I would like, for the sake of posterity, to note that there are many things one expects to encounter in the course of an evening gone terribly wrong.
An ambush in a cursed city? Certainly. A stitched monstrosity wielding a hammer the size of a carriage? Par for the course. A King-Class mage turning gravity into a party trick designed to pulp your insides? Of course, why not.
But what I hadn't penciled into my schedule—what I had not so much as drafted a sarcastic postscript about in the margins of my mental diary—was the mountain.
Yes, the mountain.
The entire bloody side of the mountain deciding to detach itself from reality and come crashing down toward us in a fiery tantrum of molten earth and grinding stone.
I will tell you now: no pen, no stopwatch, no wit sharp enough to cut marble could have prepared me for the sound.
It didn't sound like thunder. Thunder was far too polite compared to this. Thunder rolls, it warns you, it grumbles like a drunken uncle.
