A considerable time after the cloud outside became dark-he wasn't sure, keeping track of time while in cat form was very difficult for him-Sarraya stirred from her nap, waking him. She yawned and stretched, then gave him a light smile. "Alright, I'm ready," she called. "I'll go first with the light. I'm smaller than you, so I shouldn't have too much trouble navigating. You can come along behind me."

Tarrin nodded, feeling the wind starting to move again. But this time, it was coming from the entrance and blowing back down the tunnel, not coming out of the tunnel. And it was only a gentle breeze, not the stiff wind that he'd felt when he crawled in. Sarraya held out her hands, and a little ball of soft white light appeared over them. She looked back at him and grinned, then started walking into the very small tunnel she created that reached what she called a lava tube.

It was a tight squeeze. Tarrin had to wriggle his way through the tunnel, leaving a little fur behind in a few places. The tunnel wasn't uniform in size, it tended to drift in size as he moved through it. Not by much, but since it was a tight fit in the first place, a small amount of shrinking meant that wriggling became necessary to get through it. He squirmed along after Sarraya for what seemed to him to be quite a while, and then she stopped. He came up behind her and saw that her tunnel joined with another tunnel that was eerily circular in diameter. Almost like a wellshaft, but it ran up and at a rather steep angle. It was a bit larger than Sarraya's tunnel, and its walls were covered with strange, glassy rock that had a rippled surface, almost like ice.

"Here we are," Sarraya said, holding her little ball of light out into the strange cave. "One lava tube."

"Why call it that?"

"That's what it is," she replied. "This used to be a volcano, a long time ago. These little tubes form in volcanos when the lava hardens on the outside, but stays liquid inside. The lava inside forms these tubes."

"I didn't know that," he said, looking at it. The air within smelled dusty, but it did move. There had to be another exit from the place, and from the feel of the air, that exit was above them.

As near as he could tell, the tube ran parallel to the outer edge of the spire, slowly curving inward. Tarrin found it very hard going, for the rippled rock was as slick as glass, and his claws had a hard time finding purchase. More than once he slipped, and slid along the glassy surface for long distances before catching himself, forcing himself to climb the same expanses of tube again and again. For every span he managed to climb, he usually slipped back half of it. The tube was large enough for Sarraya to fly, but the thin air in the tube tired her quickly, and she had given it up for simply riding on Tarrin's back like she had done when she lost her wings. The angle of the tube didn't change much as he scrabbled his way upwards, but he did notice that the slope did level out a little bit as he managed to get further into the tube.

Time was hard to keep track of in cat form, so he had no idea how long he had been climbing when they reached its end, when a splash of light began to reflect off from the glassy surface just around a sharp turn in the tube above them. "There's the end," Sarraya said.

"I see it."

What he didn't count on when he turned the corner was that it was indeed the end. It opened to the sky, a daylit sky, and that the mouth of the tube was covered by a metal grate. The Aeradalla had noticed the tube, and had barred it off, probably to keep children from getting too curious. The metal grate was thick, heavy, and the bars were too close together for him to wriggle through them.

"Daytime? Did I sleep that long?" Sarraya said in confusion.

"Don't ask me, you know I can't keep time like this," he told her. "Can you get that out of the way?"

"Sure, hold on," she told him confidently. She flitted up to it and put her hand on one of the bars, and it began to rust away at an astounding rate. In seconds, little miniature rivulets of rust dust were drifting down past his paws, sliding down into the unfathomable darkness of the lava tube. In mere moments, two of the bars were totally rusted away, and that gave him enough room to squirm through it and into the open. It wasn't easy, for it was a tight fit and he had no traction on the glassy surface of the lava tube. But he managed to wriggle through, and put his paws down on a flat, level surface, a surface not of black basalt, but of mortared cobblestones.

Cobblestones? Why cobblestones? That made little sense.

They had come up out of the tube between two tall buildings, covered with a strange wattle-like substance, like dried mud. They were the color of sand, and they towered over him on both sides of what looked to be a small alley between them.

He padded along the alleyway with sarraya on his back absently, curious as to why a race of winged beings would waste time paving over black stone for cobblestones. Maybe to cover the black stone, which must heat up something fierce in the daytime sun. That was a possibility.

He stepped out from between the buildings, and stopped dead in his tracks.

The top of the rock spire was a city.

Not just a city built atop the spire, but extending out past its boundaries. From his vantage point, he could see many tiers with buildings built atop them, gradually going down from the center. He had come out at the edge of one of those tiers, and he looked down on the rest of the city in awe. It extended for longspans, far beyond the radius of the spire, and from the look of it, nearly out to the boundary of the cloud itself.

Amazing! That barrier had to be the beginning of a vast platform, upon which the entirety of the city rested! The Rock Spire was like the neck of a champagne glass!

He was absolutely stunned, and from the silence, so was Sarraya. They looked down on the lower tiers with awe, total awe, unable to believe that anything like this rested above the concealing cloud.

"Unbelievable," Sarraya finally whispered. "It's unbelievable!"

Tarrin looked around, at the city itself. Its architecture was alien to him, full of graceful curves and elegant slopes. There were very few right angles, and none of the buildings seemed to have a door at ground level. They all had a tiered construction like the city itself, with a smaller tier resting upon a wider base, which served as the landing platform and entrance into the buildings. It was upon those ledges that the Aeradalla themselves took off and alighted, and the sky was peppered with individual Aeradalla as they flew here and there on their daily business, much as a human city dweller would walk along the streets.

Looking out at the incredible city, he now understood the extents that could be reached with magic. The place screamed of it, radiated it like heat, but it was not active magic. The magic that had created this floating city was ancient itself, and it had seeped into the stone of the city's bowl and the Rock Spire itself, making it strong enough to support its own weight. It was certain to him that without magic, this place could not be. The stone could never survive the stress of such weight upon it without any support, not without magical reinforcement. The Conduit running through the heart of the Spire probably sustained the ancient magic that had created this place, since the proximity of such a power would prevent the magic that made this place work from fading.

"Unbelievable," Sarraya muttered in awe. "How could this be here?"

"Magic," Tarrin told her, shaking off his astonishment. He still had something to do. He had to find that object and make sure it wasn't the Firestaff. He could wonder at this place all he wanted after that task was accomplished.

"It must rest on top of the Rock Spire like a plate balanced on a pole," Sarraya said quietly. "How does it stay up?"