The cubs of the Flaming Mountains test their courage by the crest.
The lava's crest. When the earth-fire surges, the molten river rolls up wave after wave of fire, and we flame lizard pups race the crests: four feet braced, skimming the wave-tip — whoever runs farthest with the best style is that day's Crest King. The grown-ups scold us, but they played the same game in their day. Our foot-pads are born insulated, our tails born to borrow a wave's momentum. Not to run on lava would be an insult to this body.
I am the Crest King of my brood. Three dry seasons undefeated.
Race long enough and you learn the molten river's temper better than anyone: which reaches run steady, where the under-surges hide, which floating slabs look solid and flip at a touch. I can recite them blind. The old lizards call it wave-reading, and say a good wave-reader may grow up to be a Lizard Marshal, managing a whole river's diversion.
Which is why, about that night, I alone of the brood can swear it: my eyes did not lie.
I had slipped out for a night run — end-of-dry-season lava is the slickest, and night running is the purest joy. At the Blackstone Gorge reach, I froze on the crest.
The lava was flowing uphill.
Do you grasp the weight of that sentence? Water runs downhill; lava likewise; it is a law older than sunrise. But that stream in Blackstone Gorge was climbing — plainly, unmistakably — up along the gorge wall toward the rim. Not fast. But steady. As if something were… drinking it upward.
I followed it up. At the rim, the stream threaded into a rock-seam. The seam was too narrow for my claw, but the lava went in — thread by thread — and vanished. Not even heat-shimmer came back out.
The seam's bearing: due west.
I ran home with the news and was scolded raw: night-running pups should at least invent believable lies — lava climbing a slope! Only blind old Great-Grandfather did not scold. He had me mark the seam's place on the sand-table, then joined my mark with his tail to several others — every spot where, over recent years, some clan member had reported lava behaving strangely.
Joined, the marks made a line. From beneath the Flaming Mountains, running west.
Great-Grandfather said one sentence, and the whole brood went silent: "The earth-fire is being drawn away. The same draw that took the river, back then."
The river? We flame lizards have never seen a river of water. But the sandworm traders from the Flowing Sands told it on their way through: three hundred years ago, eight hundred li of weak-water was collected in a single night. Collected neatly.
The water was collected then. Now it is the fire's turn.
Water and fire do not share a furnace. Whose furnace collects both?
Collects them for what? The sandworm speaks of a vast pot simmering in the deep. A pot needs water — and needs fire. What manner of pot, and what broth, wants three hundred years of simmering, a whole river, and a whole burning mountain?
I don't know. A racing lizard-pup was never meant to think thoughts that size.
But a Crest King has a Crest King's temper: wherever the wave runs, I chase.
During the boy's channel-to-the-sea diversion works, I lived on the site, and handed over everything wave-reading had taught me — which reaches could be diverted, which must never be, and what their drawings couldn't capture, I sketched in the ash with my tail. On the day the works were finished, the Lizard Marshal took me publicly as his direct disciple and called me a wave-reading talent seen once in a century.
And then I did the thing that made the Marshal's whiskers stand on end: I bowed to him, and joined the boy.
The Marshal roared: a wave-reader with your future — running off to the ends of the earth!
I said: Marshal — the wave has run far.
That westward-climbing stream in Blackstone Gorge is the crest now. The whole mountain's fire is gathering toward that pot in the west. I am the Crest King. Where the crest goes, I go —
and this time I will ride it to the very end of the wave, and see for myself how big that pot really is.