Winter winds howled like wolves. That in itself was unsurprising; they were rabid tonight, dashing into cliff-faces and tearing themselves into tattered eddies, shedding vast whorls of turbulence like skin, ribboned around the jagged peaks. Their progenitors obscured the sky to the north, Charon’s bone-white scythe poised to strike from the south.
Pine-scent was snatched away by the storm, replaced with a neon-ozone-ish effluence that raked across the epidermis like claws; not so much a smell, moreso an electric potential that foretold incredible violence.
Lightning flashed, for a split second turning the world a strange greyscale- a blinding blue-white-but-not-quite in the highlights, pure black everywhere else. A heartbeat. Two. Then thunder rumbled, and the sky- if it was possible- grew even darker.
The forest, as a whole, was still. The great grizzlies huddled within their caves. There was no birdsong, no scampering of rodents through the undergrowth, no chirping of crickets. Only the trees would brave the storm, tall and proud. As the wind rushed into the valley from the peaks, screaming all the way, they would be the sentinels. As the hail buffeted, they would stand in place, unwavering. Eventually, no matter the struggle, no matter the damage sustained, it would pass. Everything did.