The shadow of the Glass dust-Wyrm fell across the white salt flat like the blade of a headsman’s guillotine.
Thirty feet above the frozen caravan, the monster’s circular maw whined with terrifying, clockwork speed as its four nested rings of quartz teeth ground against each other. Each serrated blade of semi-clear stone was over three arm-lengths in length, rotating in counter-opposing arcs designed to shred earth-shaking bedrock into gravel. Ropes of thick, thick, sticky, sulfuric spit dripped from the jaws, sizzling wildly as they struck the white chalk-stone crust and carving smoking chemical pits into the hardpan.
The beast had wiped out the rear wagon in a matter of heartbeats. Now its blind, armored snout swept back and forth across the plain in slow, rhythmic, horrifying arcs, sniffing the trembling air for the moving shaking of its next meal. Every twitch of its dorsal plates sent faint, prismatic rainbows dancing across the cloud of crushed dust hanging in the stale air.
“Don’t move,” Nomad Ren whispered. His voice was barely a breath, fully empty of vocal cord shaking, slipping through his teeth like dry silt through fingers. “Nobody move a toe. Nobody shift your weight. Nobody blink. Silt-stalkers don’t draw breath when the mountain wakes.”
