The scream came up through the soles of my boots.
It skipped my ears entirely. It drove up through my heels and into my shins and set the marrow of my bones humming, a crushing weight of sound, the noise of something ancient and impossibly massive waking at the bottom of the abyss and finding its firstborn dead.
The pressure hit the shattered basalt shelf like a falling ocean.
[Warning: Extreme Acoustic Resonance Detected]
[Unshakeable Spirit has mitigated psychic collapse]
My vision broke into static, red and black. I lay flat on my back in the ash with my well drained dry, and the dark ink lines under my skin throbbed in time with the roar. I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't draw a breath.
'What is… what…'
The thought wouldn't finish. It kept slipping off the end of itself.
All around me, the party was coming apart.
