The ground rumbled beneath Thon’s feet, but he paid it little heed. Here in the Umbruk, seismic shifts were commonplace. The etchings on the ancient earth totems claimed that the towering mountains around the valley through which his scouting party now walked once breathed sacred fire from their now dormant mouths. If those fires were ever here, however, it was in an age long past. Today, the steep cliffs were covered with ice and snow.
While the sounds of the earth beneath him didn’t bother Thon, its movement did. The rumbling came again, and this time he felt the ground itself shift. This was no soft shaking, like when the earth spirits were angry. It felt like something…else…was down there. And it was moving.
Suddenly, the snowbank ahead of the party began to move as well. Thon barked at his men to step back, and as he followed his own order, felt his foot come down on something that was certainly not the ground he had walked upon moments before. He stumbled and fell to the side, tumbling out of the way of the enormous…thing…rising up from a hole in the earth.
When Thon looked up, he saw nothing but teeth – rows upon rows of teeth. He tried to scramble to his left, and then to his right, but there, too, were massive, gaping maws of teeth.
Thon raised his axe and asked the spirits for strength. Perhaps these monsters could chew through stone, but he would not make gnawing upon a member of the Earth clan so easy…
