out of desperation, and couldn't tell whose it was, though - given that the complexities of human sense were centered primarily in vision - he probably couldn't have expected much in the first place.

Right now, his vision altered him to the warning glitter that strobed across crystalline stalactites. His pupils were dilated; hurriedly he scrambled to his feet, and his hands became gloved in the pale gray and pink and quartz-color of the grains that had been filed into the caves here by years of wind-traffic and trauma.

He heard screaming, from a distance - but from a distance too he heard laughter, and then, his own breath. Times like these he always felt like a glistening, dense bubble was forming in-between his ears. The iridescent film of it veiled his retinas; the word spun and turned swift rainbow colors, despite the relative dimness.

He felt the disturbingly pleasant siren of their pursuit, the gentlest, sweetest sound of chains twisting around his tendons.

Didn't really help that he had managed to get himself into deeper caverns - the further he went the further it stank, some pungent rotten-fruit sweetness. As he went further the shadows seemed to lunge and dart away from him, each near encounter with the blackness a reason for panic. It looked like something was gnashing on his aura.

Finally the siren grew closer, and he felt his muscles begin to lock, and he screamed, but the sound of it was muffled by the dragon's next low howl, arching upward, reverberating in the caverns, the glow of it causing the shadows to flee. The shimmer of its wings shook against the sound of its howling too, and they scattered briefly into a chaotic television-static haze - but they soon assembled again.

The dragon's teeth bared - its long neck stretched toward him, and stretched longer to reach him, and Seph swallowed as he felt its breath on his ankle. Even as he confronted this present and significant danger, his mind wandered, backwards, and forwards too.