The swamp stirred around Ludwig like a breathing thing.
The ground trembled once, twice, then split apart as the great salamander hauled itself from the mud. Its body was a cathedral of bone and rot: ribs bent like the frames of ships, vertebrae cracking wetly as black water sluiced from between them. Strips of dead flesh clung where tendons had once been, hanging in tatters from the gleaming ivory.
Two orbs of false life blinked open in its skull, luminescent, cloudy, yet disturbingly focused. They fixed on Ludwig as though trying to recall what it meant to see. Deformations crowned its head: a ring of cartilage growths that rose like thorns or the beginnings of antlers. When it breathed, it did so in a sound that was not quite air but the hiss of grave dust escaping an empty lung.
"Good," Ludwig said, voice calm, almost approving. "You'll do. You'll be my ride from now on."
His words rolled through the mist like a commandment.
