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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seasong" data-source="post: 816841" data-attributes="member: 5137">Road to KithiosThe first part of the journey was the hardest. Bellos knew his way around wilderness, and they managed to avoid most of the worst of what might be found there, but it still took three days to get through the first pair of valleys outside of Theralis. Then they found the highway.Once upon a time, long stretches of bedrock were cleared of dirt or raised from the earth by magic. The result looked like a naturally resulting street, two to three wagons wide and stretching for miles. The ancients had made highways out of it, the blood arteries of a nation larger than ten Theralis city-states combined. Now, patches peeked out from beneath grass and worn earth, with stretches of flat rock providing easy egress through the wilderness.As Merideth stepped onto the first stones, she could feel the history embedded in its quiescent hardness, perhaps more so than Greppa or Bellos or Arkos. To her sensitized perceptions, the cataclysmic final days were still echoing in the stone. Phantom sensations of the earth rippling. Where a stretch of stacked stone blocks had remained standing along the edge of the highway, she could see the missing patches, rent from their place by elemental forces.She resolved to never, ever, ever take on a dragon without extensive prior planning, and remained uncharacteristically quiet. The others did not really notice - all were in awe at the scale of achievement necessary to create roads from the native earth itself. No one spoke much, in fact, and as they passed an area of highway more intact than the rest, the silence was almost palpable.A lone sunglobe, set to brighten as the sky darkened (instead of the reverse, as was true of Allas' lost temple), continued to stand on a stone pillar, maintaining its watch over the highway. The others in that stretch, shattered by time and accident, lay dark and quiet.Greppa stopped by the lone survivor and stared at it. He imagined, briefly, that when this civilization had collapsed, that the orc tribes (whose history was chaotic and likely longer than any living civilization) had taken those people as slaves. And that, one day, a slave named Thera had been born, to rise and build anew.It inspired a dim and primal instinct for glory, one that he hoped to retain as time passed between seeing the sunglobe and whatever the future held for him.Bellos was focused on something else. Never particularly fond of intuition, and trusting to strategy more than instinct, he was nonetheless getting very uneasy. Merideth seemed to feel it as well, and both stepped closer together as they walked on.The earth trembled.Pebbles on the stone chattered. One skipped high as an odd edge found its place, and beneath, the earth began to shake. As the four adventurers attempted to find their footing, rocky earth flowed up from and out of the highway. Vaguely humanoid in shape, only its towering torso and arms rose above the surface.One of those arms was beneath Merideth, and it lifted her high, her legs folding beneath her into its palm, then turned its hand over and smashed her against the earth. The other arm swept Bellos and Arkos flat, barely missing Greppa, though he felt the air suck behind the massive limb.In Greppa's stunned mind, only one thing flashed through: it was an earth elemental, easily the largest he'd ever seen. And it was saying something in a language he didn't recognize.</blockquote>

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