Up above, past the lake’s shroud, there were birds, clouds and stars. I looked at the gray blackness above, hunting for something outside the mind-numbing tedium of the lake. My last canteen had drained to a half. We hadn’t encountered any rockwraiths.

At one point I’d scribbled flat, imagined monsters in the dust while Hinte wrenched at an uncooperative cryst. My scribbled rockwraith had snarled with massive claws dripping gore, mouth agape with angled sword-teeth and streams of caustic venom flying forth. I’d smiled but not laughed, and that kept my throat satisfied.

By now I wouldn’t complain to see a real rockwraith. As long as it prowled far in the distance, downwind of us, and with no chance under the sky of eating me. But no. Instead I sifted, seeing the same three things over and over again. The ash clouds were still cloudy. The glass crags were still craggy. And Hinte was still Hinte.

We’d found another stone. Well, I did, not Hinte⁠ ⁠—⁠ even if she wouldn’t accept that. We had argued up and down about it awhile before I tried making my argument with a thrown rock. She retorted with a bigger rock and we did that again before she uncovered another cryst that way.

I dug up a messy red gemstone, too! Hinte hadn’t taken it, so I kept it. It looked a wrinkly raisin, red-streaked and translucent. So maybe not the kind of raisin you’d want to eat. We saw another glasscrab too! But it ran off when we approached and I couldn’t catch it with my tired, hurt legs and by the time Hinte looked over at me it had fled.

That’d deflated me, and it lasted until I found another stone, one which was my find, with no quibbling from Hinte. I’d preened and wagged my frills at the dark-green wiver. That lasted until she decided we should check again for another.

My stomach growled, my forefeet looked⁠ ⁠—⁠ and felt⁠ ⁠—⁠ like a tornado passed through, and my legs were sagging.

Hinte was peering at me, and I put my wings under my snout and shrunk my frills in my closest to a pleading hatchling.

She didn’t even twitch a frill. “Well?” The dark-green wiver frowned beneath amber goggles, head snaking forward and tilted.

I sighed and said, “No, I don’t think⁠ ⁠—⁠ there are no more stones down there. I don’t see the point.” My voice tended hoarse and small. My throat was about to melt, at this point. Even my saliva tasted coppery.

Hinte bared her fangs, unfolded her wings and spread them, and she already was bigger. When she growled I slumped. I wouldn’t have another fight with her so soon. I twisted my head toward the hole.

Waves of heat swelled out and crashed into my face, my scales rawer and tenderer. I stared at the molten maw, my eyes seeking out currents, flows or anything that might move other crysts, if any others existed. The cracks clawing out from the hole had the lake skin crumbling or trembling. Under my claws the ground wobbled. I shifted my footing, and winced when weight fell on my gashed foreleg.

Crouching down, I doomed my sore but gashless foreleg to that hungry maw. The lake had eaten, devoured, my lunch, and that hadn’t sated it. Hinte stepped me, frills swiveling as she plopped down a few strides away, punching her own hole in the dustone with a single hit.

A few moments, and my claw grazed something hard dragging along in the currents. Toes traced it in the sand. It felt about the size and shape of a ring, but larger by a notch. Not holding out for anything of note, I pulled the hard loop out and shook away glass. I poked and ripped at the glass on the loop.

I peered at the melty thing. Glass sloughed off the hot gray metal, and revealed was an iron loop twisting deeply around itself, lousy with pointy barbs and a rough all around. I gave a secret smile and rolled the loop into my sole, and held that foreleg out to Hinte. A moment passed before she glanced over. The wiver flicked her tongue and looked up at me, head atilt.

I let my expression turn solemn. “It reminded me of you,” I said.

Wrenching a foot out she took the loop of metal, and regarded it for all of breath, and then glared at me, bared her fangs. From them the wiver spat at my my sole, venom projecting out in twin streams. They splashed on my foot, leaving a faint salty smell.

“Eww!” I squeaked, driving my foot into the molten sand, waving it wildly around. More glass creapt into splits and lines of my foot, but I forget that for the act.

And it worked! A small smile had lighted on Hinte’s face, until she hid it. She brushed it off with a glance away, to the lake. I glanced around with her. As I shifted, the move tore a crack. The plate beneath me sunk. Glass flowed onto it.

