Eshrael Labyrinth — The Singing Caves “Where the white fire runneth beneath the stone, the dragons hear their mother sing.” Beneath the black and wind-scoured face of Eshrael Labyrinth, pale veins of crystal descend through the stone like buried lightning, and where the white lava passeth near them, the deep places begin to sing. The sound is low and ancient, more felt in the breast than heard by the ear, and it wandereth for leagues through caverns no sun hath ever touched. The cave dragons know this song. They follow its trembling paths through the darkness unto the Dragon Wells, where old beds of cooled whitefire keep the warmth of the earth long after the rivers of flame have passed. There they make their nests, and there lie the mineral pools of the Molting Grounds, wherein dragons descend when their scales grow old. The waters cling to their newly bared hides, rich with the pale substance of Eshrael, and their fresh armor hardens stronger than before. Thus do generations return unto the same hidden chambers, guided not by sight, but by a voice carried through the very bones of the island. The Luminarians say the song is born of heat passing through strange crystal, of pale mineral-rich magma rising from a furnace far beneath the earth, and of waters drawn upward through fractured stone. Yet the oldest telling speaketh otherwise. Far below even the deepest wells, where no wing hath stirred the dust, they say the Whitefire Mother sleepeth beneath the roots of the isle. Her breath is the white flame that runneth through the earth, her warmth gathereth the broods unto the wells, and the slow beating of her heart maketh every crystal tremble. And so Eshrael endureth beneath a sky of ash and silence, black as mourning and veined with white fire; and whether the dragons follow merely the music of heated stone, or the fading lullaby of their first mother, none can say. - @dreamsweeper_