The Leviathan and the Levantine: Battle of the Beast

[Not Ordo]

Dralshy'a lay sleeping in a dense jungle valley on a island. The island sat in the midst of a ever present storm that made water entry on the surface impossible. Only a starship of submersible could draw near. The Selkath never came to the place and for good reason, it was dangerous. Tectonic recurrence caused the island to only spend 140 years above water every 1000 years.

Dralshy'a snored loudly as he slept off his recent meal that consisted of twenty whales but he wouldn't sleep for long.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

+Inner Rim+​

+Pyrshak System+​

+2nd Orbit Round A Hot Star+​

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+Manaan+​

+Local 24:58 / 9th Month of the Tidal Calender+​

+Equatorial Storm Belt / A great island, girded by lesser lagoon reefs / The Firaxan Shawl+​

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~In the wake of another conflagration...~​

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It was a permanent pressure cell hung over the island chain like a moody hammer, incessant lightning strikes torching the crown of a single, peaked volcano cone until the smote, broken ash-crater glowed like forge iron. The storm ate the sky, and devoured every mote and photon of close starlight, leaving the mount and the dense, tossing forestry below an infinitesimal shadow dancing behind curtains of veining lightning-bolts. Selkath ventured to the Firaxan Shawl when their need was unyielding and unremitting, and only then. Otherwise, it was the hurricane-blight used in off-hand oaths cursing familial enemies, the story muttered to disobedient youths that some wrath's were natural and cruel, a roiling storm-pot capped by torrent clouds arched like a great finial skute high into atmospheric currents.

The Relentless punched through a distorted wind tunnel and into a part amidst bastion storm walls, plying acceleration to steer out of ratcheting air-currents. It was a switching fight between maintaining navigational headings, maneuverability, lightning scoring plasma-blows off the seamed hulling. Ramjets screamed out thrust, the vessel turning into a heavy, wrenching roll and banking into a convective loop. Visual fidelity was less than a half mile. Inside the fore-mount cockpit, main-viewfinders were locked out by emergency blastshields and overlayed by real-time holographic overlays reading out changes in topographical position, atmosphere readings. On-board navi-comps struggled to keep up with lightning gauge predictions.

Her pilot said nothing. He throttled down and let an aft wind slingshot his vessel west, west again, then locked acceleration levers in the console by his seating. The vessel shot through one last ceiling of cloud cover and half light. Past the cloud-shelves, over the fire-glowing mountain peak blinking irately in the storm-dark. Lightning chased her flanks. One got lucky. It drove a ribbon of backlit plasma across the Relentess' spine, snapping off a 'tail feather'. A second, inkier shadow of coughing smoke painted over the midnight hurricane. The pilot silenced emergency chimes sounding from every available seat-speaker, deftly initiating emergency landing protocols while the vessel went to auto-pilot. He rose out of his seeding, seat-belts cast off, running like a burl into the belly hold.

Some sixteen clicks east on the flanks of the island mountain, the vessel came down. Fire lit the tail stabilizers, throwing out jet shadows across snaking flood plains below. It coasted to a controllable decent and kept trying to maintain the rate of slowdown. Winds kept buffeting into the under-carriage of the back-end hulling. It threw the nose forward at a poorly chosen moment. The Relentless drove down, bit into an acre of whip-snapped frond-trees, and began to auger. Her sole passenger was flung ragdoll in the hold. Despite mechanical injuries, the wing airfoils held, letting angled wing-tips catch soggy loam. The ship juddered a long slide.

Finally, it came to rest beneath a low butte of stoney flint jutting like a misplaced cliff-face. Automatically, flight controls settled the ship into idle. Engine funnels quieted of after-burn. On-board secondary-systems ticked into shut-off, leaving the interior black while buckled outer-plating murmured groans into the stanchion framing. One emergency exitway portcullis thrummed open and a long kick battered the spent shield-casing out onto wet grass.

Someone stepped out beneath the awning provided by the settled wing structure. He looked dressed like a lost anachronism stumbled onto paradisial hell. Leather and chainlink armour hooded by black wool-cotton and patched trousers, kneed with steel and booted, jacketed in further black, tall, strong, ominous in frame when lightning crash and threw illumination starkly over his paled face. Slit-eyes narrowed. With luck, the Farwalker armour's invisibly written wards of castigation and letters of allurement would lend some protection.

