Heat hangs in the air around me, the world vibrating as I rush the halls. The thrill of the escape always makes me jittery, and I can feel the back of my neck warming with stray sparks. If I wanted to, I could set these halls ablaze, but previous experience reminds me that it will only help them find us sooner.

The hall splits ahead, revealing a choice of six different paths, none of which are labelled (as usual). Our pursuers, all connected to the hivemind, know this place better than I know my own tail. Worse still, they'll all know we've gone already, and my intuition tells me they're not far off.

My two companions swing around on either side, glaring ahead with intense annoyance. On my left stands a scrappy, draconic creature with six legs and a soft furze covering its body, one of the experiments, while to my right is a fellow prisoner, a white pelted large felid, with a rippling array of spots and a flat head, so that it looks like they're all muzzle. The massive beast on my right side steps ahead, several nostrils flaring as she surveys the road, and then turns to Cormac, the dragon. "This is your branch, isn't it?"

"We're taking the third from the left. I haven't seen portals in the area, but I can tell you that the rest are prisoner cul de sacs."

"Do you know what lies down the one we're going down?" asks Farra, the feline.

"Not a prisoner cul de sac. Just more hall." Cormac replies. "More hall means more running. Would you prefer to stop? I'm sure they're behind us now."

"I've been there myself," I add, "About ten missions back, before they moved me. If we can make it down the hall, there's a hub that leads to the sector where the portals are located. It's a long run, but there are pockets of resistance along the way, so we can shelter with the rebels for a while if we shake the pursuers."

She takes in every word I'm saying, but as I mention 'pursuers', I can see her face drop into an expression of pure despair. "Sithra, I'm going back to the feeding rooms either way. Let's keep going."

Her native holy word hangs in the hall just as much as our fear does as we pick up the pace again. I'll never know what deity she's using for an exclamation of anguish- I've seen many companions from many worlds, and it's never the same once- but I share in the sentiment. If we fail, hours of torment await us, ending with the soul-sucking experience of having the Obsidians feed on our fear.

So we run on, our paws treading cold metal, with the vague hope of some miracle occurring guiding us like a light on the horizon. I know such things exist with a clear certainty, if for no other reason, because I'm not dead.

Still, the absolute mess of it all wears at anyone. It's a game of predator and prey, repeated a thousand times over. If only the Obsidians had the mercy to do us in, we might be better off, but you can't reap the fear of a thing gone free in death.

Not that it would matter, even then. They can't feel compassion, so mercy is off the table.

I hear the pounding of stone and turn around, letting loose all the fire I have in one tremendous blast behind us. I don't stop to see if its worked, but I can imagine from memory the furious looks they give as their bodies turn to lava and the awful shapeshifters try to reform while their boiling bodies continue to disobey their commands.

It'll hold them. It'll hold them for long enough.

The hub, filled with fluorescent lighting, emerges ahead. It's not dissimilar to the halls, which are nothing but metal and doors, but it does contain reports on screens in their scratched writing, showing feedback from machine run experiments, and the octagonal room does have larger ceilings. It also contains a higher number of Obsidians, which is bad news for us. The red warning lights in the corners flare, detecting the prisoner escape, and already several Obsidians have shifted to larger, more battle-ready states. Their hides are dark as night, made of their namesake stone, and their eyes and other features are just chiseled from the same material. The only indication that they live at all is the slight glow from the internal flame that runs through their bodies, allowing them to shift.

Well, they're also coming right at us, so that's a pretty good indicator.

The three Obsidians in the room are all much larger than us, with the biggest one scraping the ceiling. This means they've stretched out their mass more, so they should be easier to shatter, but it also means that any blow they make is going to hurt. I dodge a massive hoof from the middle one, which is definitely a chimera, and then roll out of the way of its tail, which is a perfect replica of a chimera's snake.

I breathe fire right into the snake's outstretched mouth, which causes its face to deform into a frown before it melts away, scattering drops of seething liquid stone onto my face. I squint, hissing, just in time to dodge another attack from the right one, currently sparring with Farra in the form of a being I have no name for, best described as a python-esque wyrm with dozens of jagged wings.

The chimera, still furious, rounds on me and pins me down to the ground before I can go to help her. I struggle beneath its grip, unable to burn my way out, and Cormac shoots a spine from his tail that shatters its claw, releasing me. I look back at him, grateful, but my moment of hesitation has got him captured. His foe, an amorphous being, has near encased him in obsidian. It looks to the others and disappears with him, still struggling. He's out.

Enraged with my own failure, I blast the chimera again. It raises a paw to deflect it, which melts instead, but it doesn't seem to care much at all. The counterattack comes before it even reforms and the molten claw makes me cry out in pain as it rakes across my face, too hot for even me to handle.

