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"]