Seydon drew out Winterfang, and began climbing up through the jungle rise, to where he could hear enormous, throaty snoring.

[member="Dralshy'a"]

 

[Not Ordo]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

A scent...an urge rose but from whence it came it could not know. A terrible eye, reptilian and glaring opened of its own accord it seemed followed by its other before it's head rose to sniff the air deeply. Trees and ground were torn and rent asunder as it pressed up to its feet. The ground rumbled as the ominus volcano anounced its presence.

Its great head turned silently as a lightning bolt crossed the sky illuminating the beast's tremendous form against the back lit canopy punched with holes and obscured by billows of tempest grey. There was somthing he could not ignore and a desire he had to feed as his throat rumbled forth a gruff thrumb of anticipation. Two hunters, two preys, and one island, it was only a matyer of time.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

It was frothing jungle-scape whipped into a saurian frenzy by the constant atmospheric whiplash, light just a faint idea streaking through slashed parts in the distending canopy roofing. Seydon ran up through a tuck of exposed, long cooled magma drift, snaring his gripping in wherever washes of silty pebbles and mud-caked scree broke out underneath his studded sole-studs. Rainfall painted tree-trunk and jutting, hunched across boulders with inky jet-shades and liquid pitch-black. Every surface at his touch ran with constant rivulets. Seydon spat water out of his mouth, wiped his brow, checking his armour-straps held against vigorous wear. He clamboured up a sixteen meter rock-face, molded like a flash-frozen waterfall, in actuality a long dead lava tributary with cresting 'waves' scalloped inward with flaking pumice. The Dunaan was making for whatever high ground he could navigate and spent half his time battling the freeze on his hands and knees than worrying at eye-aglow shadows gaping at him from their shrubbery cover.

And then, he felt the island quake from its roots to uppermost caldera with sound. Seydon paused, and then hauled himself upward on a bark-peeling cocoa-roan. His head took up occupancy beneath a low lean-to of bushy leafing. Despite abysmal night illumination, altered slit-eyes picked out a lumbering backdrop shadow pushing itself up from the jungle floor. The Dunaan caught his breath, staring at the monochrome sight. It was an Olympian-tier monster scaled like a woke dreadthing over trembling tree-tops whimpering and lashing at its scale-hide ankles; he measured fifty meters at the shoulder, another seventy atop its scutum, a deceptively prehensile tale as long as the profile of a standard war-cruiser swaying out behind its wide-set, hab-block sized flanks. One sweep cleared several acreages and left a broken swathe, blemished with snapped, truncated tree remains and carpeting leaf-litter, clumped mud-sludge the size of hover-tanks, and newly landscaped pond-toes rapidly flooding with redistributed river runoff.

Seydon took swift restock of his harnessing pouches, checking kit, refastening spider-locks. He swept silver-capped knuckle studs over each gloved hand, saw to the snap-mechanisms of pivot-blades stored up his sleeving, seeing that both Winterfang and Razorlight hadn't come free of their hilt-catches. The Dunaan bit his tomahawk axe into the soft ringwood and shredded down to the mud earth. Echoes of thunder in the ground were unmistakeable. And if he hurried to that ridged hill peaking like a sharp, folded line along the awakening volcano's slopes, he might just meet the Dread-Beast of Velok in time... So he ran. Seydon picked up speed and blurred a blazing trail through virtually incomprehensible water-logged coniferous hell, alchemical muscles pounding out strength until soil was blistering in his backwash.

[member="Dralshy'a"]

 

[Not Ordo]

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

Hunger grew like birth pangs of a pregnant woman as the sensations common to the hunt welled up in the great beast. Eyes blazed like funeral pyres as he caught the glimmers of movement. The beast's brutal throat rumbled once more before opening it's terrible maw, with teeth the size of men, and roared forth a bellow of anger, hunger and threat.

Bright bio luminescent lights flared at his tail and cycled toward his head rapidly as he prepared to breath death at the last place he saw movement. Again its mouth burst open bit this time with blue liquid flames at where the man-thing had just been.