A herd of what looked like elephants stood in the clearing.
Eight of them.
Calling them elephants felt wrong the longer I looked, because while the general shape was familiar, everything else about them was not.
They were enormous, far larger than any beast of that kind had any right to be, their bodies towering like living fortresses. Their skin was slate-gray and marble-smooth, almost polished, and beneath it faint veins glowed softly, branching and pulsing like slow lightning trapped inside stone.
Their tusks curved upward at unnatural angles, elongated far past what biology should allow, hollowed through the center, and etched with runes that crawled faintly with residual energy, which were 100% not decorative markings.
Their eyes were small, set deep into their massive skulls, cold and calculating, utterly devoid of the softness you'd expect from a herbivore. There was intelligence there. Predatory intelligence.