In heartbeats, the glass had crept to me. Because it had cooled even as it flowed, it crawled like so many toes. Still, some of it got onto the bright white fabric at my hindlegs or belly. With the sand cool enough to spare the stuff, it threatened less than it just annoyed. Still, I squirmed and talked reason to my companion:

“Hinte,” I said, and waved a wing at her, “I told you there’s nothing else down there.” My hoarse voice was faltering.

She said nothing, still peering at the lake surface. I glared at her. Why did she have to be so difficult? She looked over the ground again. Her focus settled on a spot a few strides away. She lay down there, and again had her foreleg in the lake with a single punch.

Several beats of sweeping her leg through the glass, then she pulled out a stone flickering green and blue. I made myself cringe and glance at her as she stood, but it held no hint of smugness.

She cracked the stone, and this time she let the scuttling fragments fall to the dustone. They skittered about there for a bit, and not long afterward faltered motionless. Hinte walked forward without me, not quite waiting for me, but not striding off.

It took moments to stand up. The gashed foreleg was folded under the weight, and even the other foreleg was bruised, and only good in contrast. Wounds ached. Like that, I took care trotting after her. I was a few steps away, and she turned to me. The wiver looked to my foreleg.

“It still hurts?” she asked.

I tried to say ‘it does,’ but it came out an alien croak. I lowered my head instead. She said nothing else, turning around, walking on.

My canteen dwindled to a third as we roamed straightly the surface of the lake. The glowing cracks in the dustone shrunk or fell away. Were we walking toward a shore of the lake? I let my hopes well up. Would I finally get a break?

----------------------------------------

In the distance, the gray-black vog gave way to a grayer, blacker wall of crumbling dustone. Sprawling cliffs sheltered, the Berwem, on three sides. On the last side, there was also a cliff⁠ ⁠—⁠ that one opened to a ravine. As far as I knew, through that ravine wound the usual route into the Berwem.

We’d taken a different route: a long, winding detour through the farmlands and emptiness on the outskirts of town, doubling back through caves and trenches in the cliffs, climaxing in a glide down from the top of the cliffs right into the lake!

The vog thinned here on the shore, and I had a better view of only the gnarled crags and crevices. Covering all the ground and piling like waves, the gravel here looked the lake’s exiles, half tough clinker rocks and half wild-looking lapilli fragments. In the troughs of those waves, you sometimes saw glimpses of the fire clay insulating the lake bottom and encircling cliffs; or sometimes you only saw gyras of built up volcanic hair, glassy and brittle. Things calmed and flattened the farther you got away from the lake, and by the cliffs walls it was proper ground again.

If that sounds all very lake shore, like no particular places as much as a kind of place, well, you’d be right. You couldn’t even tell which edge of the lake this was.

Hinte walked up to the wall, slowing to a stop at the base. She lay and without looking to me unstrapped her bag. Setting it in front of her, she withdrew her canteen⁠ ⁠—⁠ a blue and pink bit of leather bright even in the dark⁠ ⁠—⁠ and a roast the size of my foreleg, wrapped in greasy leaf-paper. Unwrapped with haste, it was six-legged squirrel with each limb splayed.

They were everywhere down here, but I hadn’t heard of them back home, in the sky. There, the closest we’d dealt with were winged rats, pests that climbed the skywires to glide from there down to every corner of the cities. We raised nets everywhere to keep them out. Sometimes it worked.

Hinte finished unwrapping and ripped into the squirrel roast. I turned away.

The ground here grew more solid than the mix of dustone and glass covering the lake itself. I crouched to lay down, and as I lowered myself, a wave weary lightheaded throbbed. Lying down fully, I settled a strides away from the eating wiver, and snaked a tail into my bag for my trout lunch.

My tail curled around air, even after I’d remembered.

Hunger roiled in my belly, and it had been long rings of exertion already. I couldn’t ignore it. I looked around, my gaze still avoiding Hinte, and I glared at the voggy lake.

Could I eat a raw glasscrab? Maybe not the highest idea. Even besides all the glass and weird soot on it. No scuttling fragments would remain on the any of the stones, either. I scratched my belly, and just scowled down at the ground.

