Loners Chamber

The gaping hall extended in front of him, a tunnel of darkness and stone, only the quiet of his own footsteps breaking the silence. He had been walking for a long time, and each step made him feel as if he were sinking deeper into the hour.

How could time weigh so much? But it did, and it pressed him down toward the floor, toward his feet, and he was breathing air that had weight, too.

His violet eyes peered into the dark, sharp and unfaltering, taking in every flickering movement of the shadows. The rough-hewn walls, scratched out by forces older than memory, began to transform.

Crude points of rock emerged, jagged and unnatural, as if the mountain itself had sprouted teeth. Crystalline growths overran the walls. They shone faintly, their trapped light casting the same kind of flickering reflections one sees in the dark alleyways of a city. If that kind of illusion is even possible, these walls did it—magnifying the unreality of this space, turning it upside down.

Belial decreased his speed, breathing regularly and purposefully. The air in this space was cooler, denser, stuffed with the quiet of centuries of nothing happening. The crystals made the light in here move and act in ways it didn't outside. They glowed, pulsed, illuminated. He stepped closer to one of the larger formations, one that could have served as a courtroom table—it was that big, that flat, and that forbidding. It had edges that could slice leather and, possibly, skin. He didn't think Bal had gotten any more reckless about hacking off body parts during the duration of this mission.

The way narrowed even more, requiring him to turn sideways to get through a stretch that was only a foot in width. He pulled his arms in close to his sides. Even so, his clothes scraped against the stone, and the sound was sharp in the silence. He paused to catch his breath and center himself.

Then, abruptly, the hallway opened into a wider chamber, and Belial stopped short. Before him lay a broken bridge, its narrow span—barely half a meter wide, stretching into the darkness. Long gaps marred its surface, places where the stone had crumbled away, revealing an abyss below. A faint sound drifted up from the depths: a skittering, scraping noise, like a horde of monstrous insects scuttling across the stone. Centipedes, perhaps, or something worse. The sound sent a prickle of unease down his spine, though he dismissed it just as quickly.

He did not care what lurked below. If he slipped, he could unfurl his wings and glide to safety. The thought brought a faint smirk to his lips. He stepped onto the bridge without hesitation, his movements fluid and precise—supposedly honed by countless battles fought on far worse footing. It should have felt steady and sure beneath him, but his boots were clicking against stone that, under all this weight, threatened to sound its death knell. And still, no time to overanalyze; he had to trust the bridge. Because the only thing dumber than being atop a bridge that might collapse was being the fool who got atop it in the first place.

Ahead, there loomed a massive door, rising from the cavern wall like a giant in repose. Even from afar, it had a terribly strong presence, ancient and immutable. Part of the crystalline growths that covered most every surface in this place had claimed it, enclosing the stone in a cocoon that pulsed faintly with the trapped light of long-dead stars. As he neared the door, Belial's cockiness dropped away, and his focus sharpened. The door was bigger than he'd surmised, easily ten meters tall and several thick stones deep. The surface was mostly smooth, save for some very old carvings that had nearly worn away to nothing, and it was completely covered in crystals, all of which had very sharp edges.

He exhaled slowly and unsheathed his sword, its edge faintly gleaming in the dark. The crystal was tough, far more resilient than stone or metal, and each swing sent a jolt of stiffness up into his arm. Chips of crystal flew, shading the floor like some kind of a meteorological event gone wrong. Moment by moment, he hacked away at the overgrowth, his movements one part relentless, one part methodical. Sweat dripped off of his nose and into the dirt. His muscles burned with the effort of thirty or forty minutes of hack and swing, and the door was still not visible.

Belial put away his sword and wiped the sweat from his face. He took a moment to collect himself, inhaling deeply as he focused on the door in front of him. It was unlike any other door he had encountered, made of stone yet smooth and almost polished. He placed his hands against the surface and pushed.

Absolutely nothing. There wasn't even a shudder.

His jaw tightened, and a growl that was almost a snarl began to work its way up from his chest and throat. He stepped back and closed his eyes for a moment, as if trying to conjure the ether from memory. When he opened them, they blazed like a furnace. He pressed his hands to the door again, channeling what felt like a lifetime of power into the rim and the middle of the door, both of which were way too far beyond what human strength could accomplish. The growl rumbled through his body and out of his mouth, a warning to anyone on the other side, hell or otherwise, that he was coming through. It was quite without doubt the strongest magic he had ever worked.

A barely audible groan sounded from the chamber. Belial's narrowed eyes determinedly held their gaze. Filling every muscle with ether, he steeled himself for the task set before him. The door creaked and squealed and protested with an agonizing slowness, and when it finally opened wide enough to let Belial through, it swung wide as if to announce his entrance.

He didn't need an invitation to step into the hollow behind the door. He had as much right to be here as anyone.

Still, he didn't rush.

He staggered in, regaining his equilibrium as he absorbed the sight of his environment. This was it—the den of the Lonesome Prince.

There were few tales about the Prince in the game. He had been a man of great quiet might, a kind of lord who might have ruled this domain. Yet, for reasons time forgets, he'd chosen to be a hermit instead of a would-be conqueror, retreating to a sanctuary nestled in the heart of the mountain just to be away from the would-be lord's life of endless wars and the lives of gods and men that seemed all too 'in-your-face' at times. Belial had expected a sanctuary on the order of a grand palace that might have suited a man of such legendary status as the Prince. What he found instead amused him.

The mancave stretched vast before him, its ceiling lost in shadow but he could make out some type of...door? At the very heart of it, there stood a single structure: a house that was neither imposing nor remarkable, yet somehow elegant. He couldn't have told you what made it so—perhaps the style, which tugged at the very edges of his memory and felt like something between the old-school Machiya style east of the Pacific demon realm and something refined, which he could not place.

It was a safe house, in any event, built of smooth dark Stone; the surfaces of those walls seemed almost polished but were instead dulled by a thick layer of dust, which rendered the house decidedly unfriendly. He peered up through the green light cast by the windows to see a kind of glow in which the whole interior was somehow caught, as if everything within were suspended in an amber time capsule smarting with memories.

Belial approached warily. Odd symbols were carved into the walls, surrounding the doors and beams. The writing was not of his world...or any that he knew, its consonants melding from flowing curves, circles, and angled lines that twisted like the vines of this universe. He traced one of the symbols with a gloved finger, feeling the grooves just below the surface. It was a language he had never seen before, yet somehow it felt both familiar and eerily coherent. He backed away, pondering at the puzzling thought had invoked.

He entered, his boots making no sound on the ancient flooring. The air pressed down, thick with the scent of dust and time.

One by one, he went through the rooms of the house, each step of the exploration taking him farther from the normal. It was plain but not without merit—a low table, its surface polished to a sheen; a shelf lined with things too weathered to identify—all rendered in a scale that was at once close to eerie.

He had seen work like this before, had something similar in his home, but this was something different, something better. Belial had a feeling he didn't want to have that simply made sense. He stepped through the door and into a room that should have contained nothing at all.

At last, he arrived at what had to be the sleeping quarters.

The chamber was huge, its ceiling rising far above. In the back there was a dark door with strange symbols and sighed. In the middle of it sat a bed, easily two meters high, its frame formed of the same dark stone as the rest of the house. Belial's lips twitched in annoyance. He took a short, undignified leap, scrambling up onto the mattress with a soft thump.

He brushed against something sewn into the corner of the sheets that his fingers had almost reached when he stopped to consider. It was a faded tag, with lettering that was barely legible.

Belial leaned in closer, narrowed his eyes, his breathing held as he studied the script.

Demonese!