Coiled near the flower, close enough that the pale white glow of the Moonflower painted faint patterns across its scales, slept a lightning serpent.
It was pale yellow — the particular, dull gold of something that carried electricity in its body the way clouds carry rain, as a natural condition rather than a weapon. Dense scales covered every inch of its form, layered and tight, overlapping with the kind of precision that spoke more of armor than of skin. Lightning serpents were creatures of the deeper layers of the Iron Forest — rarely seen in the outer regions under normal circumstances, content to exist at the bottom of the dark where the light barely reached and the prey was reliably large.
