“This is the only place in all of Vahleser you can traverse from?”
“Yes, in the North. In the South you may travel through the home of Umaveshra, but I hear he is nowhere near as welcoming as his twin.”
The path took a sharp curve to the right, and to the left, serpentine. I could not tell if we were traveling uphill or down. Every turn appeared the same. But as we rounded the fifth or sixth bend, the dim light of the azure lanterns was tainted by a yellow glow. We bounded the final corner.
My hairs stood on end.
We stood in a golden expanse, every foot step sending ripples in silver rings across a placid sea. I don’t believe we had gone above ground, but the ceiling had vanished, and an unfathomably deep umber sky stretched above us, with platinum cotton wool clouds drifting high up in the stratosphere. There were no walls in the cavern. The tunnel sat at our backs, as solid as ever, but beyond its opening, in every direction, the room was endless.
Before us stood a massive arch, gilded in reds and oranges, the colours of the Aestra. Like the tunnel door behind us, it stood isolated. A crimson veil, shining with white points of light, fluttered over its center, refracting in all the colours of a hot summer’s day, from morning to dusk. But perched across the archway, clutching the marble keystone with talons epic enough to pierce the hide of a dragon, was the most striking sight of all.
He was a vast creature, both avian and reptile in appearance, covered in scales painted individually in every hue in the spectrum, solid and vibrant. Feathers protruded from the sides of his round, curious face, where hopelessly large and spherical eyes bulged on either side of a gem-encrusted mandible, each containing innumerable rings around the large, empty, dilated pupils. His elongated, snake-like body stretched for miles, it seemed, coiling and undulating as he gripped the sides of the pillars, ponderously traversing with the grace of an eel in water on sturdy, tufted limbs.
His face turned on tics of an uncountable, stuttering rhythm, disregarding implied anatomical structure and rotating, owl-like, in full circles as he leaned down from his perch to observe us, his great eyes lolling in his head. Exhalations with the headiness of burning incense fell onto my face from the dual flared nostrils above his beak. The hypnotizing vortexes of eyes engulfed my field of vision.
Umaade. The Guardian of Eynrai.
