The mountain had spoken, and its voice was a five-hundred-year scream. Tonight, Mount Saede's fury hadn't been simple lava, but a pyroclastic flow. A superheated, suffocating tide of gas, ash, and rock that had raced down its slopes at impossible speed, incinerating everything in its path.
What remained was nothing but a funeral shroud.
Arkai Dawnoro moved through the grey silence, his black fur coat a contrast against the monochrome devastation. His commands were low, guttural things, stripped of all but necessity.
"Dig here. The shelter's airshaft might be clear."
His men, their own muzzles tight with the effort of breathing the acrid air, moved with a weary purpose.
They found them in the ruins of a stone cellar, a sight that made even the hardest warrior look away. A great Werebear, his back to the collapsed entrance, had wrapped his massive body around a smaller human form. His mate.
