Novac Lyrikal
She gave him a nod with that. "Ohhh communication with the worms a good idea. I don't know what their thoughts would be but I can't recall it being done before or tried." She said it with a hand on her chin as she was moving. The air beyond the chapter house's basalt foundations was a physical weight, thickened by heat-shimmer and the slow, subsonic throb of molten rock. They moved along the obsidian apron with the kind of deliberate stillness that made a single scuff of a hoof a violation low soun, the twin dragontaurs presence drawn inward until they was barely a ripple in the living current of the world.
Matsu motioned to her companions as the Zessstrax matched that quiet, breathing shallowly through her mouth as the pool came fully into view: a vast, jagged caldera of cooling crust and liquid fire, its surface veined with black and breathing orange like the cracked hide of a dying sun. The chapter house's shadow fell across one edge, but the rest of the pool sprawled into a cavernous grotto where the ceiling wept ribbons of mineral steam. It was a place that didn't just tolerate heat; it was heat given geological memory, and the fireworms owned it absolutely. She was looking at a lot more though with interest in what Novac had for the idea.
The first one broke the surface not with a splash but with the slow, inevitable rise of a continental shelf a triangular head as long as a landspeeder, sheathed in crystalline scales that caught the lava's radiance and fractured it into a mesh of crimson and gold. Bony eye ridges framed molten-amber irises that tracked something beneath the crust, while pointed ear tufts lay slicked back along the curve of its skull. It exhaled, and the air around its nostrils warped. Then another head surfaced ten meters to the left, and another beyond that, until a full five of the lava dragons were navigating the pool in a lazy, territorial drift.
Through the Force, the low hum of their insulated air bladders became readable organs flexing inside armored gullets as they adjusted buoyancy, sinking one moment so that only their ridged spines carved V-shaped wakes, rising the next to expose the scorched keratin of their undersides. One twisted sharply, the motion fluid despite its bulk, and snapped at a smaller reptile that had been basking on a floating raft of stone. The victim vanished in a curl of displaced magma, swallowed whole. Then came the sound that wasn't sound at all but a pressure drop the jedi grandmasters felt behind her sternum. The largest worm, easily thirty meters from ear tuft to tail tip, reared its head high enough to clear the lava's grip.
Its throat distended as it vacuumed a column of molten stone straight down its armored gullet, a reverse-waterfall of liquid fire pouring into the sealed bladder. For half a heartbeat the pool dimmed, the light stolen by that intake. When the worm lunged forward and spewed the payload, it wasn't a spray but a cohesive geyser of star-bright lava that arced over the pool and splashed against the grotto wall, flash-cooling into a glassy scar of obsidian. The defensive display a warning to its kin or perhaps to the two tiny silhouettes crouched on the apron hung in the air as a glowing after-image. Matsu was checking on other aspects though as she motioned with her hand to circle around.