Dust crunched. A wing prodded my side, and I looked up. The dark-green wiver stood above me, holding her squirrel between her alula and pinion. Taking the squirrel in both forefeet, she ripped. It was two halfs. One leg was already eaten, and she offered the half with three legs.

“Thank you,” I whispered

She didn’t say anything, just stepped away, returned to her spot. I looked at the squirrel. It was no trout, but I had gotten hungry. I bit into it and ripped out a chunk of meat.

The taste was lighter than I’d like, but I savored it, and took care to grind the smaller bones with my teeth and suck the marrow. I almost let out a hum of enjoyment. But that sort of thing annoyed Hinte. It would be rude. I liked messing with her, but she had just given me some of her lunch. She didn’t have to do that. So I reigned myself in, aimed at my meal.

Knowing the pace Hinte liked, I tore the rest of the roast to pieces as I chewed. And that was what my feet did while I ate, mixed with dusty swallows from my glass canteen. When I finished, a quarter of my last canteen remained. If I listened, I couldn’t hear Hinte eating. Had she finished before me?

A tap on my withers. I turned. Hinte held out a small glass bottle, half-full of water. I took it, bemused, before she grabbed a blotchy blue vial in the thumb of her wing. Passing that to me as well, she explained, “Pour that into the bottle, then shake it. It will help your headache.”

“Huh?”

“The clouds,” she pointed her wing toward the vog over the lake, then added, “They are noxious. Breathing them in is harmful. This solution will heal your lungs.” She paused. “But only if you breathe in the fumes. It cannot do that from your blood. Drinking would only heal your throat as you swallow.”

“What? My throat is about to turn to ash and you waited until now to give me this?” My fangs unfolded as I said this, but I retracted them.

She snapped her bag shut with her tail. “I have a limited supply of this mixture.” Pointing to herself, she said, “I can wait until I leave the lake before I use it.”

Then pointing to me, the wiver added, “But you are handling the fumes poorly”⁠ ⁠—⁠ her head darted forward⁠ ⁠—⁠ “because you decided to slink to the center of the lake without thinking.” She looked away. “So I am letting you use the mixture now. Unless you will wait until we leave the lake.” Her tone on the last sentence floundered. It sounded a statement, but it seemed a question.

If Hinte could wait until we leave the lake, I could too! I wasn’t weak or impatient. When I tried to voice my indignant, ‘Of course!’ It came out a voiceless croak that grew into a coughing fit. A coppery taste touched my tongue, but I might have been imaging it.

“No…” I squeezed out several beats later.

My forelegs found the top and uncorked the bottle as I glared at the lake’s gravelly shore. After following the instructions, I passed the vial back. The blue substance settled at the bottom of the bottle. I shook it, dissolving and mixing up the stuff. The liquid settled, waning to a muddy blue with misty vapors rising and congealing into clouds at the top.

My foreleg hesitated as I brought the bottle to my mouth⁠ ⁠—⁠ as it should when drinking unknown mixtures; but I had already tried some of Hinte’s concoctions, and her grandfather was Ushra. She wouldn’t make some novice mistake that could ground me or worse.

“Give it some time to settle.”

I lowered my head and waited. My thoughts drifted to the vog, then to the lake, and then to the stone we came here to retrieve.

“How many did those last two give us?”

“Those were ten and eleven,” she said. “We will collect three more and then we will head back.”

Three more?

“What? But I’ve been out here for so long! Why don’t we collect one more, while we head back?” Hinte didn’t reply, as always⁠ ⁠—⁠ she didn’t argue, she just stated her will and let the world march in step.

I growled. Spending a whole evening with Hinte wore on my nerves. My claws scored the lapilli gravel as I crouched, my wings spreading on their own. I could really go for a nice, relaxing flight in the southern cliffs. Maybe even sit on the highest peak far in the southwest, where the red-beaked pterosaurs made their nests, and you could watch cloud fortresses drift by.

I rubbed my headband. The sleek and floaty architecture of the sky inspired in a way that escaped the silly squatness and heavy sprawlingness of cliff-dweller buildings. Feeding little scraps of meat to those pterosaurs, sitting under wind-warped clouds, I could cloud my eyes and imagine the little peak I lay on didn’t connect to the ground.

The dustone scales back there, floating over a lake of glass, didn’t connect to the ground either. I sighed. As comfortable as I would be there, I would be alone.

* * *