(Closed)
"Ghah!"
The cry escaped his lips before he could suck it back and the tall Shadow Meld tumbled to the ground in a flurry of flailing arms, loose fabric and long silver hair. He hit hard, a loud "Harrumph!" forcing its way from his lungs, through his throat and out between his glimmering white teeth. He slid for a moment, finally coming to rest only after hitting his head several times on some rather large boulder like protrusions in the earth and he lay there a moment, catching his breath.
"Curses," he mumbled as he pulled his now bruised arms beneath his body, levering himself up onto his knees. "You'd think I never learned to walk." Groaning in pain, as this was the fifth such fall in the last hour, the tall being sat up onto his heels and looked down the mountainside falling away in front of him.
Bleak, that being the best way to describe it during this season, ragged protrusions and gaping maws rolled out before him, looking like a giant with a temper and a rather large pick axe had decided to exact his vengeance on the lifeless rock. Small patches of stunted trees and shrubs dotted the landscape, failing miserably to bring a lighter feeling to the landscape and it didn't help that a constant east to westerly gale like wind blew over the rocks and cliff faces. He was fortunate, for the moment, to have been beside a rather large cliff face for if he hadn't, he would have surely been blown free from the mountainside to tumble to certain death on the jagged rocks below. Well, maybe not certain death.
The thought had more than once occurred to him that he should fly down the mountainside, just as he had flown up it, but he quickly shuttered the thought. Flying in these winds was not only dangerous, it was borderline suicidal. I haven't lived nearly eleven millennium only to be bashed to death on the side of some strange mountain far from home. No, his death was going to be a grand spectacle. Explosions, death, screams and all around chaos. He had always been a fanatic toward dying in the heat of battle.
A low, deep gurgle, somewhere off to the far west, rolled across the landscape for a moment, rumbling in the Shadow Melds chest. This had been the seventh such time that that had happened and because nothing had come of it as of yet, the Shadow Meld did exactly the same thing he did the second time he had heard it; he ignored it. It was probably just some dwarves experimenting with some new explosive in their extensive mines beneath the surface of this mountain and by the sound of it, rather far away, therefore not worth the attention.
The Shadow Meld sighed, pushed himself to his feet and after leaning momentarily against the cliff face to catch his breath for a moment, began his descent down the mountain once again. He only made it twenty or so yards before the gurgle came an eighth time. The Shadow Meld once again began to shove the sound to the back of his mind but something about the sound quickly changed and it brought it back to the forefront with an earth shattering force.
Literally.
The gurgle grew to a rumble, which then vaulted to a shudder and then climaxed into an all out quake and before the Shadow Meld could even think to brace himself the ground beneath him cracked and he disappeared from sight, swallowed whole by the mountain.