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The lizards dive, beaks open and seeking flesh. Instead they get machetes. You slash the first flying lizard out of the air; Therko gets the next two with his steel ax. The creatures circle around you, and your group is able to pick them off one at a time until half their number are dead. The survivors turn on a wounded member, carrying it away and leaving you in piece.

"We don't even have to pluck them!" Alexius says as Vecla examines the animals.

"Edible," she declares. "Probably a bit stringy."

You stand on a smoking, fulminating peak illuminated more by the baleful fires of the inner earth than by sun. Exhausted, you're forced to rest for the night. There's no dawn the next morning, and you wait until noon before you can see clearly, but then you see it: the obsidian fortress of the ophidians.

"By the Icons," Alexius says. "We'll never get in there."

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