The Last Breath

The regular pulse that once animated the cavern was gone, replaced by a suffocating void, a silence that heralded the end of some ancient entity. Zac stood alone amid what had been a geological treasure. Nothing remained. The mithril veins were now but gray scars on dead rock; the gems, empty sockets devoid of shine. The cavern had devoured its own soul and expired in a last stony sigh.

His gaze turned to the obsidian door, a monolith of pure night standing in absolute darkness. He had spent time studying it, listening to its silent melody, deciphering the grammar of its hate.

'The same signature as the giants' staircase,' he thought, his analysis cold and detached, a bulwark against panic. 'A confinement seal. A lock guarding not a mere doorway, but an entire world. Yet within the familiar notes of the curse, there is something else… dissonances. Echoes of Angband's discord. The primordial hunger of Ungoliant. The icy cruelty of Morgoth's Dragons. Things that should not exist together.'

As he finished the thought, the ground shuddered one last time, a deep, guttural geological gasp. Fissures snaked through the stone, venting acidic vapor that hissed on contact with air. The ground began to seep and consume itself from within.

'It's dying. For good. And it intends to take me with it.'

His eyes fixed on a segment of runes on the door, a fragile note in the symphony of damnation. He'd identified a weakness, a stress point. Now or never.

He raised his blade and traced a counter-melody on the obsidian. He performed his ritual, a brute-force prayer to black magic, a plea for destruction.

A sinister crack, the sound of a bone breaking, shattered the silence. The door did not open; it cracked. A black flash streaked across the obsidian, carving a gaping breach. Zac staggered back, surprised by the violence of his own action. He had failed, the result was not what he'd anticipated.

From the fissure, a spectral veil escaped, an opalescent mist surging like a silent wave, bringing a cold that froze not the flesh, but the soul. Behind him, the apocalypse began. The ground liquefied into a lake of seething telluric acid; a surge of pure dissolution rose, threatening to engulf him, to erase him from existence.

There was no choice. Brave the unknown, or be annihilated.

Zac inhaled deeply, gritted his teeth, and plunged forward, diving through the fissure, through the spectral veil. It felt like drowning in ice and regret, his mind screaming under the assault of this unnatural cold.

He landed heavily on the other side. Behind him, the noise of the dying cavern ceased abruptly. Absolute silence. The entity was gone.

He found himself in a narrow tunnel shrouded in supernatural mist, the same he'd just traversed. Time was meaningless. He advanced, a ghostly figure through a fog that never dissipated. He wandered for what seemed like days, weeks, sleeping on the cold ground, his Shroud barely visible in the fog swirling about him. He was a lost traveler in limbo.

At last, the fog began to diminish, not by rising, but by being driven back by a howling, icy wind. Zac emerged onto a precipice.

And his mind shattered.

What he saw was not a cave, it was a necropolis, a funereal landscape on a cosmological scale, stretching to a horizon so distant it seemed to curve onto itself. A valley of death, grand and absolute.

Mountains of bones rose like mad alpine ranges. Dunes of vertebrae, cliffs of femurs, canyons of interlaced ribs. The remains of millions of evil creatures whose anatomies were blasphemies beyond comprehension comprised the very ground.

Bone towers, impossible constructs, soared toward an invisible vault, spires of macabre ivory and fused skulls that scratched at the darkness, sending silent prayers to a god of death. A white, icy wind ceaselessly swept the landscape, lifting a fine bone dust that sparkled like cursed snow, a sepulchral breath carrying the echo of billions of deaths.

And everywhere, specters: funereal legions, entire armies of ghosts and spirits standing motionless, frozen in silent battle formations. They made no move, posed no threat. They were the eternal witnesses of their own defeat, an audience of the damned for a play that would never be performed.

Zac was overwhelmed. His already fractured mind cracked further. This was a macabre splendor, a cruel beauty beyond him. He was no longer a man but a witness, an insect gazing at a graveyard of gods.

Then he looked up.

And the breath was knocked from his lungs.

Set into the vast ceiling, running the entire length of the cavern, was a skeleton, a dragon's skeleton. Its size was unmeasurable, geological. It was not a monster, it was part of the landscape. Its spine was the central ridge of the vault. Its immense wings, miles of bone webbing, were the very buttresses supporting the ceiling. Its gaping maw, large enough to swallow a city, formed a natural arch above a sea of skulls. It was the fossil of a divinity, the framework of this very hell.

'Ancalagon… Ancalagon the Black…'

A cosmological terror seized him. A realization so absurd and so obvious that it made him sway.

'My escape… on the back of the worm… I must have passed close by. I must have brushed past without seeing it. How… how could I have missed this?'

Then, he understood. In the world's entrails, scale is relative. He hadn't seen the dragon for the same reason a bacterium cannot see the whale it lives on. His escape, his "victory," his journey to the surface, all of it had been a brief crawl across the side of a dead god.

He had never been close to escape. He had only been passing from one tomb to another, even larger than the last.