We were driven through the dark. The panther’s body was still lit up with the fading remnants of golden light, leaving pale streaks in the air as it moved.

We crashed out of the tunnel and into a half-submerged chamber, sinking into water up to the stoneskin’s calves. Roots ran beneath the clear waters like curled serpents, sprawling from the trunks of a petrified orchard that lifted its branches up into the gloom of the ceiling, dozens of trees turned to stone by age filling the drowned vault. It was a strangely beautiful place, made almost surreal by the circumstances.

In the cavern’s center was a broken dome of glass full of bronze steles. The whole structure oozed mystery, buried here beneath the earth.

But there was no time.

The beast was coming, and it was gaining on us. Running would simply let it pick off the ones who fell behind. At best we could hope to lose its trail, but more likely, we’d come to a dead end, a blank wall or a tunnel too small to fit our bodies.

And we’d die pinned against unfeeling stone.

Better to stand here where the ground favored us.

At Kahlin’s sign, the stoneskins slid behind the trees, fanning out into the chamber and hiding themselves for ambush. At my urging, the chimera-panther curled around his legs, holding out the quiver of crystal bolts in its jaw.

He took them and nodded, slowly, glancing to his men. Two of them had bows.

But as he gestured to one of them to catch, preparing to sling the quiver across-

The tunnel mouth lit up with a blazing orange light. Everyone sank back into their positions as the salamander arrived, thrashing like a worm out into the water, its touch bringing the lake to an instant boil and coughing up a cloud of steam. The sound was violent, a sea of sharp snaps and spitting bubbles as fire and water collided, rising into a pressurized hiss.

The beast halted for a moment, head lifted, looking confused. Its small black eyes were almost buried in its enormous head, and there wasn’t a hint of intelligence there. The width of its mouth split its head in two as it opened.

A tongue rasped the air, trying to taste us. There were thin, feather-like tendrils on the back of its neck, covering its stunted gills.

The most frustrating thing was I couldn’t speak. We only had moments to make the ambush before the whole cavern burned around us, but the moment, the actual decisive moment, would be Kaladin’s call. He waited sword in hand. And waited. Waited...

The heat in the cavern was rising and rising, the water starting to churn with the roiling bubbles kicked up by its furnace-hot body. A muggy rain of condensation pooled above and dribbled down the stone trees. Steam and smoke in equal measure made the air feel overfull, sweltering, every breath threatening to choke into a cough.

It slid forward, moving in short, jerking spasms that kicked its body along the ground. It didn’t seem to be able to actually control its limbs anymore. Instead it wormed about, head lurching this way and that. The heat built around our legs and underbelly - I pushed down desperately on the panther’s urge to growl out in pain.

I couldn’t be everywhere. I couldn’t silence every sound.

One of the stoneskins heaved in a breath of harsh smoke and scalding air. The cough split the air-

The beast threw itself against the tree, crashing sideways into the petrified trunk in a burst of orange flames. Long tongues of fire ripped across the stone branches, and the stoneskin soldier staggered back, his horns caught with blazing sparks, his clothes igniting. The air danced under waves of cascading steam and there was a brief moment where the panther couldn’t see.

Only hear the scream.

As we caught a glimpse through the veil of mist we saw the salamander hunched over the stoneskin’s burning body, breathing fire down on the thrashing limbs as the soldier tried to extinguish himself in the boiling water. It was a hideous death.

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Kaladin roared above the volcanic churn-and-hiss of the waters. The soldiers moved. An arrow shot towards the salamander’s back, igniting and dissolving before it could touch skin. A spear was close behind, meeting the same fate.

Its head jerked backwards, that rough mannequin motion making its whole body twist into a spiral and nearly topple over.

A soldier ran towards the entrance we’d come from, beating his sword against his shield, yelling out. Drawing the foe towards him in a doomed moment of valor.

