Beyond the folds of the mountains, the land abruptly fell away.
They had reached Fire Dragon Valley.
Loa lay in a concealed crevice, looking down.
From above, the broad valley floor looked like an impression some giant god had forcibly pressed into the earth with a palm. The surrounding cliffs did not slope gently downward but dropped vertically, as though a blade had cleaved heaven from earth.
Crimson and ocher rock strata lay exposed, layer upon layer, like an open book made of stone.
Sunlight slanted down from the clifftops, casting deep black shadows from the vertical fissures onto the rock face. From a distance, the entire cliff looked like the lines of the earth's palm, crisscrossing in every direction.
Yet that expanse of crimson was not unbroken.
On the eastern side of the valley, roughly a third of the cliff presented an entirely different sight-a layer of deep ice blue covered it. Frost and snow spread along the grain of the rock, freezing the crimson stone into a gradient of deep blue and pale cyan.
Enormous icicles hung from cracks in the cliff. Some were sharp as spears; others had frozen into strange curves, like waterfalls still flowing at the instant they froze.
Sunlight struck that ice-blue cliff face, refracting into shattered rainbows.
Those were the scars left by the Fire Dragon King and that Water Element Saint Magus.
Forbidden-level water and fire magic had collided, their magical power breaking through every ordinary law. The boundary between red and blue was the most breathtaking sight-searing magma and eternal frost met there, neither yielding nor able to consume the other.
The air along the boundary remained perpetually distorted. Billowing steam wound upward like enormous white pythons, sometimes tinted sunset orange by the two colors below, sometimes glimmering with a cold