A Lightning-Beast is marked by the storm: glowing branching lines on hide or wing, a crackle of static about it, eyes that shine blue-white in the dark between flashes. Small ones are common on the plain, glassy-skinned lizards that bask on the hot fused ground and skitter at each strike, beetles with metal-bright shells that cluster on the crystal spires. Their sounds are clicks and whines, lost under the endless thunder.

They live across the fused plain, among the crystal spires, and in the clouds above, and they do not survive long outside the storm.

They feed on the storm’s energy, and many on each other. Most follow the bolts the way grazers follow rain, gathering where strikes are thickest. The hunters among them hunt movement and heat, as the storm itself does.

They take in charge and are unharmed by the lightning that kills visitors. Many can give it out again in a bite or a touch.

Many lay eggs in the warm cracks of the fused ground, where the glowing veins keep them. Their lives are short and bright.

Smiths say the shells and bones of Lightning-Beasts, worked into storm-steel, help it hold charge. To travellers they are one more reason to move slowly, stay low, and carry nothing of metal.

Plains folk believe that a beast struck by lightning and living becomes a Lightning-Beast, and keep their herds in during storms. The storm’s beasts were born in it.

Weaponsmiths pay for the charged horn of a Lightning-Beast, and the beast-hunters who take one go in bare of metal, with stone spears and wet ropes; their fireside boast is the rider who stayed on a beast across the storm plain until it burned out under him.