The ground trembled before the tail even moved.
'Duck!'
Arthur dropped. The tail swept through the space where his head had been, close enough that the wind off it pulled at his hair. Cael had already gone low on the other side. Theodore rolled sideways through frost-stiff undergrowth, the ground here nothing like the soft dirt back home, packed hard from cold that never fully let go even with the sun directly overhead.
The thing standing over them shouldn't have existed.
Shell plating wrapped its whole body, ridged and split into overlapping segments, horns jutting at irregular intervals like something had grown them wrong on purpose. Four thick legs. A jaw that snapped shut with a sound like two boulders meeting.
A turtle. An absolute abomination of a turtle, the size of the building they were staying in.
