He heard the sound of flapping wings behind him, the horridly loud sound beating filling his mind, keeping him focused. His chance would come to slay the creature on his tail. The constant, and vastly different scapes of color that changed on random intervals for a completely different amount of time each of these events, yet he never fully got to experience the short jets of light–as many of the trees great radiance was overshadowed by the gigantic wingspan of the raven hot on his tail. Through the veins of fire, the blazing grass, and the fires dancing on the tips of the branches the knight could see through the darkness by burning the image of the immediate forest into his memory–giving the effect he could see in the darkness, as he expertly dodged, weaved, and ran along the sides of the burning trees, while evading the disgustingly precise attacks of the raven. This thing that flew above him, somehow keeping up with the knight, despite his much greater speed, was a true testament to its capabilities and home court advantage–something that was simply not enough to help the living corpses or even the centipedes, the former residents of the former flesh forest. Occasionally, the knight would spot one of the wandering ones–something he decided to call cryptids on the fly as he was beginning to grow tired of call them zombies–they were beacons of light in the darkness, and tangible creatures at that, so, having no better options, while in the heat of the moment, the knight dashed towards the unsuspected cryptid and simply plowed through it, ran over it, and continued down the path it had been wandering. These tangled events of seeing cryptids or the fickle event of the lights being turned on were the knights' luck-filled attempts to not run into any of the many obstructions many hundreds of times larger than he was. Though that didn't stop him from running into everything as his luck wasn't good enough for that.
The knight was still storming his way through the forest, a distant determination as he began to get a pretty good grasp of the land and its indecent, and hardly noticeable patterns. The cryptids were somewhat easy to predict, as they were usually a few trees apart from one another, stood alone in a clearing like an abandoned bonfire–so it was quite easy to keep track of them–though the random jolts of color in his vision were not at all predictable–but when you had beacons of wandering light, it was easy almost as easy.
Though the knight knew the sun was high in the sky at this point, he had yet to see any branch of light on the surface, there were no true beacons, beacons from the sun, and that was something the knight had not considered. Was there seriously not a gap long enough to fit not a single beam of light all the way to the surface? The knight didn't have much time time think about it though as the raven and reached for him again, only for him to spin out of the way, and make his first offensive move against the bird in the form of grabbing one the enormous talons with both of his hands–Rising Tide had been discarded in the heat of the moment much to the dragons dismay–and with a great show of strength, tossed the fiend in flight over his shoulder after twisting his body to face the direction opposite of which he had been facing, and sent it crashing into a tree he had been running along-side a few moments prior, though the bird squawked loudly in surprise initially, the attack didn't seem to faze the great titan of the surface much at all as it got back up from its plastered position rather quickly.
By the time the raven had gotten its bearings together, the knight was once again nowhere to be found, but that wasn't a deterrent for the titanous, winged beast of feather, it was only a little more challenge to add to the already precarious hunt it now found itself in. In no time at all, the bird was already on the tail of the knight again, who was currently in the process of dealing with several cryptids at once, though there was something different about this situation. The knight didn't instantly blow them away, instead choosing to dodge the shambling, walking fireballs–at least until his eyes locked onto the faintly lambent appearance of the raven darting towards him. His eyes hardened, and his body seemed to move like lightning the moment they did so: his hands landed onto the blazing shoulders of a cryptid and with a crushing grip, the knight picked up the ball of fire, and spun in place, and launched the once human beast to the raven with pin-point accuracy and a speed that held an intent to kill his relentless nemesis. The resulting boom of white fire seemingly consuming the body of the creature was music to the knight's ears, but he didn't stop at the first one–no. He continued, grabbing the remaining three cryptids one by one, throwing them at the stunned creature, who hadn't made a sound from the cloud of white fire that now surrounded it–not becoming a beacon of white light in the black void of the forest, yet it still wouldn't go down.
