You came out of your haven and into the Heat. You spread your wings over great ravines and crawled through narrow alcoves. You followed the path that everyone knows, yet nobody takes.

You are on a mission.

For months, the galleries filled with the blinding flashes of an entire community in an uproar. All other frontiers have long been explored. Every nook and cranny of your vast but increasingly cramped world is observed, tended to, and inhabited. There is nothing left to discover, nothing but what lies beyond the Heat. But you, of all people, always craved the unknown, so when the arguments arose, you volunteered to find out what lay beyond the coal-smelling caves.

You near the widening tunnel, and your heart flutters with excitement and worry.

The tunnel widens, and widens, and widens. A distinctive bitter smell fills the surrounded galleries; something tells you it'll only intensify as you move on. You flash out a call. You are alone. The tunnel widens some more, then opens up; you struggle to negotiate the uneven terrain under your feet.

The infinite vastness sends a chill through your heart.

The air is hot and heavy. Even your brightest flash doesn't reach the ceiling of this cavern, but it must be nearby, as points of light pepper the darkness. More of your kind? You call out to them with a glimmer of your own, but they do not respond. Maybe they can't see it? You need to find a high place to perch, somewhere closest to the ceiling of this cave, so you can make contact.

This place is overwhelming. It makes you feel as if you're being harassed from all directions. Your eyes are not used to seeing anything not lit up by chemical lights, but now everything's aglow--the fungal growths, the passages themselves. And it's hot. Sweltering. Hellish.

You reach an outgrowth and bury your claws into a long, narrow rock. It's strange. It's soft and comforting, and your touch leaves deep scars on its rugged surface. You pay it little mind. Your eyes fix themselves on the firmament, and you call out to it. You flash your brightest, again and again, and search in vain for a response. What if the lights are just glowworms? What if you're all alone--alone in this infinite Heat?

Some vibration of the air washes over you. Pain shoots through your shoulder.

You panic; you can feel cool blood running down your wing, you're injured, but how? By what? You flash again. What hurts? You saw nothing. Then another vibration, and another.

The brittle stone under your claws shatters, and you tumble to the ground. Then it hits you. You're being surrounded. What you took as stones all around you light up; cracks open up in them, and hordes of small creatures pour out. You've disturbed the nest of some alien form of bug, perhaps, one that stings from afar!

More stingers lodge themselves in your skin, the impact of each one sending you reeling. Where are you? What is this? Why are you being attacked? Your whole body screams in pain. Your horn flashes frantically, but only pain answers you. Those distant lifeforms watch on, uninterested in your plight. You flash one last desperate call; not a greeting, but a plea for help.

And you flee. You spread open your wings and fly as if your life depends on it.

Back into the coal-smelling caves. Back through the narrowing cave, over the ravine, and into the cold embrace of home.

You must hurry, and tell your kind of the horrors the Heat holds, so that no one else drowns in its vastness, or falls prey to its denizens.

Your mission was a failure.

Your people will have to find another way.