“I think I recognize that pillar.” 

Crispin did not even do him the service of stopping to check.  “You don’t.” 

“It’s got a very distinctive crack.” 

“I’m sure it does.”

Meleph cast a last glance back at the pillar and then quickened his pace to catch up with Crispin again.  Maybe Crispin was right; the pillars here all had distinctive cracks in one way or another, crumbling stone supporting corridors to nowhere, ruined archways leading to labyrinths of stone and magma.  They had not seen greenery since descending from the Overgrown Caverns, and Meleph found that he missed the softness of moss beneath his hooves. 

Here, their steps didn’t echo either, but only because the air seemed to swallow the noise away, stale and hot, stifling sound and movement and breath.

“Well, good,” he said. 

Crispin, immaculate professional, did not stop at that, either, but his elegant head turned to shoot a look at Meleph.  Mildly annoyed.  Baffled.  Years of experience did not prevent the sweat from slicking his barrel and flanks, damping the fine curl of his mane. 

“Good?” 

“No offense.”  Meleph tossed his forelock out of his eyes.  “But we weren’t going to find any fireweed flowers in the mapped portions of the dungeons, were we?  Or at least, none big enough to bother about.  Somebody else would’ve grabbed them already.” 

“You came down here intending to get lost.”

“Only a little.”

This seemed to strike Crispin as more funny than exasperating.  He snorted a laugh — a dry grating exhale, a little shake of his mane. 

“And if we don’t find any of your weeds?” 

Meleph shrugged.  “Well, there’s always the salamanders.” 

---

“There.”

Something like the weight of reverence, in his voice.  He hadn’t intended it.  Crispin did stop at that, some thirty feet ahead of Meleph, and turned.  

Meleph scarcely noticed him.  He broke into a trot, and then a canter, scrabbling up the steep incline of red, heat-baked rock, chasing a bright, poppy-orange gleam of petals, dropping his head to sniff among the glittering yellow-gold of the stems. 

They smelled like the pine and ash of campfires, swaying in the scorching, windless air. 

“Ha!” Meleph said. 

“Those—?”  Crispin had come up behind him, craning around his flank for a look.  “They’re quite small, aren’t they?” 

“Oh, they don’t get much bigger than this.  And if you harvest too much, you kill the plant, which, you know, is why there’s barely any left around the entrances to the Furnace.”  But Meleph knew this, knew them; he craned his neck downward to his task, and Crispin, recognizing the hint, stepped back patiently to wait. 

---

By the time Meleph descended from the ledge again, Crispin had returned from scouting the next corridors.  The fleeting thought that Crispin might have left him there occurred and then did not occur to Meleph; it had not worried him as a real possibility, was not worth lingering on, and did not come to pass, anyway. 

He had filled the pockets of his cape with petals.  Some of them had been crushed.  The smell of them hung in the air, smoky-sweet. 

“I found the quickest way out,” Crispin told him now.  “An old waysign, not too far.” 

“Lovely,” Meleph said brightly, and it was. 

These things always had a way of working out.