The blow was sudden and fast. Ceph was flung from her perch before she could react. A mighty shriek deafened her of all else. The dohrni wanted to react. She wanted to bring herself back to the earth, but the pressure was back. She couldn’t move her limbs; they flopped around like limp noodles as she was carried by the wind. Wind that seemed inclined to push her harder and further with each second.
All she could think about was that droning wail that ripped through her her body like the shatter had only minutes ago. Only this was different. A separate entity that could reach the same heights of presence as the first, yet it wasn’t stopping.
The pressure was instantaneous last time. There one moment; gone the next. This was nothing like that. Heavy, compressed winds slammed through her, pelting her body and leaving her no opportunity to fight against the gale that carried her further from the hole she was supposed to defend.
Still unable to move her body, her tumbling form spotted a volan far above. Ceph didn’t know whether it was Telum or not; they were too distant to get a good look. Each time her body spun, the volan was getting further away. The small mercenary was almost a kilometre away. When she realised just how she was off the ground, panic gripped her. It mixed in effortlessly with the terror she already felt from what was obviously the shriek of a Titan.
She knew what would happen before it did, but she could do nothing to stop the Nightfall Shroud’s appearance.
The volan pierced the sky, leaving a hole of darkness in the otherwise blue day. It started small, only the size of the volan’s body, but in an instant, it spread outward. Streaks of darkness crossed through the air, growing outward like rot. Soon, much of the sky directly above her had been consumed. In its place now lied darkness filled with stars despite the presence of the sun still shining down on her.
The rotten night. The Nightfall Shroud.
It began to spread from more points in the sky to her sides; the other volans. Telum was amongst them. Was he dead? Was there any chance her friend had lived from that?
No. She wouldn’t think about it until she was out of danger herself. Ceph couldn’t let herself be carried into the rotten night that continued to spread across the sky.
The wind kept up. It kept blowing her down the mountain, getting gradually further away from the ground with each instant. She wanted to flail. She wanted to gain any sort of control, but the Titan’s bird-cry suffocated her with its pressure.
Another sound soon shook her body. Despite the deafening shriek, a deep echoing rumble was quickly taking its place. The thrum through her boneless body was not a comfortable feeling, but she welcomed it as it drowned out the pressure of the shriek.
As soon as her limbs were her own again, she grabbed Hopes and Dreams and tossed them forward without a moment’s hesitation. They would be missed, but she really needed to slow her momentum. Considering their heft, they slowed her considerably. She swallowed nervously as the two hand-cannons opened up two new splotches of Nightfall Shroud, which were quick to connect with the rest of the branching rot growth blotting out the sky.
Ceph fell like a brick. The loss of her weapons had only just saved her the fate of flying too high, but it hardly cut into her momentum. She twisted her tentacles, sending herself into a spin as she descended. As much as she’d hoped to slow herself, the earth came at her too fast to do more than brace.
The impact felt like death itself. She crashed through rock for a moment, before she found herself tumbling down the slopes. Her limbs whipped around, slapping at the earth for something to hold, but any time she grabbed a protruding rock, it broke free. After rolling what must be a hundred times, she finally thrust her tentacles into the earth and got her descent under control.
As she slid to a stop, Ceph gasped in pain. Her normally purple body had blackened with bruising. Everywhere ached and she had more cuts and scrapes then ever. Groaning, she lifted her eyes. The flattened remains of the buildings under construction were above her, debris scattered everywhere. Above that, so far away, was the city built around the cavern entrance… but it was gone.
Where she’d been trying to help those people escape the broken buildings, was nothing but the Titan’s path and a landscape stripped bare. The buildings were gone. All she could make out was the shattered remnants of the centzons’ contraptions. Compared to the city, they’d held up well, but they were clearly broken and bent outward. Parts of the machine — massive slabs of stone — had broken off and were missing completely.
Ceph rose to her tentacles, needing all six to ignore the ripples of pain that bit at them. She needed to get up there. There were so many people in danger; she needed to find survivors and get them to safety.
Her first step didn’t work. The moment she placed her limb on the ground, she realised the ground was shaking. The earth was roaring. Deafening tremors pounded through her body, amplifying the aches she already felt.
“Stop.” A voice yelled at her, barely audible over the deep rumbling. Ceph spun her eyes, but she couldn’t spot the speaker.
“Euroclydon is angry. Prostrate yourself and you may live.”
It was close, but they remained invisible to her eye. A merminea?
“I can’t. There’s sti—” Ceph cut off, finally processing the creature’s words. “The Euroclydon?”
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The Titan from across the Alps? This was its doing? A Titan was attacking? It was unthinkable. Sure, she’d seen Cipactlteteo, the massive crocodile melt its way up the Alps years ago — everyone had — but that had been so far away; a natural disaster that affected people nations away from her. And as far as she knew, that had just been passing through, not actively attacking. The shriek. That bellow of the Titan was a call to battle. Winds intent on destruction.
“Prostrate,” the merminea repeated, insistent.
Ceph took another step, trying her best to overcome the intense quakes. She needed to get up there. There were too many in danger. Too many who might be injured and vulnerable to the dangers of the mountain. She couldn’t think about the Titan. If it crested those peaks that rose so impossibly high, then she was dead regardless. If the Titan was attacking, every nation was dead.
