Opening + CH1: Stranded

The first paragraphs of the story.

      Blasted headless

      A long black silhouette

      Cast against the sulfur sky

      Its morbid sway slow

      Uncertain

      Desecrated flesh

     Oozing in slow descent

      Like the crashing of timber

      The columns buckle

      The great mass falls

      To flooded pathways

      A meteoric spectacle

      Her cries are drowned

      In a cold dark tide

Stranded

      She fell, from darkness down into darkness, and crashed chest-first into an unseen wooden support strut wider than she was. Springing to her nimble, scaly feet upon the beam, she dared to turn back; and, after several tense moments, straining to hear past her thundering heart and labored breaths, amber eyes watching the darkness warily, she finally turned to follow the beam. She gathered her lithe, scaly figure, and sprang to a lower beam, taloned feet catching it easily with her long, stiff tail to balance her. Snorting softly through her long snout, she drew her arms tight against her bony ribs, and settled down to catch her breath. It was dry down here, but it was still cold. So bitterly cold.

      The cold alone should have killed her by now; if not that, then Rokane's poisonous atmosphere. It burned her eyes and lungs, and it made her skin itch. She had seen horrible things happen to those who scratched at it. Bizarre infections that often turned fatal; and if they weren't, they were permanently damaging and disfiguring. She'd seen it with her own eyes: the way one's skin peeled away as scratches turned into deep, discolored fissures.

      Icy, acidic rain fell from Rokane's dull yellow sky day and night with hardly a break; sometimes in a fine mist, and sometimes as a driving storm. As the sun went down, Rokane's wet surface plummeted below freezing, and never froze over. Wherever the planet was stable enough to be remotely habitable, in places like this, it bore walled-in metropolises of low stone buildings and murky alleyways, shadowed by a surreal skyscape of winding roadways. Below ground were dry caverns and tunnels, some of them natural and some built by the giant reptilian natives. Safe from the frigid rainfall, the abandoned underground networks became a refuge for those who survived long enough to find it. Even those who did were not guaranteed sanctuary.

Author's Note

Continued here: http://ryozaem.wordpress.com/liberation/

Not sure how I want to do this, but I am thinking that, if you're interested, you can let me know, and I can send you a message when I upload new chapters. Or maybe I'll just do blog posts. Would that work? As I said: it would be utterly pointless for me to upload on more than one site, and I have been uploading material for this particular work to deviantART for quite some time, now.