"As a whelp, I'd hear stories of the ocean swallowing the land, mountains spitting fire, the earth trembling in great fear. But, I had always given little credence to such stores. I have only ever seen the ocean keeping to itself, mountains covered only by snow, and the Earth at best only quietly shivering."

"However, one story always seemed so much more prominent. My parents told of a thunderclap without lightning, with ash and smoke soon raining from the sky. Other dragons told of forests being leveled, the land reshaped, and a mountain losing its face with a great fury. These weren't the stories of old, passed down through generations, these were things all claimed they saw with their own eyes. It was almost unbelievable"

"But now I stand here, and I see a mountain that indeed has lost its face. And, I see how it repainted the landscape as it saw fit."

Mount St. Helens has always been an important volcano to me, and I imagine it is for many other Washingtonians as well. As a young child, I was always mystified by how it looked so different from other volcanoes, and the stories that both my parents and grandparents told about its eruption. I even have a vial of ash from the eruption given to me by my grandfather. And, over time, I've come to also learn how it really affected the landscape, both learning and understanding the raw power behind the 1980 eruption, but also the power of life to regain its foothold in the area so quickly.

This is sort of a continuation of this previous piece I got from Anoroth, where it's another image of Elwyr exploring Washington. With his story being that he had somehow been transported to this world of humans, one aspect of it is that both our worlds are the same, with his world only being different by having dragons instead of humans. This importantly means that the geology of his world, and likewise the geologic events of it, are identical to ours. He had the same experience as I did, hearing stories of this volcano that exploded. But, his world's lack of technology made it much more difficult to both see and learn about what happened himself. Yet, once transported to the human world, he hears the same stories of the exploding mountain, but now with a name put to the mountain, a location to find it, and photos to see what happened. He goes to see the mountain himself, and fully begins to understand how ruthlessly powerful the earth can in fact be, yet at the same time appreciating the haunting beauty of it.

Commission by  Anoroth the feesh overlord

Link to original