As we drew closer to the top of the volcano, Yushin, Jackson, and Salem all began to sweat and curse. The air was getting hotter with each passing second, and I couldn’t keep our travel smooth and unnoticed while also pushing back the heat. Even if I hadn’t been focused on keeping the air smooth, I wasn't even sure I could keep off the heat with control winds. For all the spell had immense flexibility, it was still a structured spell with inbuilt limitations, rather than a true wind affinity spell.

  As the heat continued to rise, we were forced to drop our flight lower and lower to the ground, until we were essentially trailing just a few inches from it. I found the temperature to be rather pleasant, as did Seren, but Orla remained unconvinced, and stayed firmly within my ether pool, and my friends were clearly struggling. After another quarter-mile, they were forced to cast orbs of air over their heads, just to be able to breathe. Both Salem and Yushin cast shadecoat to offer what protection from the heat the cantrip could, while Jackson used an application of his core affinity spell to offer some heat resistance. That wasn’t the true purpose of his affinity, but a fire mage needed some heat resistance, especially to their own flames.

  “Whatever the source of the heat is,” Yushin said between gasps after another half-mile. “It’s probably too strong for us. Even my cultivation-reinforced body will begin to fail soon.”

  Even I had to admit, the heat was starting to get hot enough that even I was uncomfortable, but it felt more unpleasant than actively painful. Still, I was confident that I could continue to push forward.

  “I cannae go any further,” Salem said, shaking his head sadly. “It’s too much.”

  “I can’t either,” Jackson said. “I have a fire affinity, not a heat one. I’m about at my limit of what I can manage.”

  I looked up at the walk up to the top of the mountain, considering. There was easily another half-mile to go until we reached the top.

  “Can you all stay here for a few minutes?” I asked. “Or is it too hot for even that?”

  “If we head back a bit, maybe,” Jackson said. “Not here.”

  When the sentiment was echoed by Salem, we retreated until we reached a level of temperature where my less fire-resistant friends were able to stay without fear of crisping themselves.

  “Alright, Yushin, I’m going to need your assistance for this,” I said, then raised my wand and summoned six different air elementals and single fire elemental. No one elemental was especially powerful, but they should hopefully be enough to get the job done.

  “Make the fire elemental invisible?” Yushin asked, and I nodded.

  The air elementals were already practically invisible as it was, so I wasn’t too concerned about them, but I didn’t want the light of the fire elemental to catch the bird’s attention. Yushin raised her own wand, and a few moments of murmuring later, the fire elemental vanished. I nodded and spoke to both of the elementals, explaining what I needed them to do, before casting summoner’s eye. As I focused through the eyes of the summoned fire elemental, the world washed itself in hues that I couldn’t normally see, and my sense for the heat around us grew stronger, but also more pleasant.

  I released my control winds spell, allowing four of the six summoned air elementals to handle the task of keeping us hidden from the birds. The fifth air elemental wrapped a similar defense over Nurin, the fire elemental I summoned, while the sixth lifted her into the air and handled the flight.

  There had been several reasons that I hadn’t wanted to use elementals to push ahead earlier, and this was one of them. Firing off eight spells at once, even if they were second circle, after having already been flinging spells throughout the day, was draining. The elementals were smaller and far less dextrous than I was. In the case of an actual fight, they’d be likely to vanish almost instantly. And when I’d been maintaining the wind spell, I’d have been unable to use them to scout, as I couldn’t split my attention that many ways.

  But, it was what I had to do, so it was what I would do. The trio shot up the slope at the best speed they could manage while remaining stealthy, and I kept my eyes out for any signs of danger. The heat continued to rise as we drew nearer and nearer to the top, until at last, I could see the source.

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  The top of the volcano was a bowl-like indentation easily five hundred feet across, and the bottom half of the basin was filled with lava. Magma? I wasn’t sure which a lake of boiling molten rock shifting inside the walls of a volcano technically was, so I settled on simply calling it lava. The shores of the lava lake were made of obsidian glass, some small enough to look like grains of sand, while others were taller than an average human. Most seemed dead to Nurin’s senses, but a handful of the sharp volcanic glass pieces were hollow. Inside, they glowed with a shifting inner fire, a remnant of the mindbending heat of the volcano, the liquid fire stone. The closer to the lake of lava, the more frequently the stones had the fluid inner fire, and the more powerful the inner fire was.

