[center][h2][u][b]Empire of Lynn-Naraksh[/b][/u][/h2] [b]A Dungeon[/b][/center] Dark. Almost. It was nearing dark now. Too long for it to be a passing shadow. Night. She had once counted the time of days and nights, and known when one would succeed the other without needing to see the light and darkness. It was when she thought that the sun would blind her with its stings, one every day, and had sought to shelter her eyes from it. That had ceased to matter long ago, but also long afterwards. When something still mattered. Had it ever mattered, however? Had anything? Had she truly ever measured the span of light and darkness? She often found herself remembering things that had never happened, for it was all long ago, and it was not important. She knew this all the better because, of late, she had not remembered them so often any longer. The strain of memory to decease itself had become obvious for the hollow, senseless artifice that it was, ad so it had faded away like all that had truly happened before. It was not even important when was long ago, and in sooth, though she could not have known it, it had never been. She had not come into the vault to await the date of a sentence, but to do something else, something that did not matter because it had already happened. All to do with it ha gone the way of oblivion. The many eyes of raging flame, the blood upon the swords, the breath of molten iron were less real than in a folk-tale about the things that hunt in the night and punish the disobedient, for their blood reeks sweetly. She had also seen the things, when they had come before the door and cast the shadow of unborn night. They were frightening, because that was what they had to be, and they thought much of their duty. Some of them shone when it was still light, and they were the worst, because they promised one thing and then gave another. The others did not mask themselves, but revealed their darkness as it was. That might have been even more fearsome once, for reasons that had been somewhere for someone, but not here, nor for what remained of what had been her. The fear, however, was not fully gone. It was nothing like what she, or anyone who believed there to be entities of importance, once could have felt. Where that was a keen glimmer in the shadows of thought, this was a sinking, quivering reflection on the waters of a torpid lake. Perhaps she did not feel it at all. She had sought to think of whether she did, now and again in the past, but it flowed between her fingers rather than cutting and piercing them. In the occasional moment of indolent lucidity, it occurred to her that this was the only way her memory could entertain itself after its simulacra were gone. Drawing something from oblivion itself was beyond its reach, and thus it captured the reflecting waters in a sieve and let them roil, gently, silently. But those moments passed soon. The last one had been many lights before (many? Many. No more). She had thought, then, that it was well they did not come more often, for else memory's games would no longer have sufficed, either for it or for her. It was just as well the lapse had come before the realisation of what they ought to have sufficed for. She dimly suspected - even as everything was dim - that she might have realised that many times before, and always it had receded back into oblivion. As it all did, in the end. One thing she did not seem to lose, and that were the thoughts. Thoughts - hers, for the most part, or of memory. Sometimes one appeared which she did not recognise as belonging to either. Like the fear, which passed through both but did not stand still. Thoughts of what was old, older than her and her time here, in the darkness and light, however much it might have been and for whichever reason. They did not reveal any more than this and went by, most often forgotten before the cycle was finished, and left unmourned. For what mattered it how old a thought was? No more than anything. Not that the light was soon to be over, and its hue - how was it named? She might have seen it before - was growing darkened as it failed to fulfil its oath. The light was not unlike those things outside the door that had gleaming faces. It promised more, but instead of delivering its radiance it dived in blackness and pallor, however bright that might have been. But what good to praise or lament, now? Idleness. Vacuity. [color=2e2c2c]...[/color] Night. [color=2e2c2c]...[/color] [i]Clang.[/i] Fall [center]into[/center] [right][color=2e2c2c]abyssal[/color][/right] [center]How[/center] Why ask [center]when[/center] [right]it is[/right] [center]Fall[/center] That matters [center]Something[/center] [right]for once[/right] [center]at last[/center] [color=2e2c2c]And again?