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.