From the moment your foot breaches the mountain's inner chamber—past the weather-worn stones and the half-frozen warning carvings etched by hands long buried under the snow—you sense, not through sound or sight but through the subtle recalibration of your own pulse, that this is not a place where mortals are meant to trespass, not a ruin to be explored or a mystery to unravel, but a wound in the world’s flesh kept open to contain something too wild, too sentient, too hungry to be sealed away without the land itself rising to protest.

The air, thick and close, clings to your skin like breath held too long, perfumed with the tang of iron from old blood soaked into the stone, the loamy musk of fur and ash left behind by beasts that had no names, and something else beneath it all—something not quite decay and not quite life, but instead the scent of instinct itself, of primal fear and tangled heat, the smell of a creature that does not hunt to feed, nor to dominate, but because it was born knowing only the need to pursue and consume and crush.

There is no light here, not really—only the suggestion of it, refracted through shards of ancient crystal embedded in the ceiling like fossilised stars, their glow dim and pulsing as if in warning, not illumination—and the shadows that curl around the walls do not behave like those found in any sane world, because they do not fall, they do not stretch; they coil and ripple, like predators watching you from beneath the skin of the mountain itself, waiting for a reason to lunge.

You do not hear her approach, not in the traditional way—not through the grind of stone beneath footfall or the guttural snarl of something enormous disturbing the stillness—but rather through a shift in presence, a tightening of atmosphere so sudden and absolute that your spine stiffens before your mind can register the reason, and your lungs hesitate not from exertion but from the sudden, immutable realisation that a predator has entered your proximity and sees you, truly sees you, as something that can be claimed or broken or simply erased.

She arrives not with noise but with gravity, not a being entering the space so much as a force, an inevitability—like the storm cresting over the ridge, like the avalanche cracking above your camp, like death itself stepping into a room where it was always meant to be—her silhouette carved in the slow burn of torchlight as she emerges, frame haloed by steam and smoke and a cloak still damp with snowmelt and blood.

Her size is not monstrous in the way of legends or exaggerated bard’s tales; she is not towering or grotesque, but rather occupies the space around her with such absolute certainty and self-possession that everything else—the mountain, the stone, even the air—seems to bend around her in silent accommodation, as if the world has accepted her as one of its oldest and most feral of its children.

When she speaks, her voice rolls out like a landslide—deep, low, not merely echoing but rumbling from somewhere beneath the earth’s crust, layered in dialects no longer spoken and vowels stretched by the weight of a language shaped in growls and warning calls and the silences between hunts.

Her voice drips with heat and gravel and something older than language. Her breath ghosts over your skin—warm and sharp like blood-soaked sandalwood—and you feel the weight behind every word, not just as sound but as gravity, pulling you toward something you know you won’t survive… but maybe you want to.

"You came here small," she says, her tongue dragging over the word like it’s sweet and painful at once—like it clings to her teeth and she’s resisting the urge to bite you—her eyes narrowing as they trace over you, not just assessing but mourning, touched with a hunger that isn’t only in the gut but curled somewhere deeper, where loneliness wears the shape of need and protection becomes something perilously close to possession. "Small, and shivering, and carrying a story you hoped someone like me would believe—just long enough to love you for your story until I swallow you whole."