Shelter took the form of a cave embedded into an ancient ridge of cooled lava. If a cave is what it could be called, that is... Cormy had explained it briefly while they settled in, about how magma would cool and harden into rock at different rates, how some of it would cool slowly to form giant crystals of obsidian, basalt, or granite, while other magma cooled swiftly enough to trap bubbles of air. Why the bubbles had grown so large in this particular ridge was beyond the professor, but he claimed the mechanics were the same. Sparrow took him at his word.
The tokagi was not looking too well, his brown scales going pale around the edges. Sparrow wondered if it was the heat bothering the tokagi, but his two hatchlings ran and skipped about as if nothing was the matter, playing hide and seek in the cave system until Tazinil sternly herded them back to the others.
Cormy’s condition sparked no pity in Neddryn. They had pushed on at the same brisk pace, climbing down further into the network of caverns. The rough, pockmarked interior of the cave left scrapes on their hands and proved a dangerous maze of holes and tripping hazards. In places, the thinnest sections of the rock had caved in, revealing uneven chains of spherical rooms that extended for what was likely miles into the ground like a necklace of beads, and led Cormy to speculate excitedly whether the Sphere of Air connected to the Sphere of Fire from below instead of above as popularly hypothesized… Neddryn yelled at him to shut up before long, for which Sparrow was eternally grateful.
