The colossal red eye did not blink.
Its slitted pupil swam in a ring of burning, furious light, carved straight into the vertical face of the black cliff. Heat poured out of the open chasm and rolled over the rocky beach like the open door of a blast furnace, and in a second it had baked the freezing seawater out of my dark mantle.
The eye stayed fixed on Ilse.
The Dragonborn was still locked in her triggered form, her hands pressed flat against the warm stone. Blood dripped from her fingertips where she had clawed at her own horns, and it sizzled when it hit the rock. She didn't move. She didn't breathe. The gaze pinning her to the beach pressed down like a physical weight, squeezing the air out of the whole cavern.
Then the pupil slowly contracted.
The eye blinked. Two great plates of black stone ground together with a deep, bass-heavy rumble, and then the lid rolled open again.
That one blink turned my whole sense of scale upside down.