The knight was sure it was over, but in the briefest of moments, he saw a shadow emerge from the great inferno he had thrown at the bird. The creature was not just okay, but it was mad–very mad. With talons outstretched, it committed entirely to capturing the knight–going full speed towards the little menace that had made its hunting so aggravating that morning, but the knight wouldn't let even something of that speed hit him. He dropped to his stomach in the darkness, allowing the bird to continue its attack that it could not fully stop–as it had committed to it completely for whatever reason. The knight was a little smug when he heard the bird thump dully into a nearby trunk, still smoking from the edges of its feathers–creating the faintest pieces of light in the clearing despite how high up it was. For some reason, the bird had decided to go directly up after the failed attack–probably to turn around, and recommit to another full speed attack but that was its last mistake–it got too close to the sun.
The knight was now back on his feet. This foe was both agitating, yet admirable, but all things needed to end eventually, even the slightly amusing ones. The knight tightened his left hand, allowing the weapon to materialize in his grip, though it didn't seem to emerge from a wisp of purple this time–not that the knight noticed in the darkness brought from the lack of white fire. His grip on Rising Tide was tight as he raised into a high stance, ready to spear throw his sword to the stunned enemy, but something gave the knight pause. The bird wasn't anywhere to be seen, and the sound of the bird against wood wasn't right–at all. He had heard it quite a few times in this forest, after all, and that wasn't the right sound. His stance hardened as he gazed into the darkness with an edge in his form.
As he approached the tree the bird had hit, the knight heard a crash above his head, he quickly turned his attention skyward, towards the second layer of the forest, and stared in the vicinity of sound. The knight expected to hear a crash as the bird fell like a comet in the night sky to the surface because of how hard it hit something, probably extremely large, and extremely durable, yet what he heard was more like something struggling madly. Anxious caws rang loudly from the understory above the knight and that made him hesitate. Then he heard a snap–a sound of bones shattering. Then quiet, not a hum of fire–nothing. When he felt the air shift, not from the bird, but from the quickly condensing ball of white fire that emerged from nearly directly above where the bird had smashed into. The knight wasn't sure exactly where the bird was now, but he couldn't pay much attention to that fact as he stared down a wisp the size of a the tip of a match stick into a sea of torrential, spiraling fire–not unlike what he saw earlier in the highest heights of the forest–yet it seemed… weaker? Smaller–definitely, he thought to himself, but that wasn't translated well when he heard the pained shriek of the bird he had just been running around from as soon as the fire stopped emerging from the singularity it had appeared from in the infinite darkness of the understory–the second layer. The world lit up as his ears dimmed from the sound–In the short flash of fire that dispersed into the surroundings, lighting the world up beautifully, the knight saw something that would likely haunt him for as long as he remained in this forest.
In the few moments of light the land obtained from the explosion of heatless flame, the knight saw the bird that could block the sun with its neck inside the midnight blue beak of a titanous raven-like, giant–someone toppling the size of the already grand raven he had crossed, and ran from since entering this chaotic place. Its black feathers, lined with the same midnight blue were each many times longer than he was tall, with a pair of curled horns the size of his entire body–yet still they appeared far too small for its size, much like the horns on the crow in its maw. Its black, beady orbs stared into his eyes while its fellow bird struggled to get out of its beak, but was cruelly silenced, when the beak shut without any form of resistance in the few seconds of light, cutting through its body while it stared into the knight's eyes, unflinching–almost tauntingly cruel to its own. Blood flew, and the severed head and body slipped separately down the branches thumping lightly on different pieces of wood as it continued traveling down until–finally, it landed in two separate places in a somewhat close distance. The blood trails had already evaporated, from the selective heat of the forest, but the knight couldn't see, nor appreciate any of this. The lights were out again, and there was a new contender out for his name, and for his body–and this new fighter didn't want him to eat, no–it wanted to kill him for sport.
