Condemned to Death

I, yes, even I have found in the depths of my soul a strange despair.  Even in the darkest trials for my cloak, I saw some light hidden in my future.  I was able to see my rise to power within my grasp, my right to walk the night with ease and stand in elven society with my chin held high.  Were I to know it would lead me here, I might have reconsidered that light, that fleeting hope against the darkness in which I find myself.

Do I blame the dwarves?  No, I do not.  They are vile in their ways and grubby to boot, but I do not blame their greed.  That is what they are, and we have known this.  They have shoved me in this hole, trapped me down here in the dark, but this is their habit, their justice in a way.

Similarly, I can not blame myself.  I did no wrong in my infiltration, silent as the night air.  Coincidence itself aspired to trap me in a set of right choices that led to a wrong end.  Trapped in the shining moonlight and locked away, down deep.  I blame fate itself, though it feels not my hatred.

Blame will not help me.  Really, nothing will.  There are no tunnels here, I have no tools, and the black water laps at my feet.  That is all it can be, for it feels un-right against my skin.  It chills and the heat it takes dies, removed to nowhere.  Where it squelches in my boots it never warms, only chilling me more and more.

They have left me to die down here, naked in the dark, trapped in a well filled with treasure I can do nothing with.  Had I but a bit of cloth, I could bend it into the cool fabric I know so well, but here I am, stuck.  All I really have are the sounds of my enemies that pass my hole and the water slapping the shore.

It makes me wonder, though.  Why would they not mine this, bring it up in buckets?  Is my death more important than their profit?  Somehow, I doubt it.  There has to be more.  What keeps them at bay from riches beyond belief?  My prison is a strange horror.  And there across the black expanse walks my answer.  How long I have waited before it homes, I do not know.  Even in the black of the cavern, against the darkness of the dark fluid itself, it is a shadow.  It walks on legs, shifting between three and two and four with bursts of eight or ten or more.  It floats, seemingly, for it walks on the surface of the waves.  Above me are the hushed voices of dwarves, speaking in their ciphers.  Were my throat not parched from fear of shadow sickness I would have called out my fear to it or them, though it would do no good.

It comes close.  My limbs are limp with weakness and can stop nothing, so I sit, chilled.  With its head, a long nose like a beak sniffs over me.  With a hand, it cuts, pulling at my being, tearing through me from my heart to my neck, and my blood freezes to my skin.  Somewhere deep inside a scream grows as it does, pulling away two clawed arms where one pierced me.  My lungs do not provide the air, and my throat is torn asunder, but my spirit deep within is what lets loose this sound.

Elucidating the past.

When the light died, there was only one creature that kept walking the land, continuing to behave like the world still turned.  It, like the state of things, was a creature of utter darkness, a creature of cold and of finality.  Were the beings of the world still alive, they might even laugh at the idea that the last remaining mark of their lives was even real.  Few believe in Death as a creature, after all.

Still, it took its journey through the wreckage of a civilization that wouldn't even rot because it was so dead.  It walked among the buildings and the corpses wondering if somewhere there was something it had missed.  There was not.

It had all come about one day, shining brightly, when some wandering magician had cursed the light.  On what grounds he had a quarrel with it, nobody ever found out.  Death had dutifully claimed it before the day was done.  It had seen the shimmering pattern of nature in the sunbeams and the fireplaces, and that pattern had changed from the curse.  It said to the creature "Kill me for my time has come.  Kill me, for I am ripe for the harvest." and so Death had.  After the light went away, the rest of nature followed it, too cold and hungry to live on.  The fabric of reality called out and Death took it away.  All that was left was Death itself.

In this state, it wandered, searching.  It thought to itself of days filled with work and with the rot of rebirth that had opposed it.  There was not happiness in an end to the cycle, only a feeling of loss that Death had never felt before.  There was an emptiness where nothing moved and where there only seemed to be stillness.

Death sniffed the air, sensing in it a final state of the pattern, message for him hidden beneath its ever-changing fabric that now was stilled.  "Your time has come, now ends the everlasting cycle.  You must move on, leave, for this is not a place for you."  Ever dutiful, it did not hesitate as it set its thoughts inward to itself, and there it ended its existence, in a sense.

In the next world, complete in its cycles, something oozed in.  It was unlike anything that had previously passed through the void that separated things, for it was of the same fabric.  It was void itself, let loose upon creation.  It was Death itself, but not constrained in its being.  From the havens to the earth, nothing understood it.  While their death had been ordered, had a purpose, this new thing was blank and baffling.  All it carried was a sign that it had ended even light itself, that it was a force of destruction.

It oozed in, seeping down into the earth, and upon it were placed crystals of the sun to bear down a prison of light, a prison of that which confused it.  Why, it thought, were things once again spinning in cycles, why did the world turn again, though strange and unfamiliar at points?  And there, deep in the ground, ages hence, the dwarves found it thinking.

