Dahlia did her best to ignore the trembling. It was obviously the ground shaking, not her hands. Ignore the fact that, despite the ground shaking in regular beats in time with a colossus' footsteps, her entire body shook like a leaf non-stop. No, she refused to acknowledge it. Not the uncontrollable tremors, nor her overactive thoughts and hair trigger nerves. With so much at stake she needed to be calm, or if she couldn't achieve that then she needed to fake it until she tricked herself into believing it.
Distractions helped.
And so it begins! And uh oh, things are already not so great, huh? And also it apparently speaks in iambic pentametre? (Thank me for resisting the urge to do rhyming couplets)
For real though, I had majour writers block for the Menhrolith. I had to do wayyyyy more prep work and planning for this battle than I usually do and had to map out all of the important parts so that I wouldn't confuse myself.
Also, the Menhrolith has always been a kind of conceptual thing in my head. "Big ancient earth elemental" with a few extra steps has always been the picture in my head. More of a legend and conceptual challenge that I looked at as a climax of volume two and means oto an end rather than an entity with specific traits. That's not to say I didn't have ideas or things in mind, but they were never very grounded (ha ha, that's an elemental pun). I had to invest a loooooot of time just brainstorming what an entity like the Menhrolith would even be capable of as well as how it might look beyond a bog-standard big stone giant dude. It's been a bit of a journey.
Something that helped me a lot with it, at least from a visual point of view, has been working with my firend on an art commission. Unfortunately, at the time of publishing this, the art was completed on time but in the future the art will be in a comment where the menhrolith is first described as well as in the chapter comments, so if you didn't see it yet, feel free to look around and see if it's been posted yet. Alternatively, the art will also be posted on the discord server once it's complete so feel free to check it out there. It's kinda an uncommon method to make digital art as well (at least from what I've seen) so I've included some behind-the-scenes info on the creation process on the discord as well.
Discord linked here: https://discord.gg/hJWSVx2uhT
Anyways, I'm kinda having a lot of fun with this fight so far and am looking forward to the chapters to come. I hope you feel similarly and as always, I also hope you're having a wonderful day. Y'all take care <3