The giant beast refused to come near us.
After Maggie's holy flame had turned a patch of its scales to grey ash, all three of its writhing heads pulled back into the dark. It didn't retreat, and it certainly didn't leave. Instead, it hung thirty paces off the basalt shelf with its torn, pale wings beating against the draft, and drove its tail straight down into the stone.
The tail frayed into ragged quills at the end, and every one of them went into the rock.
A wet crack echoed through the chasm.
The floor under our boots began to shake, a deep grinding shudder that rattled my teeth. Long black fissures split open across the shelf, and dark spines pushed up out of them like shoots of jagged iron. Then they kept going. They twisted and swelled, and they grew legs, until each one was a small, mangled copy of the titan hanging above us.
