“So anyway,” Bel prattled, “Dexter got his start doing repair work for the second dynasty.”

Bel turned to Cress and Manipule, catching their eyes to make sure that they were listening. Manipule smiled and nodded while Cress rubbed her chin thoughtfully. Orseis had actually managed to fall asleep during their short break, so her only response was a quiet snore. Manipule had slung her egg to one side and scooped the cuttle-girl up with her free arm, and Orseis seemed content to sleep through Bel’s informative talk.

“Repairing what?” Cress asked.

“At first canals, but then defensive things like catapults. The second dynasty was started after the Great Bargainer came to Satrap, when the humans were having a bad time. All the demi-humans gave them an edge over the elves, but once the people in the Lip started making hybrids with some crazy stuff everything went chaotic.”

Cress snorted. “Yeah, that sounds like something humans would do.”

Manipule hummed loudly. “I think can understand this Bargainer woman. Who would not want more children?”

Bel smiled at the gorgon’s response. As she was coming to learn, that kind of thing was a very Manipule-like sentiment. She had apparently helped her own egg-mother raise a second brood of gorgons, so Orseis wasn’t the first little girl that she’d carried around. The lower gravity made it more practical, though.

Bel was surprised that Manipule had willingly left such a large family, but some frantic waving of Cress’ hands had dissuaded Bel from asking anything about them.

Bel cleared her throat, simultaneously clearing the murky thoughts from her head. “Well, it worked in the short-term, but the hybrids born from the Bargainer’s children have backed themselves into a corner now with all of their issues reproducing. It’s why they really want to get into Satrap and meet the humans. Blocking that may be why Technis made his Barrier.”

Cress’ eyebrows went up. “Oh really? He doesn’t like the hybrids? Is he afraid of them?”

Bel shrugged. “I just started the second book so I haven’t gotten to all of the details, but the Third dynasty was humans-only. Rather than making powerful hybrids, they concentrated essence and power into a few people and specialized in transportation to quickly move those people in response to threats. Once their ruler started making portals, they were able to expand to larger and larger areas, and their kingdom took over the eastern side of the continent.”

Bel longingly tapped the box of books hanging from her shoulder. “It’s really interesting stuff, but I’ve only gotten the chance to skim over the maps so far.”

A shout went up from the head of their group. Bel looked up, but from her position on the winding staircase she couldn’t see anything but the gorgons ahead of her. Cress wasn’t so constrained: she spread her wings and quickly took to the air to see what they’d encountered.

Bel tightened her grip on her spear and rushed after the gorgons in front of her. They soon emerged into a larger room, one that was practically its own cavern. The ceiling rose a hundred of strides into the air, and the space was filled with column-like tubes that were wrapped in thick vines, forming a dense mesh of leaves in every direction. From the sudden rise in temperature, Bel wondered if the tubes were transporting magma to the molten layer.

That would put us past the frozen layer and into the forest layer, right?

Bel looked around for clues on their location and spotted a pair of petrified dhvaras on either side of the entrance she’d just come through.

Well, they probably started it, Bel consoled herself. I’ve never met a dhvaras who didn’t start something. Why are there only two of them, though?

Bel’s question was answered by a horn blowing in the distance. She looked up to see that there were multiple entrances into the cavern-like room, through which more dhvaras surged like a tide of ants. Even worse than the Dhvaras were the garuda who were flying between the tubes. It was difficult for Bel to get an accurate count of them with all of the foliage blocking her sight, but they showed up with the same angry red in Kjar’s sight as the dhvaras, so she was confident that they would end up fighting.

“Do the garuda work with the dhvaras?” Bel asked.

Manipule shook Orseis awake and reached up to take Bel’s books for safekeeping with her newly freed arm. “I don’t know much about–” Manipule began, but she yelped with surprise when Escarole pulled her backwards.

“This is too much excitement for the egg,” Fortuit called out from the safety of the stairway. “We’ll keep Manipule with us while you deal with all of this.”

Manipule quickly waved to Bel before she could be pulled deeper into the stairway. “Good luck!”

Bel raised her hand briefly in thanks before setting her mind to the current problem. The rest of the gorgons were forming into a rough line, with Cress and the other winged gorgon waiting behind them to leap into the air and intercept the garuda. Bel was familiar with the formation from their time walking through the forests of the underworld, and had seen the gorgons improving their teamwork as they walked to the Pillar. The gorgons all had unobstructed lines of sight to use their gaze against attackers, and the two fliers would intercept attacks from unexpected angles.

It was probably the best they would do on short notice, but Bel could see several large magma spirits reluctantly following the instructions of the dhvaras.

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“Those are gonna be trouble,” Orseis groaned.

Bel thought back to her encounter with the chained horned-bear from her time in the magma layer. Then she grinned.

“No, they won’t be trouble, they’ll be an opportunity. You go join the rest of the gorgons, I’ll handle the spirits.”

Bel rushed back to the stairwell, catching Manipule and Fortuit by surprise. While Manipule sputtered about something, Bel tossed her weapons and clothes into the stairway. Stripped down to her gleaming armor of Pillar-metal, Bel reached up for her magma snake.

“Time to go, Sparky.”

She felt a surge of indignation from her annoying plague snake, which was apparently outraged that Bel wasn’t going to let her loose to kill anyone. “You’re still in trouble for biting me,” Bel snapped at it. Ignoring the misbehaved snake’s angry hissing, Bel mixed spirits with her magma snake, reveling in the swelling feeling of power and heat that came from her transformation.

