The sentinel was barren, covered in black rocks and shorter than those around it, as the sun set that night we saw more too. Rather than rivers of water that I'd come to expect this one had a few small reddish lines of magma dripping out from it, slowly spilling down. At the base were clouds, ostensibly where those flows met others of water, but I couldn't see them from our vantage point.

“Why is it glowing?” Isha asked.

“Because there's melted rock flowing down the side of it.”

That put both of my companions a bit on the back foot. They knew that things could be melted like that, obviously because I was by trade a smith. They also well understood just how hard such things were, with massive amounts of time and effort going into melting even small amounts of metal.

“Can we forge anything from it or in it?” Chien asked, still thinking of business.

“Doubtful, though there may be some interesting rocks nearby from where it cools, we should look for those.”

That night I began working on my floating. Flying like a bird was probably still out of the picture for me, but I could at least try the basics of going up and forward, something we might need. Nobody had said anything, but what if one of those lava flows ended up making it all the way to the shore? I didn't have a boat, as a point of fact I'd never seen a proper seafaring vessel at all, only small rafts and canoes.

The next day as we traveled we got nearer to the volcano, trying to get a look at it and as we did we began to see things. First were sections of new land, places where the old flows had hardened into fresh rock, smooth and devoid of life. Then as we neared one of the rivers of lava I spotted movement, it was subtle, and far off, but I stopped our group.

“What is it?” Isha asked.

“I don't know, something by the river there.”

“I can't see anything,” Chien said.

“Just saw it for a second, really need a better way to see them...” I lamented, knowing that binoculars would be wonderful here.

“What about that bending light thing?” Chien asked.

I'd tried to give the kid as good an education as I thought he could understand, and years ago he'd asked about water. Why did water do weird things to the angle when you saw stuff? Everyone knew, because they could all see in calm rivers and streams, the way the light rippled. I'd not gone too deep into it, simply telling him that light could bend, but he remembered. Frankly I was stunned that he'd thought of it.

“What? You said it messed with how you saw things right?”

“Yeah... might be best if we tried it like this,” I said, drawing a simple diagram for him. “Want to give it a go? It's your idea after all.”

With a nod he did just that, warping the area before him into a lens. I sat back, looking on in pride as my apprentice did something I'd not suggested. Was this was having a child was like? No, it wasn't quite that deep, but there was a smile on my face as I watched him grow, and give us something to look through. It was a bit blurry, and decidedly angled along the edges, but he made a wonderful magnifying glass for us.

It also did the job perfectly, zooming in on the little lava river. Within seconds we'd seen what we needed, beasts that looked like some kind of unholy mix of fire and crocodile pulled themselves along the river of molten rock, coming to shore for brief moments.

“Boss, I don't wanna fight one of those.”

“Agreed.”

“Very agreed.”

With three for and none against we moved to avoid the mountain altogether, pulling away. Only to discover the next day another, and another. Mountains were replaced by them one by one, and in no lesser number along the far edge of this strip of shore, and I worried which was the one I was supposed to look at, a worry I need not have had.