(POV: Unspecified — The Mountains of Silence)
Drip... drip...
Viscous droplets of foul fluid from rotting cockroach entrails fell in a desolate rhythm from the ceiling of the pitch-black cavern, releasing a feverish, rancid stench that choked the lungs and coated the throat in the bitter reek of ancient decay.
Below, the ground was an endless, suffocating carpet of dead cockroaches, piled upon one another through decades of lightless neglect. Every bootstep upon those brittle, dried carapaces produced a sickening crunch that stirred nausea in the chest; it was an unholy place that screamed to be burned down to absolute ash.
He took one step... two steps... three, dragging the weight of his body through the damp depths until he came to a halt before a massive stone monolith towering in the heart of the cavernous void.
He extended a bare hand, wiping away layers of dried blood and sticky grime from the rough face of the rock, revealing the words etched deep into the stone with a brutal, sharp instrument:
"Daughter of Gold... Son of the North."
"The North waits."
"The North hears."
"The North sees."
"The North remembers."
Beneath the carved words stood a primitive mural. It was crude, its lines jagged and rough, yet it pulsed with a dark, suffocating intimacy—a feeling overflowing with a twisted, unnatural love. A colossal demon loomed over a bed, bearing two horns stained in the blazing red of smoldering embers, its long hands wrapping calloused, merciless fingers around the throat of a woman. She was carved without a single facial feature, her body coated entirely in a garish, blinding gold, strangled in eternal silence within the stone.
In the lower corner of the carving lay an alchemical card turned face down, its sigil and identity completely buried in the gloom of the rock. Beside it, etched directly into the stone, a long sword rested inside a polished scabbard.
And at the very bottom of the mural, sealing the prophecy, was a final sentence carved far deeper and more violently than the rest:
"The North will do."
He paused.
He stared long into the stone and its chilling depictions.
Slowly, he walked around the massive boulder, running his fingers along its edges, searching among the crevices for further words, a deeper meaning, or a message concealed behind the scene.
There was nothing. The rear surface was sheer, unyielding stone, smooth and bitingly cold.
He exhaled a long, deep breath. The sound left him faint and hollow, like a man draining his lungs of his final ounce of patience.
"Only this? I exhausted my feet for nothing."
He reached out his right hand into the pitch-black void behind the monolith. A deep black ring materialized, drinking in the meager light like an abyss, and from within its depths slid a steel dagger with a keen, pointed blade. The hilt settled into his palm with cold, rigid certainty.
His eyes locked onto the silver edge of the blade, which caught and reflected the cavern's deep blackness.
Suddenly, his body shuddered in a terrified biological rebellion against his own mind. He swallowed hard with immense difficulty, his Adam's apple rising and falling in a stark, visible tremor. The fingers gripping the hilt locked in a violent spasm, his knuckles turning stark white as though the bone would burst through the skin, while the tendons of his wrist trembled with involuntary twitches he could not suppress.
He raised the blade and brought it against his throat.
And there, mere millimeters from his flesh, his hand froze in the air.
The breath died completely in his chest. His trembling fingers slowly pulled the blade backward, retreating several millimeters in an overwhelming, instinctual hesitation. His chest heaved in rapid, shallow bursts as he panted brokenly, his pupils dilating to their absolute limit, staring into the dark void in pure, primal terror—a biological fear screaming from every living cell in his body, violently rejecting what was to come.
He squeezed his eyes shut until his eyelids ached.
Then, with an agonizing, deliberate slowness that tore at his nerves, he pressed the cold steel into the side of his neck. He sank the edge into the flesh, and with a ruthless act of blind willpower, dragged the blade in a decisive slash across his throat.
The wet, sickening sound of tearing cartilage broke the silence.
Hot blood erupted in a gushing torrent, splattering violently across the smooth stone and the freezing rock, sending a searing stench of metallic copper into the air that overwhelmed the ancient rot of the cavern and awakened whatever lay dormant in the abyss.
His body collapsed, striking the brittle carpet of shells with a heavy, muffled thud. The dagger slipped from his limp fingers, clattering with a faint metallic chime against the sea of carapaces. In an immediate, blind reflex, both his bare hands flew toward his severed neck, digging his fingers frantically into the open wound in a futile attempt to stem the escaping tide of life, his palms drowning in his own warm, viscous blood.
It was not an instant death, nor was it a peaceful departure.
His body thrashed in violent, spastic convulsions, slamming against the ground in a frenzied shiver that kicked away the cockroach shells to expose the bare, freezing rock beneath. A wet whistle of air and a horrifying, choked rasp hissed directly from the gaping wound in his neck—a drowning, breathless gurgle desperately searching for a single breath of air to enter his torn windpipe.
His bloodshot eyes bulged in pure, unmasked horror. He gasped, chest heaving with terrifying speed, desperately clinging to the fading slivers of consciousness slipping away drop by drop.
The gaze of the darkness rose in majestic stillness.
The vantage point drifted slowly upward toward the dizzying heights of the cavern ceiling, revealing the tragedy in full from above. A small, pale figure thrashed beside the monolithic stone in the center of an immense, pitch-black void, encircled by a slick, dark crimson stain that seeped and branched deep through the crevices of the rock and the porous spaces of the crushed shells.
And from the forgotten corners of the cavern, out of the suffocating stillness, a faint, dreadful rustling began.
The dry, brittle clicking of thousands of chitinous legs and a coarse, accelerating scrape resonated from every crack and crevice, swelling into the collective murmur of an unimaginable swarm.
The carapaces that had seemed dry and dead for centuries began to twitch, seized by a frenzied awakening—first one, then dozens, then hundreds. A crawling black tide, a surge of thousands of creatures aroused by the scent of fresh, hot blood, converged like a blind deluge from every direction, crawling over the warm crimson pool toward the convulsing body drawing its final breaths, ready for the feast to begin.