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Raiden smirks, “Well, their actual name is really complicated, really long, and pretty much just translates to lava snakes, so it’s much easier just to say that.”

“It’s going to make it a lot more difficult to fly out of here, at least there’s only one,” Griff says thoughtfully as he watches the snake rise out of the lava, shooting ridiculously high in the air. It’s getting so high up, and moving so quickly that if someone were flying they would have to move fucking quickly to get out of the way of it.

“Don’t they move in packs?” Ransom asks, looking at Raiden.

Raiden grimaces and nods, “Yeah, they do. We should probably try to fly out of here before the others show up. It will be impossible to do otherwise.”

“Erm, I’m sorry guys, but I’m not sure that I’m going to be much good,” Griff says. “My wing was damaged in the fight before we got here, and I’m not going to be able to fly quickly enough to get out of the way of that.”

“I can heal it,” Doc suggests.

“We’ve run out of time,” I say urgently as I point to where the lava is showing that there are several big things swimming just underneath the surface.

The rocky pad that we’re standing on rumbles again, and this time the force is so much that it starts to crack beneath our feet.

“The ground is splitting apart,” Van exclaims urgently, spotting what I have. “It’s not pulling apart yet, but we don’t have long.”

“That’s not the only problem,” River points out as he moves away from the edge of the rock. “The lava is getting higher, we’re going to run out of rock in a minute.”

We’re all tired, we’re all hurt, and we seem to be in an impossible situation. We’ve lost one of our fliers, and even if we could fly, we wouldn’t be able to all go at the same time. Which means whoever gets left behind is pretty much being sacrificed because there is a minuscule chance that we would be able to get back to them and save them.

Raiden’s expression becomes contemplative, and as he opens his mouth, I interrupt, “Don’t even think about it.”

The others glance at Raiden and immediately catch on to what he’s thinking.

“Absolutely not, it’s not worth it,” Van replies firmly.

We’re all being really careful about what we say and how we phrase things because we don’t want to give too much away, and we especially don’t want to let on about Raiden’s wings.

Raiden’s frown is dark, but he nods, “Fine, but Doc needs to heal Griff.”

Doc nods and heads toward Griff, putting his hands on him and making a show of it, taking a while to call his magic and using words to trigger the healing. In all, it takes around five minutes to heal, which is still incredibly quick, but is about four and a half minutes longer than it actually takes him to heal someone.

The whole time that he’s healing, I’m keeping an eye on the creatures that are swarming in the lava around us, making it look like the lava is boiling and bubbling violently.

“Why aren’t they attacking?” I ask.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Raiden replies. “I didn’t think that was something that I needed to do a lot of research on since they only exist in the Inferniolea realm, and we would know before we went there.”

“I don’t think we should be worrying about that right now,” Doc points out. “They aren’t attacking, and that’s good. We don’t need to figure out why they aren’t attacking. It gives us a few extra moments to figure out how to escape.”

“If we don’t come up with an alternative, then I’m going to go with my plan, Neith would kill us herself if we died because we didn’t,” Raiden comments.

“Fine,” Van replies, clearly not liking it.

He is right though, it would be stupid to die to keep our secrets.

“Any ideas?” River asks, his eyes on the creatures around us.

We’re all silent. I’m stumped. I have no idea how the hell we’re going to get out of this situation without using all of us who can fly to do it.

River

Judging from the looks on the others’ faces, they are as stuck as I am for ideas. We need to get out of here, and quickly. We were given a time limit at the very beginning of the task, but instead of the timer sticking around so that we knew how much time we had left, it just disappeared. Which is fucking unhelpful, because we’re just guessing how long we have left.

“River!” Evander shouts.

It brings me out of my thoughts, and my eyes widen in shock as I see a snake-like creature come barreling toward me. It looks like our time to figure something out has quickly come to an end. My sword is still in my hand, and I jump high, hoping that I’m going to be able to flip over the top of it. Unfortunately, it’s a lot fucking bigger than I gave it credit for, and I end up landing on its red-hot scales.