>>5542624You again swallow your fear of a watery grave, and opt to take the river-route. It is, in spite of your own experiences, safer than plunging into the territory of some unknown a predator-of-the-deep, and also less certain to spell doom than starvation and exhaustion along the longer route. You repeat these facts like a mantra as you walk the faintly-familiar course back towards the underground river.
As your divinations foretold, the river is shallower and calmer than when last you dove in, in vain effort to rescue a drowning Reptilian. That was when you first learned of how very close the green Knight was to exposing your race’s existence and operations—something which, it seems, has become grim reality. How much do the surface-scum now know of the Master Race?
You shake your head. You have no way of knowing the full extent of exposure and disclosure, not yet. You re merely trying to avoid focusing on the river before you.
It is still too dep, wide, and fast to ford by simply striding across. Even in <Dragonshape>, the perpendicular passage between this ‘riverbank’ (if indeed hard stone on either side of a harshly-eroded path can be called that) and the opposite side is too narrow and low to fly across. You consider forming a <Wall of Stone> across its surface, but this would result in a narrow gap and a similar issue—neither you nor your basilisk would fit (and perhaps not the Novice Fleshweaver’s egg-laying hips, either).
“I could use the Ring of Elemental Command,” you theorize aloud. “This could block up the river, so we could pass, or form a sheet over top of it.”
“If it fails, and bursts like a shoddy dam, we will be battered by many tons of water and shards of ice, and hurtled into the dark deeps.”