The Mintle Moor: A History Volume I

The shadow mines of Mintle Moor are queer in their very special ore.  Where dwarves in other halls sought the light of the earth hidden beneath in darkness, the dwarves of Low Mintle sought the shadows deep within the glittering crystals that made the land such a beautiful place.  The crystals, despite their size and fluorescent color were by and large worthless, at least to anyone within a few hundred miles of the mines.  They shone and glittered, but because of their prodigious number, most anyone who wanted one or two for their backyard already had one.  The crystals possessed no magical, medicinal, or mechanical properties that most anything else wasn't useful for, and despite the great craftsmanship of the dwarves, they were unshapable, breaking down into dull shards instead of smaller pretty-things.

Inside these Crystals, beneath the pink and the turquise and the yellow that were so common, was the object that the dwarves really mined.  Deep down were the sun was only reflected off the walls and had dimmed from repeated bounces, were deposits of shadow.  To most men, a shadow would seem in no way more valuable than a shining piece of rock, but most shadows were not quite so malleable as these.  Like water, when they were cracked out from the center of the stone, they would run down through the cracks, pooling in places but mostly seeping down deep into the earth.  Men who were rich enough to even buy the substance told tales of the horrible chill it brought, slipping through your fingers like a shell-less snail.  It absorbed light, flat black to the eye at high noon for as long as it didn't evaporate.  As a gas, it was like the thickest fog, letting neither sound nor sight pass through.

Only the elves, living in their crystalline houses were skilled enough to turn it solid though.  Some say they used moonlight and dark rituals, others speculated that blood was mixed into the darkness to coagulate it into a goo.  The only thing most knew for sure was that the elves were fond of making cloaks of the stuff and sneaking up on anyone and anything that crept past their walls.

Needless to say, on the Mintle Moor there was more high tension trade secrecy than in most other places of the world.  The dwarves would go on strike for mining, and the elves would rough up the distribution lines in the night.  The trading posts dotting the land would hire guards and travel only at night, but wake in the morning to notes scrawled in blood.  Or perhaps it was another cycle where the dwarves or trading caravans finally got fed up with the elvish monopoly and hired spies and wizards to find the shadow's secret, leading to dead bodies in the ditches.  It would go in cycles of who had the upper hand, always with a rhythm through the decades since dwarves first mined deep enough.

It was not for a long while before the dwarves mined too deep.

Saint

Just a drop of blood and the mountain let out a fearful roar.  That was all it took.  One small stone to nick the man's cheek, pulling at flash to rend a gash shorter than a fingernail.  His hand touched it, felt the drop of wetness on it, and for an instant, thought nothing of it.  Then the air moved, pushed out of its calm doldrums by the creatures of the deep, those who dealt in gold and bones, those who dealt in fire and claw.

He was running, fully terrified of the passageways that he so carefully had walked down in the day earlier.  A glint in the darkness, a wet wall shimmering in the lamplight, jerked his eyes and stumbled his legs.  The third scare was the one that ate him, devoured him whole along with the lamp, licking its lips of the blood oozed off its teeth that were as black as the tunnels it lived in.  Its brothers and sisters were too late, showing up to lick at the walls and floor the man's sweat, blood, and tears fell upon.

Once woken, they hungered.  Each belly that had lain dormant for decades in the darkness rumbled out a demand for meat and metal, for bone and blood.  A rumble in their stomachs that inched up through their neck and mouth and rumbled the whole mountain so hard a volcano might have been ashamed.  They poured from the summit like a cloud of smoke, a legion of wyrms that ranged from the size of a cow to its barn.

Many eyes were drawn to the moon that night, most in terror, some in confusion before the legends of old woke in their hearts.  One man and one man only smiled.  A grim smile surely, but a smile nonetheless.  In his steel skin he watched the sky and stood atop a rocky hill, propped up upon his lance.  He would be of use this night more than any other night in his life, he knew.  There were too few bandits and wars in this land, too few enemies that could be met with a sword.  The royal palace fought its wars in ink and compliments and secret meetings in back rooms.  He had moldered there these last few years and now, when he had set himself out upon a journey of discovery, he had found a battle to fight.

The first descended upon him as he stood, lone and broad of wing.  It overshot its dive in anticipation of his flight.  The tip of his lance raked its belly, drawing sparks off the hardened scales of melted metal, reforged in dragonfire from within.  On its second pass, its eyeball found the lance.  Through the brain and out the back of the skull, it still shone silver in the moonlight.  The man had made his first kill.

If man's blood had stirred the beasts to wake and hunger, dragon blood stirred them to rage and revenge.  Like a swarm of locusts, they descended on that hill, belching their flames and gnashing their teeth.  Some took one stab of the lance, others took two or three.  A large one that lagged behind took four stabs to the chest and flapped away to survive the night.  The man himself was scorched and scratched, torched and torn.  His metal skin was rent in one pass and melted down in another.  When two or three passed by his eyes, six more approached from the darkness.  It was never fated that he might survive the night, not alone and not against such numbers.

