The sound of the chaos, of the madness: it fills the air. The sound of war-crying screams and anguish, of the sudden ephemeral and eerie hiss of an unseen force: it begins to spread through the trees and through the waters- through the very land itself.
Pangea comes to life with each discordant note, each disharmony and maddened wail.
It’s heart pulses, once and then twice: beating beneath the sand-mixed soil and trees covered in kelp, algae, barnacles and coral. The shadows and bones of ancient leviathans still fresh across the hellscape and their corpses shudder as the rotting meat exudes a sickly odor and smell: as the bile and blood begins to pour into the ground and give rise to things such as browning spots and dying plants. Fish that has flopped are still now, and their scales fall from the flesh as the meat sours.
Pangea exhales its rotted and fetid breath, it raises an invisible hand and all the inhabitant thereof are suddenly crushed beneath its claws.
None can feel them, none know of them: but Yidhra sees them. She feels them and recognizes the shifting pressure so suddenly that her bony form takes steps back- steps away from the war-party and the God-Mage’s hunt.
Yidhra lifted her think neck and she screams: “NO, I WILL NOT DIE.” her mind races, adrenaline pulling through her every fiber of being as she rushes to the side and dives towards the edge of a strange pool of water. Oily on the surface blood mixes with the brackish fluid and as he hoof strikes the ground the water is deeper than she imagined.
Her knees sink in, but she runs: pushes through and passed it.
The ocean is cold.
Blue, and grey- green and shimmering… the water is cold.
Like a fish she plunges into it: thrusts herself beyond the waves and allows herself to shift so that the full form of her body sinks well beneath the surface in a frantic dive. Saltwater stings her eyes but, she is so used to the pain of it that she cannot care for the burning.
Her nostrils flare and water slides through her throat and into her lungs.
Heaviness and exhaustion, the fullness causing her cough to worsen and her body to wrack with pain: she bends in ways that are not natural and continues swimming beneath the sea.
Yidhra feels the parasites of her body coming to life, she feels them digging and biting the weak flesh. She recalls the first time she tried to swim: and the drowning, and she welcomes it.
There in the heart of Pangea however, she has not escaped the beats or the eyes of it: she is not unseen, and suddenly her muscles seize and tense. Inside her mind she hears the familiar voice, the purr and shake of the God-Mage himself… the harsh growling of annoyance or amusement.
“You cannot escape.” he states.
Cold fire burns her body, and she screams beneath the water as the fur becomes flesh: spattered and grey, porous and shifting. She feels her muscles growing and feels her body and bones snapping and reforming as fullness returns to her shape. Yidhra’s mane and tail are tugged and pulled, the dark colors lightening and changed as the tangles becoming coiling and writhing tentacles: and the suckers and barbs flex. She tastes and feels the water through them- feels her own form settling as she inhales a deep, last breath and begins laughing.
“I am not dying, oh no…” she purrs, the water dripping from her lips as she breathes. “Carnage… Pangea, so beautiful.”
Hours pass before she rises to the surface, before she breaks through the waves and before her form shadows the land again. Her skin shifts a strange array of colors and textures, it’s porous and grotesque mimicry of the landscape enabling her to press upon the coral and become it. She hisses and her voice echoes as she slithers and walks across the land.
She sees color is vibrancy she never know, and stops when she reaches the highest rock: her coiled tentacles grasping and feet digging in as she feels the elongated limbs near her shoulders helping to pull her up.
Yidhra’s mouth is no longer a mouth, but rather a maw: a series of fleshy tendrils where a beak sits in the mass.
“Pangea awakens,” she speaks at the top: she calls out. “It breathes as you and I, it lives again as it has- and it brings with it, a gift: one that we are responsible for.” her beak snaps and the blood drips from it, leaks down the tendrils and drops upon the land.
Her blood is blue.
“All those here know it, we feel it: we are touched by it,” she shouts. Watery and smoky her voice is deep and guttural, the barbel shaped iris narrowing as she looks around. “I am Yidhra, a creature from lands long lost to time, and I stand now in this place- gifted and given form by Pangea. Come with me, and rise: live here, and let us enjoy the fruits of what we wrought into this world. This… is my domain, after all.”
As if to exercise a point she lifts a hoof and snaps it down upon the surface of the rock. Around her there is a bubble, a heaviness that fills the air: a vulgar humidity that becomes oppressive.
Fear.
Like a tangible force, fear seeps into the air and it affects those who it encompasses.
“Rise, and come now- my darlings.”
Yidhra