The Pacific Ocean wasn't a blue horizon. It was a grey, heaving wall of despair. After weeks of brutal travel, the sight of the endless, churning water felt less like a vista and more like a verdict. They stood on a beach of black, gritty sand littered with the skeletal remains of ships and things too large to name.
Wolfen's plan to trek north to Alaska, over the Bering Strait, and down through Russia was met with a silence thicker than the coastal fog. It was a plan forged from pure, stubborn logic, a grueling thousand-mile detour across the roof of a frozen, broken world.
As they stood in grim silence, the ground shuddered.
This wasn't an earthquake. It was a deep, resonant THRUM that came up through the soles of their boots and vibrated in their teeth. Then another. And another. A slow, tectonic rhythm.
Eva felt it first—a pressure in the air that had nothing to do with the ocean. A presence so vast her Prime senses simply gave up, overwhelmed. She turned, looking past the dead forests and shattered cliffs behind them.
Something was moving along the coastline to the north. It wasn't walking on the land; it was so large it seemed to be part of the land, a mountainous headland that had decided to migrate.
As it drew nearer, silhouetted against the dirty sky, its form resolved. It was draconic, but in the way a continent is draconic. Its body was long and serpentine, covered not in scales, but in plates of dark, sedimentary rock, moss, and entire groves of stunted, wind-bent pine trees. Its legs were like weathered mesas, moving with a slow, geological grace. Its head was low, its jawline a cliff face, and from its back rose not wings, but great, fin-like ridges of stone that channeled rivulets of rainwater into waterfalls down its sides. It was less an animal and more a piece of the planet's crust that had achieved a terrible, slow-motion sentience.
It moved parallel to the coast, its destination unclear, each footfall sending tremors through the earth for miles. Its head, crowned with stone horns like ancient, broken pillars, swung slowly from side to side. A single eye, a lake of molten amber the size of a city block, glowed dully. It did not look at them. It looked through them, at the horizon, at things on a scale they could not comprehend.
"We are microbes to that thing," Maya breathed, her voice hushed with a terror that bordered on reverence.
The creature—the Behemoth—altered its course by a fraction, angling its colossal body towards the ocean. It was going to cross the water. Not by swimming, but by simply wading through the continental shelf, its back a moving island chain emerging from the sea.
An idea, born not of courage but of sheer, desperate opportunism, ignited in Eva's mind. It was insane. It was the only thing left.
She turned to the others, her face pale but set. "We're going to ride it across."
The following silence was profound, broken only by the deep CRUNCH of the Behemoth's next step, which crushed a ridge of basalt into powder.
"WHAT?" Leo's strangled cry was almost lost in the basso rumble of the creature's movement. "EVA! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? ON THAT?!"
"Ride. It." She pointed a trembling finger at the living mountain now wading into the surf. "It's crossing. Its back is a forest, a landscape. We get up there, we hide, we don't get seen. It's a land-bridge that walks on the seafloor."
Jordan's logic-engine seized. "The thermal output alone suggests its skin temperature could exceed two hundred degrees Celsius in patches. The seismic activity from its movement guarantees constant instability. The chance of being noticed, even by something of that scale, is incalculable but non-zero."
"I love it," Wolfen declared, his golden eyes gleaming with something akin to artistic appreciation. "It's arrogant. It's suicidal. It's perfectly us. Let's go."
The Behemoth was entering deeper water, the ocean foaming and steaming where it touched the hotter plates of its hide. They had seconds.
"NOW!" Eva yelled.
They broke into a sprint, not away from the titan, but parallel to it, racing across the black sand to match its slow, relentless pace. They aimed for one of its colossal rear legs as it rose from the surf, a moving mountain of wet stone and dripping vegetation.
Wolfen reached it first. He didn't climb. He forged. Umbralite spikes erupted from his hands, stabbing into crevices between the stone plates, creating a fleeting ladder. "UP! FAST!"
They scrambled, hand over hand, climbing the living cliff as icy seawater rained down on them and geothermal heat baked through the rock. They hauled themselves over the top, tumbling not onto skin, but into a damp, mist-shrouded miniature world.
They were on the Behemoth's back. It was a rolling landscape of rocky outcrops, steaming hot springs, peat bogs, and hardy, wind-whipped trees. Small, blind lizards with stone-like hides scuttled away from them. The air was warm, humid, and smelled of sulfur and pine. The sensation of movement was subtle but immense—a slow, rolling sway as the Behemoth strode through the deep water, the ocean now hundreds of feet below them, visible only through gaps in the stone fins.
They crouched behind a rocky berm, soaked and trembling. The California coastline was already a smudge on the horizon.
They were no longer travelers. They were parasites on a god. They had traded a map for a myth, and were now passengers on a living island, crossing the Pacific on the back of a creature that didn't even know they existed.