As the morning light peered out across the land that still smoldered in the dragon's wake, a small child climbed the hill.  His house was gone, as were his parents and their brothers and sisters and their parents too.  The nine black corpses that lay bleeding on rocks and dirt were a sight of wonder.  They fell in a circle around the peak where a single silver lance lay stuck in the charred ground.  Legends would spread of an agent of God that had descended there, leaving behind a mark to show mankind the way.  Much would come of that story, but for all the wars and heroes it would spread, it lies founded on this one.

Two bearded men arguing in a semi-tidy living room.

Most wizards, despite popular belief, do not actually break the laws of the universe, Mr. Batig.  That you have done so where countless others have dabbled is in itself something impressive.

I, uh, don't know what you're talking about.  This is all perfectly normal.  No tears in the fabric of reality or anything here, nope.  Just, uh, this curtain which-

Look, Mr. Batig, as a custodian of this plane of being, it is my job to fix things like this.  You are very much in trouble, but that doesn't mean that my intervention is bad for you.  On the contrary, I am set up to turn a trouble of your well being in the presence of highly unstable magical energies to merely a bureaucratic imposition that can be calmly discussed as gentlemen.

...I don't much like bureaucracy.

And I don't much like gaping cuts into the void.  The curtain is pretty much see-through, you know, and that's without the fact that I could peer through it on the astral layer.  Now would you please, Mr. Batig, be so kind as to let me patch that up before it gets more out of hand?

Look, this is perfectly under control, mostly, and I was going to sew it back up in a few minutes.  I don't really trust you. . .whoever you are messing with it.  This thing is very carefully crafted and relies on a few theories that I put together myself, so its not really in the normal magical form, you see, and-

Then would you just close it now, or attempt to, if you were planning on doing so anyway?

Sure, fine, its even easier to do than the last one since I left more of the border on this one intact.  I'm only doing it because you asked nicely.

. . .last one.  Dear God, there's more of these out there?  Have you been leaving a trail of these that I somehow missed?

No, no, of course not, I'm not stupid.

. . .

I'm not!  I fixed each one up before I moved on.  Wouldn't do to be leaving things open.

You missed a spot there.  A gap under your left hand.

Oh, so I did.  Fancy that.

Perhaps you missed other spots on the previous rifts?

Hah, I double check these.  Also, it wouldn't matter if I did, they self-seal as time goes on.

Yes, Mr. Batig, but only if they are not left to fester.  If they were, say just a bit open and some bit of void got caught in the opening it would grow and

Look, I was careful, Put a whole lot of stitches in them, like I'm doing now, and then I covered them, like I am about to, with some of this here paste.  It's made of tree blood.

You mean sap.

No, tree blood.  Some wizards prefer to call it magical phlegm.

Which doesn't come from trees, it is produced from magical auras of sentient lifeforms, which by the way makes it illegal to harvest in most countries on this planet.

Only one type of it, trust me, this is my life's research.

Very well, we will go over this later, once you have stitched up that tear in the fabric of-

THERE IT IS!

What?  Beg pardon?  There wh-  WHY WOULD YOU STICK YOUR ARM THROUGH!

Just a little closer, come on now. . .

Mr. Batig, please tell me why you would be so insane as to have your arm through that tear in reality.  That is a very quick way to get yourself killed, and me along with you, so if you would please PLEASE remove it from the portal-

GOT IT!

Got what, exactly?  Is that some sort of twig, some form of void-creation?  Put it back, sir!

No.  No no no, this is just a wand of mine.  See, I sort of dropped it out there a year or so ago on accident, so naturally I couldn't just leave it floating out there, and I had to reverse engineer the way to open these things in the first place, which was really quite diff-

Mr. Batig, you are telling me you have been opening these rifts because you dropped a small stick and wanted it back?

Well, yes?  Its a rather nice stick, don't you think?

. . .I fail to see its charm.  Why not just get another one instead of mucking with the cosmic balance of the universe?

Well, uh, that would have taken quite a bit of time and effort, plus I don't generally like the local yew suppliers that much. . .

Would it have taken, lets say, a year worth of study and travel time, plus another year of questioning and detainment by the council of magic?

. . .well. . .

Because you are most certainly getting written up for this.

Aww, c'mon, this was mostly harmless.  Those chickens will be fine in a few generations.

The town of Klel's chicken population is one of the least worrying points about your whole endeavor.

The last time something like this happened, caused by not less than a fallen demigod, not some country wizard, it managed to cause a countrywide panic and minor entropic invasion.  Deaths on the scale of thousands.

Oh, really?  That sounds horrible.

Quite.

So, uh, the entropy things, they came through portals like this?

Yes, Mr. Batig, they did.

Would they happen to be kind of blueish, but more colored checkered than feeling like cherry?

. . .That is a fairly accurate description, yes.  Have you perhaps heard of them before?

No, not really, but I think one just winked at me.