Her next step was impossible. The shaking grew so strong she tumbled to the ground, unable to hold her balance. The mountain jolted. Her grip was already broken, so when the earth slid out from beneath her, she was sent rolling. Anywhere she looked, the world seemed consistent, but she could feel the earth moving. Cracks and fissures split all through the landscape, widening with each tremor.
Then, everything stopped.
She lost her grip again and rolled further down the mountain until she crashed into a valley where the slope could no longer carry her. The tremors continued, but the Titan Alps no longer shifted. Ceph speared her limbs into the stone, ready to face out the rest of the earthquakes. This would end, and once it did, she would rush up the mountains to help those above. They were all still alive. She had to believe. She just needed to hold on for a minute.
The Titan Alps fell.
A chill froze Ceph still. No presence held her, yet she could do nothing but widen her eyes at the sight of the Alps shattering. The upper peaks collapsed as the top half of the Titan alps slid from their place. It seemed almost innocuous at first; the mass of rock that held thousands of mountains was so far away, so high above them, that it felt like another world. It slid down the slope in one piece. It was slow, but the moment it slid off the slightest of cliffs — one that was probably dozens of kilometres considering the distance — Ceph knew she was not safe.
The mass of mountains crumbled into the largest earth-slide ever seen. She felt the impact thrum through her body. It added to the quaking of the earth that had yet to let up. Ceph could only watch the deathly mass tumbling down toward her in shock. The Titan Alps were collapsing. This… this should be impossible. They rose so high they left a shadow on the sky. They were the mountains that dwarfed the Titans themselves. For them to break…
It was only when the mountain behind her fractured from the quakes that she finally snapped out of it. Her eyes twisted to see the a massive fracture cut through the valley beneath her. A moment ago, there had been a river. Not anymore. The fissure descended impossibly deep and the mountain on the other side moved away from her. It did not do so slowly. With each breath, it moved a dozen metres further. Soon, the mountain pushed out too far over the slope, and it toppled. Like a boulder dislodged from its place at the top of a cliff, this mountain tumbled down the ever present slopes of the Titan Alps.
It barely survived a kilometre before it was nothing but rubble tearing out over the landscape.
Ceph was terrified. She’d not felt like this even when she was a child. This was a scenario nobody had ever considered possible. She glanced back to the top of the Alps, and found the massive rock-slide far closer than it should have been in the seconds since she last looked. It was coming down quicker than anything had a right to move.
Ceph ran. She stumbled, the earth quaking too much to get any footing. She slammed her limbs against the ground. If she couldn’t walk or run, she would push herself as far down the mountain as she could. Ceph wanted to live.
Throwing herself to the side, she approached the closest path she had down without bounding over unstable earth. This was happening everywhere. From the south to the north as far as she could see the massive peaks, they were collapsing.
She sped down, ignoring the aches pounding through her body. Ahead, there were a group of mermineae doing the same. They ran down the section of stable earth, dodging the boulders that often rolled their way. Ceph caught up to them quickly. Their kind were usually fast, but the shaking below their feet made them trip with each few steps.
Ceph wanted to help. To do something to assist them in escaping the collapse. But in her terror, she found herself running past. A crack shook the earth, and a gorge opened up beneath her. With a quick strike of her tentacles, she flew clear over the rapidly widening fissure. She dared a glance back. The mermineae couldn’t slow in time; they tumbled straight into the gaping earthen maw.
Queasiness hit her stomach. She felt sick.
The mountains were still falling. From what she could see, there were only a few sections that remained whole and solid. The rest flowed like an ocean. An ocean that would overwhelm her if she didn’t continue.
She was so close to the crevasse now. The border between her Lower Elevation and the Steppes. She’d already reached the land of endless glaciers, though they didn’t look much like glaciers now; fractured and shattered, they were more like teeth of ice bared at the sky.
Ceph was so close now. She would survive.
She dared a glance back, and found the earthslide already upon her. It had swallowed up their only entrance to the underneath and now bared down on her. An avalanche of rock hundreds of metres tall. There was no time to do much more than throw herself through the air one last time in the hopes it would be enough.
She knew it wouldn’t.
The immense rockslide hit her battered body worse than impact mere minutes ago. Against the odds, she remained unconsumed. She was held fast to the avalanche by an unbroken boulder as it pealed down toward the crevasse at unbeaten speeds.
Not one to ignore the opportunity given her, Ceph prepared herself to leap again. The moment she and the earthen avalanche were over the wide chasm, she pushed every fibre of her aching being into throwing herself forward. She caught the intense gust of wind that blasted from the crevasse and carried her upward.
This might shoot her into the Nightfall Shroud, but there was no other option.
She crashed. Safe. She’d made it across the crevasse intact. Ceph spun and found that the wide opening in the earth swallowed the rush of earth. Gasping, she released a breathe of relief. She couldn’t relax; the crevasse didn’t stop all the rock from passing, but the vast majority of it had been stopped.
Ceph rose upon her tentacles. A boulder crashed into the earth besides her, before tumbling further down the slopes. She was safer, but not totally safe yet. As she watched, the rockslide was quickly overwhelming the crevasses ability to swallow the earth. In a few seconds, it would be crashing down the mountains again. She couldn’t stay here.
So she ran.
Ceph abandoned the mermineae. Ceph abandoned the people of the ruined city. Ceph abandoned her team. She forgot everything and ran like a coward, leaving her friends to die. If she’d lifted some people onto the unbroken sections of the landslide, it was possible. She should have considered the chance that she could help. Should have ran up instead of saving her own skin. Maybe then, more would have survived.