It'd slowly crept over the horizon, building and building, a black colossus standing tall above all and any around it. As we approached what could only be the nastiest looking active volcano I'd ever seen I frowned. The sky was blackened by soot, thick, burning rivers covered it, not the small streams that had flowed down its companions but roiling tides of death, I could even see monsters from a few miles out flowing upon its surface, pulling themselves around the burning rock.

“Feels like someone's supposed to throw a ring into that,” I mumbled.

“What?” Isha asked curiously.

“Nothing, but this is decidedly the one they want us checking on.”

“You think?” Chien quipped. “Lens first?”

“Yeah, let's see what we can see before getting near it.”

He pulled out his newest spell and we saw that it was easily as much of a bleak hellscape as I'd thought it was. It looked like even the ground was steaming, and it must be burning hot. That was probably as much as the elder had wanted, just confirming that there was nothing too odd going on, but it wasn't enough for me. If I was going to do a job, it would pay to do it right.

“Alright, I've got something I'm going to try,” I told them.

I'd played with the idea of flight, and found it to be awful. Now I tried again, wrapping bands of force around me like ropes and pulling myself up. The sensation was awful, my inner ear screaming as my point of perception shifted along with where I was trying to move to, but I'd had an idea.

Once I was up I didn't simply try to move myself forward, instead visualizing something akin to a zip-line, and setting it into the sky before me. That done I hooked my rope-like construct to it and tried pulling myself along it. This, while still rather unpleasant seemed to remove the worst of the nausea, rendering it a much smaller issue.

“You can fly!?” Isha asked. “Not even Elaya could to that!” she shouted, referencing the elder from the village we grew up in, she was right too, flight was an obscenely rare skill.

“It, sort of works. Okay, I'm gonna go and see what I can, I'll be back in a bit. Keep each other safe until I return.”

“Be careful,” Isha admonished as I flew away.

The path was halting, as I had to stop to make new lines for me to flow along, but it did function. My long and arduous practice making more and more physical forces helped too, making the whole thing easier. I loved that aspect of magic, that things we practiced got easier. Soon I was zooming along over the mountainside, looking at all the beasts below me.

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Most of them seemed standard, something I'd seen from Chien's lens, but among them there were a few outliers. Bigger versions of the same monster curled up in some of the pools, the large reptilian lava-lizards seeming to relax. In and of itself that didn't seem a problem, but it was notable. I also saw them fighting each other, with a few situations where one ripped another to bits.

If I had to guess, these, or other related beasts, were what the northern elves hunted for their well-loved heating stones. Even if they weren't actively using magic these beasts were clearly magical in nature, with black cracked skin that showed fire leaking from underneath. I'd wager that within each was a stone like those I'd made, the size of a grain of sand or something similar.

There were thankfully no fliers about, nor any sign of anything that might nest and come for me. If I'd seen even one I'd have turned back, unwilling to try fighting while flying, too much risk. So I continued on, towards the top of the mountain.

Thick waterfalls of lava cascaded down the black cliffs like something from a story, raining burning death upon the land below. I avoided them, going up and up, higher along the dark stone. They must have been falling from the bottom of the caldera, as the cliffs rose hundreds of feet higher above them.

As I crested the peak I looked down. The bowl inside had to be the size of a city, with rippling black and red soup bubbling and churning in the natural cauldron. The sides were high, high enough that after checking the heat of the rock I was safe to land, the heat dissipated before reaching this altitude.

The beasts from below were absent here, perhaps they needed a shore, something this caldera lacked, or perhaps some other quirk kept them away. No other monsters were roaming about either. That didn't mean however that there was no sign of one.

A skeleton clung to the inside of the caldera, looking like some sort of t-rex, but massive, the size of a skyscraper. It was clearly long dead, bones peaking out beneath cracked and broken scales, thick as the armor on a tank, below it the rock seemed to boil like water on a stove. Slowly I guided myself over to the massive dead beast, careful to keep well away from the burning gasses and stone below.

With care I made it near one of the claws, the hands it had been using to try and hold to the edge. The nails looked calcified, the bones with layers of rock from old eruptions splattered upon it. Whatever this beast had been it had found the slightest slope it could here, laying down before its death, allowing the body to stay where it was, even as its tissues fell away. Certainly this thing must have died centuries ago, the heat and lack of any predators preserving it.

As I contemplated trying to get one of the armor plates I looked at the lava below, and realized I'd been wrong. I thought it was boiling as I approached, but that wasn't so, no what appeared to be bubbles weren't bubbles at all. Massive eggs, each the size of a school-bus floated atop the molten stone.

Curious I made a lens like Chien had and looked down. Within each and every one I could see a creature like the one before me, only a fraction of the size, was this normal? Did this thing naturally lay eggs here? How long until one hatched? Most of them had little monsters of black or red inside, but one was smaller, with a creature of pure white. I looked down at it almost in pity, it must be a runt, or have some defect.

While I was looking the membranes over the unborn monster's eyes pulled back, and a pitch dark eye looked up at me, locking on my own through the spell. I sucked in a breath, for I could feel a wave of visceral hate and anger in that eye, staring back into the lens I'd made, boring into my very bones. In a second I'd dropped the spell, and a few later I was flying away. Internally I knew it couldn't hurt me, but it still felt as if the beast could see me, and wanted nothing more than to end my life.

Moments later I returned to Chien and Isha, zooming back as quickly as I could. My hair still stood on end, frayed from the seconds of looking at that little creature.

“Hey boss, everything good?” Chien asked as I landed near him.

“I think so yeah, should tell the villages that there are some large eggs up there though. Nothing moving around yet, but they may want to keep an eye out.”

“Is it okay?” Isha asked.

“I think so.”

Little did I know that at that moment a small horn was ripping through the membrane of an egg, releasing a monster unseen for generations.