Creature in the Crater : 02

The strange sound was intermittent, arrhythmic and soft. It was not quite musical but it was built on minor chords that gave it a wistful ghostly quality. Whatever it was, the noise seemed to spook Suak. The alegoyle circled low and wide at the base of the hills but would not follow Klane when he began to climb the slopes of Ulumol.
"Do not venture onto the moor and do not go near the crater," he had been warned by a loquacious Rider who had once lived in the ill fated settlement. "The creature will show no mercy. It is a great fearsome beast of a kind none have seen elsewhere. It flies like an alegoyle but whilst they can usually be scared off with spears and bows, this thing is much bigger and it is intelligent too, for it can fight with fire and with other terrible weapons. It took three of the fairest of our maidens back to its lair in the crater and we have not seen them since. We could not resist and we had to flee."
"I shall go there and see for myself," Klane had proclaimed boldly at that distant campfire, provoking only uneasy smiles from his listeners. Now with eldritch sounds on the breeze and the reality before him, Klane felt more than a little uneasy himself, but he was a determined young man and curiosity drove him forward.
The crater was not hard to find. Above the course of a shallow stream bed was a stand of small firs and the bare branches of birch and ash trees now stripped of their leaves. The lip of the bowl could be seen, modelled in the evening sunlight and Klane approached it cautiously as dusk was falling.