She set her alarm for eight hours of sleep, as agreed, minus the hour and change since she first went to sleep.

"Nothing else happened."

And sleep for Belmarniss.

Tanya will stand her watch.

And then they can get up and move on. And again, and again. (There is actually a slightly reduced monster density on the rest of the trip, maybe courtesy of those raiders.)

And eventually reach the surface before running out of food?

Yes, though it helps that Belmarniss knows which cave animals are edible.

When they pop up on the surface, it's night, and there's trees obscuring the stars, but there's fresh air, and green smells.

Finally. They climbed so far up they might as well be on a mountain! But then, wouldn't it be easier to make horizontal tunnels? What made these gigantic cave systems?

"We should make camp inside the tunnel one last time and wait for daytime to scout."

"It's pretty like this," Belmarniss remarks, but she sets about it.

"I appreciate it too" (after the endless caves the breeze of fresh air is very literally that) "but we have no idea which way to go. Once the sun rises I'll be able to fly up and see for many miles around to find the nearest settlement or road or river."

"Yeah, makes sense."

Tanya is relieved, and hopeful, and anxious, and she can manage however long it is to sunrise. 

It's four hours. Belmarniss is grouchy about the light, but quietly. She'll retreat into the cave to pack up while Tanya flies.

"You don't want to come on the flight? Doesn't the penumbra solve this?" If Belmarniss prefers not to be in sunlight they won't work well together, but their journey might be almost over.

"Isn't that tiring, bringing me up that high? I didn't prep Feather Fall."

"I can do twenty minutes without noticeably tiring and that's enough to go a few miles up and back down. ...I can also cast an opaque illusion to put you in shadow if that helps."

"Penumbra covers enough that it doesn't hurt but I'm still not used to it... but yeah. Sure." Hammock thing?

Hammock thing with complimentary sun-shade!

Going up at a gentle one gee for ten minutes can get you as far up as you could possibly want. What is there to be seen?

Sunrise is coming up from thataway so that's probably east! Their aperture is on a mountain slope, and the trees around the aperture look younger than the ones farther away - maybe raiders fill up whatever carrying capacity they haven't managed to exhaust on other stuff with wood on their way back in. The nearest town is about four miles to the southeast and on the other side of a river and looks very small, surrounded by farms. There's another a bit farther away and a bit bigger, east by northeast. More of the same in the mostly-easterly direction (not much is visible past the mountains to their west), but farther southeast, maybe forty miles, there's a town that might have two-story buildings and things like that. It seems like it might be spring, depending on the usual climate here.

Tanya commits this to her orb's memory.

This works by mentally creating an illusion matching what she sees and, without casting it, having the orb remember its spell parameters. It's good enough for a page of text or an aerial overview but it means she won't be able to zoom in on little details later, the way she can by creating a foot-wide lens right now. (She zooms in on the towns while she can and records that too, of course. Belmarniss can also have a look through the lens.) "Anything you want a closer look at before we go back down?"

Tanya can make a very large lens but she cannot increase the amount of light that comes through it, which means the highest useful magnification factor is x1000 or so. But if she illusions a dark box all around them with the lens the only source of light, and waits for their eyes to adjust back to the dark, she can zoom in a million-fold. She could identify people in the town forty miles away, if she knew their faces and knew exactly where to point her magical camera instead of painting the whole town on a one-foot-diameter objective.

(Why yes, aerial mages do wonders for surveillance. The only real counters are poor weather and your own mages. ...or living underground, that would do it.)

However, whenever she adjusts the zoom level (e.g. to point it at a closer town) their eyes have to re-adjust, and if something nonmagical flies at them while they're in the dark-box she won't see it coming. If there's something that deserves extensive surveillance, Tanya can do it on her own after she takes Belmarniss down.

"Bulette," Belmarniss identifies, pointing north at a nearby bit of mountain. A monster is trundling along. "- I don't care about getting a look at it, just thought I'd point it out. Are we stopping at the little village before we go on to the city? Looks like the road goes that way... if we look close enough and the angle's good I might be able to identify the symbols on their churches."

Tanya can spend a minute zooming in on the churches if Belmarniss can point out which buildings those likely are, or just on big central buildings if that helps. (Ugh, but this is legitimately important in understanding local social dynamics and is half the reason Tanya has brought local social expert Belmarniss along.) And then they can start descending.

"The close-by villages are likely to be the ones recently raided and unwelcoming to drow," she observes. "But if we can peacefully learn where we are on your bigger map, we can determine if we want to go towards the bigger town at all or if we actually need to cross the mountains or something. And that only requires asking questions, not staying there, so I can go in alone if you think that's best."

(Belmarniss identifies the nearest villages as having Erastilian symbols and spots an Abadar, a Pharasma, and an Iomedae in the bigger town too.) "I can look like a surface elf for twenty-four hours at a stretch if I want, if I want to blow a third circle spell on that, but I'm not actually sure how much that helps in practice. I think the big town would be on the way to the coast by the shortest route, loosely, so if you want a big port city that'd be the direction to head."

The atlas confirms this, and tentatively identifies the big town as "Jaru".

"If I'm by myself I can fly fast enough to cross the whole country in a day" (in an hour and a half, really, counting only the densely populated western part) "so it's mostly about where you want to go. I don't know how far I can fly you horizontally in a day without tiring, we'll try and see - say, ten or fifteen minutes of flying every hour, see if I can keep that up all day and not wear myself out in case of a fight." 'All day' is still only eight hours long if they're camping in the wilderness. "We might be limited more by what speed makes the wind too uncomfortable for you or the drag too much for me. If we can only manage fifty miles an hour for a total hour of flying per day, that's still much better than walking but it could take a week or more to get to a particular city."

"Do you have any specific plans beyond going to libraries? I don't know enough to make plans for myself yet."

"I don't know a lot more than you, not confidently. I probably want a big port city. They'll see more exotics there and I'll benefit from seeming like I might be from farther away and less like what they expect from drow." Sigh. "Plus the libraries'll have stuff from farther afield. Though I could imagine wanting to stop in a town we visit on the road if it's hospitable enough. Since traveling by river doesn't help us basically I think I want Cassomir, not Oppara. But I'm guessing, could learn anything once we're talking to people. Next Share Language should be Taldane, I've probably got an accent and you'll pick that up but it'll get you started."

Cassomir is on the border with Andoran and on a major river. "That makes sense. We'll want to follow the mountains south and swing west when they end, going over won't save us that much distance so we need not risk it." Those are some impressively tall mountains. "And I should start learning the local language. I can't buy a dictionary to a language I actually know but I can at least buy some paper and start writing things down. When the language spell ends I remember syntax much better than vocabulary." Tanya didn't have any downtime on the way that she could spend being distracted from her surroundings, and once she's around more people who speak Taldane it will hopefully be easier anyway. She'll have more time to talk to Belmarniss in the next few days than she has before if they spend most of their time waiting for Tanya to rest from flying. (She could double the pace but she'd be tired in case of a monster attack. As long as they can buy or at least hunt food she doesn't care if the journey takes a few days longer.)

"If we stop in towns I can probably spend some time profitably talking to locals, if only to practice the language, but we'd need to pay them. You might be able to sell spells, although small towns might not have enough of a market. I'm not sure what I could do to earn money short term. I can kill bulettes but I assume towns don't normally have dangerous non-people monsters nearby, let alone Cassomir once we get there. ...although I can quickly fly out to somewhere that does have one, if I knew where to go."