Tundra

His green hair flailing in the wind, Grissos waited on the shoreline. The beach had been scoured by the sea, leaving only the furrows of age and weariness where stones and pebbles had been raked home by the tides. Occasional clumps of seaweed dotted the sand like deflated medusas. The druid turned his icy stare out to sea, searching for any sign of the thing that would soon emerge. It would be bigger than an island, he reckoned, by far the biggest thing to be birthed of the waves, and he alone would control it. As useful as Erasmus was, he didn’t trust the mere mortal, even if he was a mortal who had ritually insured his single, precious life. He was unsure, even, whether his fair weather ally was capable of finishing off the burly Seafarer.

If he was honest with himself, Grissos had not expected so much opposition. He had ten clans within his rein, as well as countless infected fungus giants and robust mammoth riders. He was confident that he could crush the nameless school if the mages chose to involve themselves, which was unlikely, but this newest annoyance was a problem he had not been expecting. He had thus been reluctant to leave his grove at Sentinel Rock but he knew that he would have to deal with the particular matter of the elder in person.

His chain of thought was interrupted as bubbles began to break the surface of the water, a little way behind the breaking wavelets. It was not the mountainous conch shell he had been expecting however, or even a tendriled limb of the leviathan to which it attached. This emerging object was small and skinny, vaguely humanoid but with devious, yellow eyes, webbed digits, claws, fins and fangs. Only once the silvery being made the beach did the elder god emerge. It was as if someone had suddenly taken a segment of the continental shelf and chosen to thrust it up towards the sky. There was less a spout and more a column of cascading water as the bulk of the exoskeleton burst the ceiling of its underwater world, its size girt all the way around with pouring waterfalls. A forest of corals, sponges and prehistoric sea fans were saturated on its back, still alive and inhaling the water that clung to them. The squat, whorled body was encrusted with so many barnacles that it could have been rock, while only rare, worn windows in the shell revealed the previously grey mollusc flesh, now dyed a violet shade of purple.

Suckered feelers waved above a forehead studded with a single, staring eye, stroking the air angrily. Grissos noted the wrath of the beast, and was pleased.

‘Are we all ready?’ he asked his minion.

‘My brothers are having trouble holding the elder in check,’ Menaus replied. ‘Its mind does not work in a way they are used to.’

‘How d’you mean?’

He hesitated. ‘Its mind is water pushing against a wall. No sooner have you contained it at one point that it breaks through at another.’

‘Can they control it?’ the druid asked, anxiety and anger blossoming in his chest. Everything had to go according to plan. There was no room for incompetence, or for mistakes.

‘For the moment,’ Menaus said, cautiously.

Grissos nodded his antlers, drawing himself up bracingly. ‘That’s all I need for now,’ he said. ‘I’ll reinforce them later. Call it up onto the land.’

‘Where are we going?’ the fish-man asked eagerly. His master was not happy to indulge him.

‘Mossen Grove,’ he said. ‘

‘I know Mossen Grove,’ Menaus supplied in a mystified voice. ‘The Otherworld is close there. There are spirit-druids.’

‘Exactly.

‘‘I have not hunted spirit-druids before. Do they taste good, do you think?’

Grissos grinned wickedly. ‘I have no doubt they do.’

With the shuddering of a small earthquake, the elder lurched forward, rolling onto the land and obliterating the beach. Grissos, careful not to step in any seawater or fluid draining back towards the sea, took the shape of a stag and followed it.