Her skin turned thick and rigid. Her body swelled, cracking her skin open to reveal oozing, radiant magma beneath. Bel liquified her armor, allowing it to flowing down her arms and coat the tips of her fingers to form long, deadly claws of hot, glowing metal.

While Bel was busy with her transformation, the two forces faced one another, sizing up their opponents. One of the garuda landed upon a large stem that was suspended between two columns and shrieked out a challenge. He jabbed a pilum towards them and spoke the divine tongue in a loud voice.

“We have allied ourselves with the clan of the Darkened Heart to seek revenge upon the–”

The Belemental grew instantly tired listening to his squawking. She roared with deafening intensity and charged for the spirit handlers, skirting around the other dhvaras who had formed a small shield wall in front of the gorgons. She would leave the regular dhvaras to the other gorgons, but she would deal with the spirit handlers personally.

Chaining up and controlling the large spirits was wrong; they deserved to be punished, and she would be the one to do it.

The garuda, outraged and the interruption, threw his Pilum at her, but she manipulated her metal into a large shield, which she used to bat the attack out of the air. A swarm of arrows loosed from a distant line of dhvaras flew unerringly in her direction. Tired of the interference, she pounced. The arrows clattered uselessly against the floor as the magma Belemental hurtled herself towards her targets.

She heard a war cry behind her as her sisters joined the fray, but she didn’t look back. Her concentration was intensely focused onto the dhvaras spirit handlers, whose crimes were so great that they glowed a vivid red in her vision. They stood near several pools of lava, which had perhaps once flowed with water but had now been converted to storage cells for the dhvaras’ enslaved spirits.

A couple of the dhvaras handlers, feeling clever, gestured with their hands and flung person-sized globs of glowing stone in Bel’s direction. It maybe have worked on their other enemies, but throwing magma at a magma spirit was pointless In fact, as her form smashed into the projectiles they flowed into her body, making her larger and more powerful. Despite her sudden change in mass, the power of her pounce kept her body moving towards her original target, and she smashed down in the midst of the spirit handlers with a roar of anticipation.

She slashed with her claws, cutting straight through the armor of nearest spirit handler as if it wasn’t there. Limbs and boiled blood filled the air, shocking the other spirit callers into motion. They tugged on their chains, directing their spirits to attack the rampaging Belemental.

Too slow! she thought.

She grabbed the chain from the spirit handler’s severed hand and used it to pull herself up to towering spirit’s back. Her new claws made quick work of its collar, freeing the bound spirit. Before it could wander off, she wrapped her arms around its neck and reached out with her thoughts of retribution.

A moment later she was larger and angrier. Who were these insignificant creatures to chain a spirit? The engorged magma bear with a Belemental emerging from its neck roared in challenge, but was quickly tackled by a swarm of its companion spirits.

If weight or heat meant anything to a spirit she would have been in trouble – but they didn’t. She calmly grew more arms to fend off her adversaries as their bodies ineffectively clashed. Her form warped into a globular mass of heat and rock with a nest of toothed tentacles growing from its top like snakes from a gorgon’s head. The tentacles whipped about, forcing the other spirits away and spraying lava at the nearest spirit controllers. While they were distracted, her metal flowed to form a large claw at the end of a tentacle. With a flick of the limb, she cut through a second collar.

The dynamic of the scuffle changed with the second freed spirit, and the opportunities to free a third and fourth spirit soon manifested. The dhvaras’ resistance crumbled and they turned to run.

The spirits leaped upon them, bashing the spirit handlers to the ground with fists and tentacles of burning rock. The dhvaras were frustratingly immune to the heat, but repeatedly slamming them into the ground with increasing force was all it took to squeeze the sweet essence from their broken cores.

The Belemental turned to the rest of the fighting and prepared to charge into battle. Things didn’t go as she wanted though. Now that other spirits were free, they lost interest in the other dhvaras and wandered away. Half of her body tore itself away, and suddenly she was smaller and less threatening than she had been moments ago. As she stared around her in momentary confusion, a gleaming pilum pierced through her body and a bolas wrapped around her legs.

Being impaled didn’t really hurt since her body flowed around the projectile. The wooden body of the missile smoldered under her heat and the rope of the bolas quickly charred, but she couldn’t be sure she would be safe from all attacks.

She looked up to see a flight of garuda coming after her, all armed with different throwing weapons. All it would take was a lucky strike to hit something vital, so she chose discretion and dove into the nearest pool of lava.

The world immediately dimmed as she swam under the lava, the cries of battle smothered by the thick liquid. Her vision was dark and her ears filled with muffled rumbles, but her sense of the beating hearts around her was unrestricted. She crouched on the bottom of the pool, waiting for the garuda to come closer, like an alligator waiting for an unsuspecting herbivore.

They circled overhead for a few moments, clearly waiting for her to emerge, and then a pair of them dipped towards the lava, apparently deciding that whatever abilities they possessed would be sufficient to finish her off.

When the surface of the lava burst upwards in a shockwave of high-velocity molten rock they barely had time to squawk in surprise before their flaming bodies were tossed through the air. The rock continued its arc, scattering the rest of the garuda and setting a section of vines ablaze. The Belemental emerged from her hiding place to lob globs of molten stone after the scattered garuda, bringing another pair down as they struggled to escape. She roared victoriously, but then sagged as her feeling of unbeatable energy faded.

Bel stumbled away from the lava pool as her body shrank. Her molten skin cooled and flaked off, leaving a weary and very vulnerable gorgon behind. She liquified her armor again, quickly wrapping it around her exposed body, and stumbled to the nearby corpse of a garuda to drain its essence and pull a spare pilum from its back. Then she set her shoulders and turned back to the fighting.

I’m not done yet, she thought.