Chapter 4 - The Shadow of Death
Zephyr couldn't move. His ribs felt crushed into powder, and his nervous system was firing white-hot static. He looked up, watching the massive, flat sole of the mammoth's foot descend like a falling tombstone.
So this is it, he thought, bitter tears stinging his eyes. Dying like a bug under an old bull's shoe.
He let out a frantic, high-pitched squeal—not a battle cry, not a predator’s challenge, but the raw, pathetic distress whistle of a baby calling for its mother.
The foot stopped three inches above his snout.
The air didn't just turn cold; the atmospheric pressure plummeted so violently that the mammoth’s ears twitched and flattened against its skull. The dead mist clinging to the rocks suddenly stopped swirling and froze solid mid-air.
From the clouds above, a sound fell. It wasn't a roar. It was a vacuum—a deep, devouring whoosh that sucked the breath out of the mammoth's lungs and caused the loose ash across the entire valley to lift an inch into the air.
BOOOM.
A shockwave hit the petrified forest, snapping three dozen quartz trunks simultaneously like dry toothpicks.
A pillar of pure, impenetrable black smoke hammered into the clearing sixty feet away. It hit the ground with the force of a falling meteor, blasting a crater out of the bedrock and throwing up a blinding curtain of soot and embers.
The mammoth trumpeted in sudden, hysterical panic, wheeling its massive bulk around so fast it slipped on the loose gravel.
Inside the black cloud, two fires ignited.
They weren't orange. They weren't yellow. They were twin beacons of pure, ultraviolet wrath, blazing through the smoke like burning stars.
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The soot cleared in a single, violent back-draught of monstrous wings.
Ignis had arrived.
