Sun meets the Gray Beast

 Sun enters into the gray beasts domain, he can immediately sense entering the presence of a deity, a presence which should conceal his magic from the Seven. He undoes the lock and hesitantly removes his necklace. With a few dozen words he casts an insignificant canter causing a nearly imperceptible amount of smoke to escape his nostrils. He waits holding the necklace above his head. Minutes pass in silence as he braces for one of the Seven to collapse the world in around him. But no retribution comes. Sun closes his eyes chanting in another, older language. His throat swells, his eyes bulge, smoke seeps out of his nose, and from between his teeth. The smoke gets heavier, thicker, more viscous the air smells pungent of burning ash wood. His voice raises and echoes, he falls to his knees and clutches at his chest and throat without breaking his rhythmic chant. The wind picks up pushing the smoke that threatens to choke him into the air above. Sun’s voice abruptly cuts off, the last of the smoke trailing through his teeth to join the rest of the cloud. His demeanor changes, a bottomless unrighteous arrogance subtly morphs into a unchecked unbound confidence. His leering becomes looming that shrinks the sky.
 Sun cracks his wrists and wets his lips. He clears his throat. "I call upon the deity which resides in this domain!" Sun shouts in no particular direction other than up. The wind rustles the trees but Sun gets no answer.  He follows a stream up to a more densely forested area and demands the deity’s presence once again. "I know you're around here, I can feel you. How many of the Seven did you visit before you came here? No more than three I'd wager, come out and let me have a look at you"
 In response a bassy roar shakes the trees and resonates Sun's sternum like a tuning fork. Accompanying the roar in the shadows of the trees are a pair of large eyes that are too high up and too far apart. The creature looms as it stalks on broad shoulders crushing the wooded areas underfoot, breaking enough branches to imitate the crackling of a bonfire as it walks into view out of the thicket. First an arm, a burly arm coated in long, coarse, gray hair that spans for meters. Its hand is orange which resembles Sun’s own hand: four fingers and a thumb with three accompanying joints on each finger. Sun spreads his arms in a disarming gesture as he begins chanting low and quiet. The gray beast’s eyes narrow, it follows into view with its second arm, torso and hind legs. The beast’s head is small, its eyes dark and beady, its face covered in fur save for its orange bill. The creature is a behemoth standing an imposing 4 meters tall, its hind hands anatomically identical to the ones in the front. Without breaking eye contact Sun backpedals but the gray beast slowly closes the distance, stalking nearer to Sun on its four legs. Its hackles rise and its long tail sways back and forth. The closer it gets the faster Sun’s rhythmic chants and the lower the beast's head shrinks beneath its shoulder blades. The predator moves its hips closer to the ground like a gray spring of sinew loading tension. Sun, just as abruptly as the time before, ceases chanting.
 The beast collapses, its knees buckle and it claws at the dirt but finds no purchase. Sun draws his breath and begins another spell, the beast turns in fear and crawls away getting back onto its feet. Sun chants creating thousands of blue transparent gloved hands that appear in flashes clearing the surrounding area of debris. They pull leaves off trees, remove twigs, and pull plants up by their roots from the ground. In the pattern of a small rectangle around his feet, the hands etch symbols in the dirt. The hands dissipate, Sun empties the smoke from his lungs and takes in a breath of clean air. He continues chanting to create four lines of hieroglyphs. Each of the new lines propagating from the center of one of the four lines forming the established square, and each hieroglyphic line facing one of the four cardinal directions. The lines of glyphs open veins in his arms pooling blood in the air. In the seconds it takes to gather his blood the hieroglyphs surrounding him are etched deep into the dirt and stonic writings are uniformly pressed into the dirt in a wide circle connecting with the four outcroppings of writing. A haze appears around him, smoke billows and tendrils slither and shoot out of the four sections inside the circle grabbing nearby life: bunnies, lizards, and birds are brought in the circle surrounding him. An unseen force crushes the animals together, their blood mixes and seeps with an unnatural quickness through the newly etched troughs in the dirt. Sun kneels to place his palms on the ground, they mix with the blood and smoke rises from the dirt out through the space between his fingers. His words reach inhuman speeds as he enters the spell's crescendo. Without warning Sun's voice cuts off, his lips forming words silently under the concentration of smoke. The blood of Sun and the creatures sink into the ground and in the distance the beast howls.
 Sun clutches his stomach with both of his arms, his forehead against the dirt. Ecstasy from the return to magic and adrenaline from the encounter mixes inside him turning his stomach. He laughs psychotically, drool running up his cheeks. He gathers himself, he wipes his face clean with his dirty hands and stands up straight. He follows in the direction of the roar until he finds the gray beast. He stands over the beast as it violently struggles against the newfound fetters shackling its limbs to the ground.