He felt its charge the way a body feels thunder just before it hears it. He dropped the mirror thread from his wrist onto the mud in front of the patch, a quick smear that let the ground flash him back.
For two heartbeats a second, Ethan stood where he had just been, his weight on false ground, an easy target.
The chimera took it. The horned head drove forward. The front feet planted where the mirror insisted his ankles lived.
The mud said thank you and took the weight. It didn't swallow like a mouth. It took like a person who knows how to carry.
Slow, inexorable, half an inch and then another. The chimera thrashed with the kind of power that gets you deeper into what you struggle with.
It tried to pull in the wrong direction. It sank to the knees, to the belly. The wings rose hard, buzzing, slicing fog.
They lifted some, not enough. It tried to go up without changing what it did with its feet. The more punished is stubbornness.
