A few minutes before the explosion.
The mountain range west of Lirath was one of those places the world seemed to have forgotten on purpose.
No paths. No settlements. Nothing that invited anyone to come closer.
The beasts that would normally have dominated those territories, B and A-rank predators, creatures accustomed to treating anything that entered their space as potential prey, kept to the edges. Distant. Silent.
Not because they wanted to. Because their instincts told them that doing otherwise would cost them dearly.
Their instincts sensed it,
Vibrations. Subtle, almost imperceptible to anyone whose senses weren't sharp enough to catch them, but constant, steady, like the slow heartbeat of something enormous breathing in the depths of that mountain range. They didn't come from the earth. They came from the air itself, pulsing in the invisible with a regularity that had everything of conscious life and nothing of natural phenomenon.
