The laugh came out first, and my body's immediate response to it was another comprehensive wave of agony through my left side that made the laugh fold right then and there and come out as something considerably less triumphant.
All the while, the monster stood there in the freezing dark with its eyeless face turned toward me and those deep guttural growls rolling outward across the basin floor in slow, continuous pulses, its broken claw still frozen at the end of the arc that had sent me grinding against the ground, but it did not move, nor did it stop growling at me.
[I've done all I could've…] I thought, and the thought arrived with a certainty that surprised even me. There was no panic attached to it, just the plain and simple accounting of a situation that had been handed everything I had.