Three more had actually broken from their hiding place to join a fourth, who’d thrown his back against the petrified tree and was desperately trying to bring the pillar of stone down. It was a thin plan but one that might actually work; the tree’s bulk made it the only weapon we had that might actually be able to survive drawing close to the beast.

As they pushed their shoulders against the tree it groaned and began to crack along its base. The stone branches scraped sparks from the ceiling.

It was working.

The sound and fury of the man’s sword ringing against his shield seemed to almost transix the salamander, its dull head swaying to follow him as its mouth sagged open. Fire collected in the base of its throat, building, embers washing over its tongue as a vortex formed from the heating of the air within its lungs.

The soldier was preparing to dive aside, for the cover of the nearest tree. Waiting for the moment.

Kahlin stood like a pillar, fingers tight on his blade. I could guess what he was thinking.

If they missed with the falling tree, he would try to kill the beast with his sword. The heavy iron cleaver would last as long as the stone arms holding it could. One strike was all he’d need, and his soldiers would live.

It was brave. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it would work.

As for the body I was in - useless. There was no chance the panther could lay a claw on the salamander before it died. For a moment I considered detaching myself, traveling up the spiritual string that linked the beast and my core, trying to do something from above.

But there was precious little I could do that would reach them in time.

More likely my reinforcements, my clever plans, would only arrive in time to find their charred bones.

So I held steady.

The cavern turned red-orange as the fire-breath boiled forth; the salamander’s body inflated for a moment before impact, hidden gills along its back swelling open as its belly expanded and crushed down violently to spew forth the collected flame, breathing out a flaring lance, a straight-edged beam. It was a thing of molten beauty; teardrop sparks fell like rubies.

It was the death of the soldier. He dove, but the fire was simply too fast. The blazing lance caught him along the shoulder and threw him back, the water boiling away in a long swathe, parting the underground lake in two around the shuddering beam. The lance broke apart instants after forming, dissolving into a wash of less focused flames.

The petrified tree came crashing down, sweeping towards the beast as it shook with exhaustion, breathless. Its head turned upwards.

There was a dream-like quality to the horror of watching it throw itself aside in the final split instant before doom. A rejection of what I was seeing, a refusal to let the world be this way.

It hurtled itself aside and the tree caught its back limbs, crushing half its body to pulp.

The beast screamed, pinned in a cloud of steam, bleeding fire from its gills. It began to breath in again, the light in its throat shuddering now, unstable. Only half able to muster another deadly breathe so soon.

Kahlins stepped from behind the tree. He slung the quiver towards the archer, shouting “Hold!” as he struck his blade along the ground, striking sparks.

The beast was pinned.

Its head swung towards Kahlin as he took the role of the dead shieldman, baiting the fire-breath towards him. Its eyes didn’t even see the archer lifting the crystal arrow into place.

One shot.

I saw the venting gills on its back flare open and shoved down on the panther’s mind, making it leap. We were a black shadow edged in gold as we crashed into Kahlin and drove him towards the ground. The beam leapt overhead and scattered into a wash of a million burning drops as it struck the stone wall. Even being close, even being within the field of superheated air surrounding the lance, was agony.

I’d never truly felt raw, overwhelming pain before. I felt it now. The fur burned from the panther’s back, its layers of symbiotic vine and spore erupting into flame as the sap within boiled to nothing and the waxy plant-flesh turned to crisp, dry kindling. Our eyes were blind. Our lungs flooded with oven-hot air, until we were coughing, unable to breath, spewing up blood.

The world hurt.

And then it was over.

The fire died away in a single instant. The beam shattered into shredded ribbons of fire dissolving into the air, almost beautiful, the air itself shimmering with that horrid heat. The trees looming above us seemed to dance in that rippling mirage, their limbs twisting across the ceiling. Every scrap of crystallized mineral and glassy stone in the cavern’s walls was lit up like a jewel, filled with the salamander’s light, and slowly, slowly, those mirrors of fire went dark.

The crystal arrow jutted from the back of the salamander’s throat as it fell.