[/color] [center]No[/center] [right]It does not[/right] [center][color=2e2c2c]Still nothing[/color][/center] [color=2e2c2c]Why else be here[/color] [center]Finally[/center] [right]cold pain[/right] [center]IN ITS TIME[/center] [color=2e2c2c]And this is all.[/color] The soil was not truly painful. It was something, for certain, and that was enough of a blow, but her skin had held, weathered as it was by winding breezes and dripping ropes to life. There was nothing else in her that could yield. It was a relief that her bones had endured, however. Had but it been higher, who knew... It did not immediately reach her that her position had changed. She was no longer upright, with the inking light before her eyes. Instead, there was only cold stone, and blackness deeper than the palely lit night. It was almost amusing, after a fashion. There it went - entirely unlike everything that had been before. What would she have thought if it had been her, in that position? Did anyone else in the world ever assume it, for that matter? Did they know how entertaining it was, to be like this? Not frightening, no. Fear was something else. But it seemed to her that she remembered the upright position being the more natural, for reasons beyond the simple one. Now? She sought to ensure that her fingers still moved. She could not turn here head like so, for there was hard stone in its way, but- She could see her fingers. It had moved. The arm had moved. She had willed for it, and it had moved. The hand was before the eyes. Was this not unusual? It tired her. The change, which had been passive. The motion, which had been slight. The very facts that were happening, for facts were happening. She did not know how long she lay in place. Hours. Days. Maybe more, but not less. It was not sleep, it was a night of the body that came only once in a lifetime, only after events like this. Still, she could move her arm, though all else might as well have been made of the same stone as the floor. How long had passed? Weeks. Years. She did not feel hunger. Only exhaustion. Her head swam as waves on which there floated revolving iron rings. They struck every part of it within, in turn. The echoes were respite. She rose when it was dark again. How many times had it grown light, then shadowed again? Many. None. It still did not matter. For what did this change, in the end? She rose, her body crumbling behind her, and saw that the darkness was all. There was no door beyond which things could pass. It stood, open, like her eyes and arms. Like her arms. She did not know they had such strength. One lunge forward, and they clutched at the edges of the cutting floor, and pulled. All that was behind followed. Lunge, pull, it followed. Was it indeed so insignificant that even swollen, enfeebled palms whose fingers could not move could bear it? It could not have been the fingers, for there was only inflexible bone in them. It was the arms that moved. They had held so that they could support all else, and now they carried it. Was this amusing? Did it matter? she asked no one, whose were the old thoughts. No, it did not, answered no one, but she knew this well enough anyway. Beyond the door that was no longer, darkness reigned still. To all sides, not as before. She did not stay to appreciate the contradiction. They lunged, pulled, dragged. Not once did it occur to her where. Simply, they lunged, pulled and dragged. That was what they did. And this was what she would do. Onwards. [color=2e2c2c]Nowhere[/color], for - where else? Where at all. Why. What for. Each question was worth the others. [color=2e2c2c]That was to say,[/color] nothing. [color=2e2c2c]Nothing.[/color] [center][h2][b][u]Abyssal[/u][/b][/h2] [b]Naraksh. Lynnde.[/b] ? [i]It had slept. It had died, and it had slept. Long. It remembered, faintly. Reaching to the tainted skies with its many arms, snatching foes out of flight and crushing them. Looming over the celebration of the creatures of flesh. They were minuscule. Little more than the specks of dirt beneath them. But they gave it blood to sate its hunger. The hunger. It had slept, and it had not fed. Long. It could feel now. It was not in pain from the killing wound anymore. Instead, there was emptiness around it. It tugged, faintly, below, out of sight. Its hind claws scraped rock. They could not budge more. It was bound. And yet, the hunger. The strength. Where were they? It reached out with immaterial tendrils, smelling, tasting, probing. The thoughts of one slipped, cold and slimy, fast below the surface. The thoughts of the other churned like molten flame and ground ponderously like mountains of black stone. They lived. They slept. It would wake them. Now that it had awoken itself.[/i] [/center] Deep beneath the earth, past dread and flame and bone and metal, in chambers of sweltering desolation, it stirred. The Beast of Iron opened its eyes.