As soon as the lights flickered out for the last time, the knight was gone, once again. His pace swift, as he tried to recall the little he knew about the forest floor, from the short flashes of light. Then he heard it, the mammoth wings were unfurrowing it, somehow casting the darkness around him darker than it already was due to its great size and even darker shadow. Round two had begun. The knight swerved to the side as he heard the air itself burn from a heat nonspecific to any one description of heat. He rolled to the right, though scuffing his shoulder on a nearby branch, the knight was now but a hair's breath away from the pyro summoner. Once again, the knight was enveloped by a saturating light that fed the land as the bird tried to feed itself–though that sounded deaf to his already numb hearing. The white covered the grounds, saturated the edges of each branch–life was breathed into the land again, for a few short moments, and what he saw from the never ending stream of nutrients for the forest made him sweat a little. The behemoth of a raven was spewing the incandescent flames. The birds of the second layer of the forest could spew fire from their beaks.
Panic set in for a moment as the knight's vision grew a little dimmer, but he forced his heartbeat to slow with a few breaths and quickly took in his surroundings. Quite the distance upward, the bird was staring down at him with an emotion in those black eyes that could only be called detachment, while continuously spraying fire, meanwhile there were several trees surrounding, covering various pathways out of his current situation. His back was directly in front of another trunk of wood–one that, thankfully, wasn't of an obscenely large scale like many of the other things he had encountered on his journey so far. He was about to move, slowly, crab-walking alongside the trunk of the tree–before making a grand escape with what little remainder of light he had left, but, sadly, his plan didn't quite work out like he initially planned it would.
Just as the knight made the first step along the base of the trunk–he felt a tingle go down his spine–and when tingles went down the knight's spine, he knew, instinctually, that something really, really bad was soon to occur. This time, it occurred in the form of flapping wings, greater than the hunters of the forest floor. Its enormous head peered down at him as a second bird from the understory, landing next to the first one with a grace that was unbefitting of a creature of its size. Somehow the great branch the two birds were on, which dwarfed them, creaked under the weight of the ravens–something the knight's sensitive hearing picked up on after recovering a bit from his ears' previous state.
The pair stood in silence as the first one continued to spew fire at the knight from its perch far above the knight, though the knight knew–he wasn't sure how, but he knew they were communicating. A small tremor traveled up his arm from his right pinky as he stared at the twin forces. The hunter was an apex of the region–he was sure of it, but then, what did that make these? A cold terror made itself present in the knight's shadowed face by a furrowed brown behind the mask–he needed to move, and fast. Before the thought could even finish, the knight was dismayed to see he had already been found out. When, in the white light of the torrent of unabashed heat, both pairs of eyes shot towards him. There was an intent in the orbs that seemed far too intelligent to be considered rationally possible for a wild animal, no matter how old it was.
As he saw the new arrival open its dark blue beak, the knight gulped. It was only for a moment, but the knight saw it flicker in and out of existence right above its red tongue: the beginnings of a beam of fire, no bigger than him compared to the vertically, enormous forest. The knight could vaguely see the talons that could slice these trees to ribbons curl in on themselves on the branch in his peripheral, but his eyes remained on the fascinating sight of a ball of fire appearing from thin air, both growing in size, heat and light, before condensing again, even smaller than what it had been at the beginning.
Dread creeped out of his heart like a spider would its den, and then, the attack launched. The knight felt his breath hit a dead end and an excruciatingly big wave of fire emerged from its beak, spiraling outward towards him. He gulped dryly, as he stared down the fire while somehow ignoring the lance of fire that had pinned him to the tree from the left, and then he understood it.
Looking across the single side of the world that didn't blind him, he looked to the honestly beautiful forest floor–it was so much different when it was lit up. The small orbs of light the drifted off the illuminating stems through the thicket and into the unseeable sky above, the land felt so alive in the light, even the small critters of the land seeming to come out of their dens when food finally appeared for them–but none of it mattered now as the knight was pinned to the tree, when a similar lance of fire blocked his view of the world entirely–disconnecting him. It was now him, the tree at his back, and the sea of white flames that were only a few inches away from melting him into a pile of goopy metal–despite the radiating heat off of it not being all that remarkable. There was only one way out of this situation–climbing up into the domain of the second layer–the layer of the fire breathers.