Dying Earth Story Nears Completion

I've had a very productive week thus far, with "The Quickening" appearing out of nowhere fully formed and now nearing the completion of a good working draft of "The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod (some frags of hook below, which may change all unrecognizable before the end...).Whisper Bird neither felt nor cared to feel the clammy foetid closeness of the land of mushrooms; this kind of cave, with its monstrous, bone-white lobsters waiting in dark, dank water for the unwary; its thick canopy of green-and-purple-and-gray mushrooms that hung over everything listening and watching; its bats and rats and blind white miniature pigs; its huge and rapacious worms like wingless dragons, all of it imbued with the pervasive stink of decay, lit with a pale green luminescence that seemed more like the light of creatures floating across the bottom of the sea...---If Whisper Bird must go slow and silent, so T'sais Prime must go fast and quick, and if never a bird had she been, it would have been to her benefit to be one. She arrived in the City of Broken Glass after nightfall, when only the faint green glow from far above signaled the ceiling of this contained world, the light bleeding off from the mushroom level. She was surrounded by a hundred thousand gleaming surfaces of mirrors and of shattered windows that reflected a million confusing images, so that she could not tell what was real and what was not, with ghoul bears and deodands fast-approaching, hot to her scent.She was not built for the adventure of close combat, and so she used her first spell, of Flying Travel, to summon Twk Men, who descended from the sky with all rapidity on their dragonflies, in this strange place as large as small dragons. Four bore her upward upon a raft of twigs lashed together and set between them, the space between the flickering dance of the dragonflies' wings so scarce that T'sais thought they must surely overlap and, out of rhythm, all fall to the jagged surface. But they did not. They seemed, at first, so solicitous and friendly that she wondered aloud why they had been banished to this place.---Grod Lump knew he was a hammer not a fork or a spoon. He was built for war, and thus when he landed in a hellish scene, he did not even blink one of his many eyes, but got on with his task. Ahead of him lay a vast steaming plain covered in blades of red flame like burning blades of grass. Across that plain strode the enormous fire salamanders, ponderous and slow as glaciers, Grod smaller than a flake of skin from between one of the creatures' toes. They were engaged in their never-ending war with the flame dragons that harried them like Twk Men swarming a human too close to one of their nests. The air was fierce with exhalations of fiery breath and the slap and roar of the great beasts' progress on an endless migration to the walls of the world and back. The sky was several veins of orange and gold. Such people as Grod could see lived in an endlessly singed wasteland that existed between ash and immolation. At the edges, too, charred, blackened rock curled and curved, cooling in mid-arch. If Grod had been a poet, he might have appreciated the view. But he wasn't a poet, and he was already under attack, the dragons flying down to eviscerate him through the roiling waves of heat with their corrosive flame. But he was ready. As the first hurtled toward him, he unfurled the one spell he had been given: Ball and Chain, which manipulated the molecules of the air to create a sphere of utter cold around him that he could not feel, while also sending out a vibrating chain of ice that caught the dragon in the head, freezing its skull solid, which then, out of the influence of the chain, came back into the flames long enough to explode into ashes...which fell like odd snowflakes onto Grod's sphere of cold and stuck there, spackling it.