Kale Ardentis drifted through a sea of molten agony. The stomach of the gargantuan magma leviathan was an ecosystem of liquid fire, a place where the laws of physics were replaced by the crushing weight of thermal density.
Every breath he attempted to take was a death sentence, as the superheated gases of the internal chamber sought to vaporise his remaining internal organs.
His Hexarion human physiology, usually a fortress of biological stability, was being dismantled by the second.
He found himself in the gullet of a creature that defied all common sense, a biological anomaly of the highest order that had slept beneath the molten river for centuries.
He didn't wait for the system to offer tactical options. With a final, agonising effort of his mental pathways, he willed the pulsing orb he had snatched from the vortex into the system storage.
