Sargonas

Sargonas is older than the gnomes who named it. When the first settlers of Kinetika broke ground upon the Arms, the Beasthunters already spoke of something vast moving among the colossal trees of Lienmar, something that had watched the forest long before any Gnot was struck. It is not a monster in the way the demons of Othmog are monsters. It hungers for nothing, hides from nothing, and has never once been recorded taking a life. It is simply *there*, the way a mountain is there, and the forest has learned to grow around it.

Every account agrees on scale and disagrees on everything else. Some hunters describe a horned, moss-backed titan the size of a hill, its hide grown thick with bark and lichen until beast and forest are nearly indistinguishable. Others swear it walks upright, wreathed in Haze-mist that bends the light around its shoulders. What is certain is the wake it leaves: colossal trees pressed flat in a line a hundred paces wide, streams diverted around a footprint deep enough to flood, and a silence that follows for a day after, as though the whole forest is still listening for its next step.

The Beasthunters do not hunt Sargonas. Ermak’s founding order marked it, early on, as a beast that killed no one who did not chase it, and every generation since has kept that peace. Airship crews log its passage as a hazard, not a target. Loreseekers who study the deep Haze believe it may be one of the first mutations the forest ever produced, back when the fleeing Thergen first passed through Thera’s Breath, older even than the gnomes it now shares its home with, and just as changed by the same crossing.

It killed no one who did not chase it.

Sightings cluster around ill omens more than they do around any season or trail. A Darkfall’s approach, a bad harvest, the death of a Crowned One, and someone always claims to have felt the ground move in Lienmar the night before. Whether Sargonas answers to the turning of the Spire or merely to its own vast and private clock, no Loreseeker has yet proven, and the Beasthunters, wisely, have stopped trying to ask.

“We do not hunt the mountain. We only learn where it likes to walk.”

Ermak · First Beasthunter of Kinetika