>>5403648Despite your swelling, soaring pride, you immediately recognize your error. The shoggoth is dying, but a dying titan is still hundreds of tons of semi-solid sludge collapsing down upon you. Your hold it back—by the Dark Gods, by the Dragon King of Bloodrise, you hold it back!—but within seconds you feel the agony of incoming doom. Whatever strength has filled you begins to crack and crumble. You cease this foolish push-back against the wounded shoggoth’s limbs, and attempt to disengage this ill-conceived grapple…
>2…But it won’t allow it. The shoggoth, though dying, is not dead. Like an army of ghouls pulling you into a mass grave, its myriad and half-conceived limbs enwrap and grip at you, sinking in jagged talon-teeth and coiling you like spiny snakes. Your roar of triumph turns to one of pain as more and more weight crashes down upon you from above, smothering you. Air and flame alike are forced from your lungs, as your ribs crack and back breaks—or, at least, it FEELS like it. You can barely move…
But you CAN move. You CAN breathe. You ARE alive. You half-crawl, half-tunnel your way out from the limbs and appendages, now flailing in confused agony at the spreading fire. The toxic acid of your enemy eats at you, but slowly; you are resistant to poisons. Your own fire, still raging, does not harm you even THAT much; you are essentially immune to fire, and the fire’s disruptive spread provides your only avenue for escape.
You burst forth like a half-drowned swimmer escaping the depths of a dark and acrid ocean. The shoggoth has explodes, no longer a single sphere but a splattered canvass of gelatinous ooze, crawling away from itself into a thousand directions to duffer and die in the corners of creation. If any of this thing survives, it will be in a diminished form; you feel, with almost divine certainty, that the shoggoth will again be as it once was.
“Dragonborn!”
It is the Throat-singer, gazing down in horror and wonder at what you have wrought, and at your state. You imagine you do not look a pretty thing, covered in the muck of your slaughtered enemy, half-crushed and half-drowned, eaten away at. He is high above you, in a gallery of this curiously-angled architecture, this city-of-one built in spherical symmetries unsuited to conventional biology or physics.
Without thinking, you unfurl your wings. His eyes widen still further as, with two great beats of your powerful appendages, you rise to meet him, and alight upon his gallery. He stumbles back, falling upon his padded dwarven rear, and looks at you like a sinner before an avenging angel.
Only then do you realize…
“Wait,” you mumble, “do I have wingsss?”
>2Your injuries catch up with you, before you can hear the answer or fully comprehend what has happened. Then, there is only pain, and a darkness more complete even than the guts of the shoggoth.