  If that had been all, I might have told my friends to wait here while I collected the obsidian, but within the lava, shapes moved. Judging their true size from this distance and through the light of the glowing lake was difficult, but from what I could interpret from the heat-senses and Nurin’s own interpretation, there were dozens of forms that ranged in size from roughly the size of a cat to the size of a large dog swimming through the lake of lava. They were shaped somewhat like fish, but Nurin could feel their sharp teeth and hunger from even the edge of the basin. Among them swam a single, even larger, shark-like form. It surfaced only occasionally before swimming deeper down, but in the moments where it grew near the surface, I could feel that it was at least twenty feet long. The true king of the lava lake, I didn’t want to tangle with it. I suspected its power was at least on the level my now-dead first generation siblings, and it had a massive terrain advantage.

  Nurin began to slide around the rim of the basin, until she found the first of the stones near her with inner fire. Gauging its power through her eyes, I thought that the stones around the top would be useful for a first or second circle mage. Trying to apply the relative strength of those stones deeper in the basin was more difficult, but I thought that it fell in fairly consistent ring patterns, with the ones right at the very edge of the lake being somewhere around seventh circle. I mentally cursed. If the obsidian had been fourth, even fifth, circle, I could have let it go. But through Nurin, I could feel the fluid flame within the obsidian.

  It would be an amazing material for Jackson, with the absolutely extreme heat that it gave off. The fluid properties weren’t meant to empower water spells, but I had the sense that it would empower any spells that I fed with dragonfire even more than they already were, which could be an amazing long-term investment if it retained that effect when I combined my fire and ether pool. I would get three mage tools in the end, and there was a certain appeal to me to have each of the three be representative of aspects of me. While the body materials were fairly simple and universal, I could have three core materials, one for abjuration, conjuration, and transmutation. Three focusing materials, one for fire, water, and curses.

  I mentally asked Nurin to head into the basin. I could have commanded her, as she’d agreed to obey me while under the contract, but that felt impolite. I made it clear that if she was unwilling to head into the basin, I wouldn’t force her. She was a touch nervous, but she did slide in. She got about halfway down before one of the smallest forms leapt from the lava lake and threw itself through the air at her. The second air elemental vanished, but Nurin managed to shift to the side, and the fish retracted backwards into the lake on a thin line of lava, like it was on some sort of reverse fishing line, and another leapt at Nurin. She tried to duck out of the way, but the small fish struck her with a glancing blow, and I felt as most of her fire went out. A moment later, a larger form struck from the lava, instantly banishing both Nurin and the first air elemental, and my senses snapped back to my own body.

  I let out a breath and mentally examined what I could. They’d attacked Nurin, despite her being invisible, so it seemed likely that they were operating on some sort of heat sense. She’d been able to take a glancing blow from a small fish, despite lesser fire elementals being some of the weakest possible fire summons, meaning the small fish weren’t too dangerous. The medium sized ones and the shark, though? Those would be dangerous. I glanced over at my friends and gave them a grim smile.

  “I think I have to go there. I’m the only one who can handle the heat, and there are obsidian shards there with real power. If we got them, then Jackson would have an incredible material for fighting the disease dogs. I might be able to use it too, though I’d probably want to save it for an amulet or something from the other ritual. I know that amulets get the least use from focusing materials, but I also get the least use from fire. My runestone–”

  “Focus,” Salem said, and I realized that being in the mind of Nurin while she’d been killed had disoriented me more than I’d expected it to.

  “Right, sorry. The obsidian ranges from fairly weak, suitable for a first or second circle material, to seventh circle. That would be the kind of material you can use for a very long time.”

  “That’s true,” Salem admitted. “But if you were to get injured, or die… I wouldn’t want that.”

  “The Erudite is watching us,” Yushin said. “We are in more danger, and he will not stop wounds, but more danger is acceptable.”

  “I won’t be entirely defenseless, and I do have a plan,” I said, then checked my ether pool reserves and grimaced. Even with the immense amount of ether this realm seemed to have, it was fairly drained, and getting sore from use. “But… tomorrow. I need to recover, and you all probably do too.”

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