I jump away, spitting stone and blood. Farra might still make it to a rebel outpost if she can get away from her aggressor. I look up, hoping for the best, and activate my crest and tail flames. Drawing deep from within my internal flame sacs, I pause in the middle of the clearing and feel my tail and forehead burn with an intense, bright flame. My whole body feels as if it's been set alight and the air radiates with heat around me. The adrenaline is unreal but it's becoming harder to focus, and Farra knows that I'm not going to hold out.

"What are you doing?" screeches Farra. "What are you doing?!"

"They'll be distracted. You know where the next post is. Run for it." I call back, desperate, and my mouth readies with fire as I charge one Obsidian head on, my superheated claws scouring much deeper marks in its thin stone exterior. The other turns and I blast it too, sending off desperate flares in any direction as they try to reform fast as I can take them.

Farra runs, as I asked her too, and my eyes swim as I imagine the pain to come, the water, the drowning...

I can't do this. Have to get out of here somehow.

One lunges towards me and I bolt for the nearest hallway, a final blast of fire melting it against the doorway. There's some sick noises behind me, not unlike sizzling stone or flesh (I've heard both), and as I stand panting I realize that I've blocked off any real exit.

Trapped.

My sparks are the only thing lighting the hall, and the metal beneath my paw sizzles before I shut my crest and tail flares off. I'm so dizzy it feels like the hall is turning beneath me until I see light in the distance.

It might be a wayward ember from my flames, or an illusion brought on by my fatigue, but at the moment, I'm almost definite I saw some kind of light beckoning to me.

Hello?

A voice, a feminine one, echoes through the halls. It fills my ears and shakes me down to my paws, making every hair stand up with a wild, electric energy. It's familiar. It's someone else. It's in my native tongue, no less, not the common language Obsidian prisoners use to communicate.

I may not have grown up there, but I still know the language like the way I know the sky and the earth, the hazy memories I have of plants, the way my lungs hate this air because they know they're not supposed to be breathing it...

In that way, in the marrow of my bones, I know her.

The Obisidians know everything about me. They grew me in a lab for whatever purpose they must've found fit, studied my habits from birth, and now they've seen all of my tricks.

There's no way this isn't a trap.

I run anyways.

The only thing at the end of the hall is a door, which slides open at my approach, as they all do. I don't know if it's mistaken me for an Obsidian in the lack of light or if it's one of the prisoner-use doors, but still, it closes behind me and the overheads turn on to bathe the room in silver, white, and that ugly off-purple of black lighting.

The room is far sleeker than our old, dilapidated containment units.

A dark form tangled in gray wire lies at the center of the room in a pool of blue liquid, illuminated on all sides by harsh white lights both inside and outside of the tube. Some Obsidian scratchings line the area, as well as several control panels, framing the perimeter in a maze of wire and metal. Like most Obsidian cages for experiments, rather than food sources, there are huge panels on either side that show statistics like her heart rate and other vitals, along with a running log of her progress.

I notice her sharp ears and the fur pouring out of them and my heart stops. I know those ears, know those paws, and I definitely know the overdeveloped dewclaws, made for something better than just running halls in the hell of a labratory.

Canira.

I haven't seen a live specimen besides myself for years. I was under the impression we'd all been moved out to some obscure part of the factory, save for me, or that the Obsidians had just deemed our kind too unstable for testing. Canira, along with the other native Dreamlandian species, are notoriously hard to keep as prisoners and have a habit of dying quickly.

So why me? I stare up the tank and correct myself, Why us?

"Who are you?" I ask.

She opens her eyes and even through the ooze encasing her, I can see that they shine a startling blue, so bright that they're almost white. Her pupils contract to slits as she tries to get a better look at me, pressing one paw against the glass, and her head tilts.

"Are you new?" I ask, wondering what they could have made her for. She doesn't respond, her paw pressing against where my face is, and I think I see her maw twitch. I lean up onto the vial and press my own paw to hers, my claws hitting the glass with a quick, hard clink.

She withdraws, startled, and her wings shoot out around her. They're a wide, dark arc of sinew and bone tipped with sharp points where the bones connect, like dragon wings. They furl against the sides of the container, as if they can't stand their situation either.

I recoil in shock, landing back on all fours and stepping back. She tilts her head again.

"Sorry. They don't usually... we don't usually, wings, I mean. We don't usually have them. I suppose we could, though? I don't know any other Canira." I confess to her. I compose myself and continue, "I'm Torch, and I'm a friend. I can bust you out of there."

She gives no visible confirmation that she agrees or disagrees with what I've said.

Can she hear me?

There's no time to ponder the question.

I sense the click of claws on metal and turn around too late. 

(A/N: aND IT ONLY TOOK TEN DAYS!)