I was curious.
I remembered all too well what had happened, the last time I had been curious.
I was still ashamed of myself.
I still felt, in the peaceful, quiet moments in the very early morning, the same regret, the same devastation I had felt upon seeing the consequences of my failure.
I should have been able to resist the urge to check.
I had to have been crazy to think I could.
The mountain was now much more friendly now, now that I had realized the true limits of my power, but it still had a lingering feeling of death and evil, masked underneath the more benign first impressions I got. This feeling was only intensified the closer I got to the Crater's rim. I flowed along silently, steadily now, but I felt a part of me wilt inside, the part that remembered my last journey up this slope.
But I pushed down my fears and kept going. I needed to know.
And then I reached the Rim. I dared not even consider going inside the Crater, and the view from here was quite fine by me. Down there, in the very middle, there it was. A black lump, like a sphere had been melted and fused to the bottom. From here, it looked tiny. I knew that that was an illusion; the last time I had come this way, I had come much closer to the object, and it had been twice my height.
And I wasn't going to come that close to it this time.
My curiosity satisfied, I let myself slide down the outside slope again, floating downwards in relief.
The Firebird was once more trapped.
I just hoped it would stay that way.