The beast that had materialized to bar Evelina's path defied all reason and sanity. A massive, undulating abomination that shrugged off the natural laws binding its smaller brethren without a moment's hesitation.

Towering at least twelve feet at the shoulder, the grotesque amalgam of lupine, draconic, and something...other, coiled and shifted with a constant litheness that set every survival instinct screaming through Evelina's consciousness. Its sheer, stupefying bulk displaced the very atmosphere around it in roiling eddies, the surrounding air rapidly becoming thick and hard to draw.

Layer upon layer of chiseled, ebon-scaled musculature flowed into one another in a ceaseless, hypnotic cadence—powerful haunches perpetually tensed to unleash devastation with...