For the Hero of Eternia was suspended from the great arch of the cavern itself, within the hollow head of the snake. There he hung on high, his limbs
spread wide, held on the unsupporting air by long chains which vanished into the gloom beyond. His near-naked body was lit like a man of new-cast bronze,
shining in the sullen and burning glow of the mountain’s fires below him; the very air shimmered and shifted with their heat in which he must slowly be
roasting. And there was but one way to come at him – that one, slender buttress of carved rock which flung itself across the gullet of the snake, highest
of all the galleries and spurs of stone. Before them was the open floor of the cavern – above them the many rising levels, all of which culminated in that
single slender span – and that spread-eagled figure hung there so unnaturally like the cruelest possible parody of a bird in flight.
From: Though Heroes Fall, Chapter Nine.