Carving the Cinder Plume

How much heat could a slab of river-quarried slate drink before it shattered under a rider's heels? Ryoma leaned out over the drop at the lip of the Basalt Shore, gripping the curved nose of his board, waiting for the soot-black plume below to cough up its second pulse of raw fire. If he dropped three seconds too early, the cold basalt would drag his speed to nothing. If he dropped late, the volcanic updraft would blow him into the boiling brine. He wanted five hundred degrees of live friction across the belly of the stone, enough to push his dormant kinetic gauge over the threshold before sunset, and the smoke vents did not grant second chances.

The ridge dropped away at a sixty-degree slant, slick with fresh gray pumice dust that hissed where it touched molten seepage.

Ryoma wedged his vulcanized hide boots into the braided sinew bindings. Down at the lower switchback, two scavenger boards were already carving wide, ugly herringbone tracks through the talus, their heavy obsidian scraper-pins throwing orange sparks into the gloom. They had tracked him from the dry cinder terraces above, eager to strip the seasoned slate off his feet.

A low hiss vibrated through the rock under his soles.

The vent coughed. A column of roiling cinder and scarlet gas tore out of the chimney fifty yards down, turning the gray incline into a chute of glowing embers.

Ryoma shoved off.

Gravity took him by the collar. His board slammed into the loose slope with a flat, ringing crack, tossing twin rooster-tails of hot ash into the stinging air. Wind whipped his untamed dark hair flat against his temples. The scent of scorched hide rose immediately from the soles of his boots—dry, sharp, and smelling faintly like singed goat hair. He grinned into the gale, shifting his weight onto his back heel to bite the bevel of the slate into the crust.

A soft, ember-colored chime pulsed behind his eyes.

"Move your heels, slate-thief!" a voice bellowed over the roar of the chute.

Ahead, the two scavengers banked hard into his line. The lead rider, a broad-shouldered brute in a chest-guard made of stitched turtle shell, dragged a jagged club of knapped basalt across the ash. He kicked a spray of scalding gravel directly toward Ryoma's face. The second rider swung wide to the left, angling to box Ryoma against the bubbling fissure that bounded the eastern runout.

Between them lay thirty paces of collapsing terrace. If Ryoma scrubbed his edge to brake, the drop in friction would dump his speed, letting the cold air lock his numbers in place.

Ryoma did not touch his brakes. He dropped into a deeper crouch, pressing the balls of his feet hard into the braided leather loops. "You picked a poor day to crowd the line!" he shouted back.

The brute swung his club in a vicious horizontal sweep, aiming straight for Ryoma's chest.

Instead of dodging toward the safe gravel on the right, Ryoma threw his hips toward the hot seam. He jammed his leading edge into a protruding rib of vitrified volcanic glass. The impact screamed like dense flint on ironstone, sending a jolt up his calves that rattled his teeth in his jaw. Fire burst from the underbelly of his slate as it skated across the glass rib at blinding speed. The sudden acceleration whipped him under the swinging club by three inches, the knapped stone cleaving only black smoke where his neck had been.

The second scavenger cut inward, his obsidian-tipped staff lowered like a boar spear to ram Ryoma's flank. "Off the ridge, cinder-rat!"

The fissure lay fifteen paces ahead. It was a jagged trench of red mud and bubbling pitch, glowing like an exposed furnace lung. Trapped between the spear and the boiling pit, any sensible boarder would have bailed into the scree and accepted the road rash.

Ryoma shifted his back foot, deliberately catching the trailing wake of the cinder plume.

The air scorched his throat, hot enough to crack clay. Heat was raw fuel on this slope. He leaned back until his trailing knuckles skimmed the smoking ash bed, carving an extreme arc that turned the board ninety degrees across the fall line. The stone groaned under the terrifying torque. The slate sucked the ambient fury off the cinder bed, drinking the heat until the ember numerals in his sight went from steady amber to blinding white.

Ryoma felt the pulse snap into the soles of his feet like a lightning strike through dry wood.

He drove his back heel down through the sinew binding.

The stored thermal energy discharged through the bevel of the slate in a concussive shockwave. A sickle of superheated ash and white-hot grit ripped forward, tearing a trench through the scree. The blast struck the second scavenger's board squarely at the nose. The scavenger's slate buckled, flipping the rider into a wild, flailing spin that deposited him unceremoniously into a deep drift of cold, harmless gray ash thirty yards behind Ryoma's wake.

The lead rider recoiled, hauling back on his steering ropes in panic as the fiery rooster-tail scorched the hair off his shins. "What kind of rogue art is that?"

"Shore style!" Ryoma shouted, skipping past him on a single vibrating edge.

The board hissed as it shot over the narrow lip of the fissure, clearing the boiling red pitch by four feet before touching down on the glassy runout with a clean, smooth slide. Ryoma straightened up, laughing into the wind as the embers danced around his shoulders. His boots were definitely smoking, and the stitched soles were going to need another coat of pine pitch before midday, but the heat in his calves felt glorious.

He glanced back over his shoulder. The two scavengers were tiny shapes choking on his dust, their boards stuck in the rough shale of the upper turn. The path to the lower beach lay wide open, a long, sweeping run of smooth volcanic glass that would take him straight to the carvers' huts.

Then the earth spoke.

A hollow, bass groan shuddered through the rock, vibrating far deeper than any ordinary rockfall and rattling the marrow of his shins.

Fifty paces ahead, right across the optimal racing line, the dark basalt crust buckled upward like a blister on baking bread. A jagged fissure tore across the rock with the deafening snap of fracturing glass. Before Ryoma could lean into another turn, a geyser of white, superheated steam erupted from the rent, roaring eighty feet into the sky and blinding the descent in scalding fog.