Location: Akka Mountains
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Spring
Whilst I was busy working in The Life Labs back at The Caulrdon, Kaoz entered The Deepest Depths which led down to the heart of the Akka Mountains.
The secrets paths of the Drokka did not welcome the Myz; they merely tolerated his intrusion, the air growing thick and foul as he descended. Kaoz wiped a layer of black grit from his brow, his torch sputtering against a draft that smelled of rusty iron and tomb-dust. The miners’ markers—those helpful splashes of white paint—had vanished at the threshold of the wall he’d shattered. Ahead lay a void that had not seen firelight in an age.
“Kaoz stupid,” He growled, realizing too late that he was without a map of the Byways. He thought of the parchment The Shaitan had given him when I’d first sent him on this mission—the map he later so foolishly surrendered to the Steward’s “superior intellect” when they became partners. For a moment he pondered returning to the palace to force Ramssee to give the map back, but then a surge of heat blossomed in his chest, a remnant of Inanna’s fire. He would not go back. He would sooner let the mountain swallow his bones than crawl to ask the Viperz for help.
“No return,” he hissed. “Kaoz find way. If tunnel end, Kaoz dig. Kaoz find Grim!”
For hours, the descent continued, a steady, rhythmic plunge into the mountain’s gullet. Fortune—or perhaps a darker, more predatory design—dictated his path, for the Deepest Depths bore no resemblance to the tangled, frantic honeycomb of the upper levels. Here, there were no branching choices, no tactical diversions. There was only the singular, descending throat of obsidian stone, a slick and polished gullet that led straight into the ancient roots of the world.
But as the elevation dropped, an airless rot seemed to coat the back of Kaoz’ throat. The silence was no longer merely the absence of sound; it became a physical, oppressive weight that pressed against his eardrums until they throbbed in time with his racing heart. He realize the darkness here was different, too. It was an active, hungry thing that didn’t just sit in the shadows—it seemed to reach out, leaching the warmth from his skin and the orange glow from his sputtering torch. Each time the flame flickered, the blackness surged forward, threatening to swallow him whole before the light could recover. The walls of glass-smooth stone whispered to him, catching the echoes of his own labored breathing and tossing them back as the distorted wheezing of something much larger, following just a few paces behind in the gloom.
Then, his boot struck something that didn’t crunch like stone. It rattled.
Kaoz lowered his torch. There, sprawled in the center of the path, lay the remains of a Drokka. The armor was a rusted shell, the leather long ago turned to dry husks, and the bones were the color of aged parchment.
“Drukka!” Kaoz barked, a maniacal glee lighting his yellow eyes. “Kaoz find prize!”
He fell upon the skeleton like a starving wolf – ripping the breastplate from the ribcage, his claws digging through the rotted tunic, tossing finger bones and shards of skull into the dark as he searched for the hilt of the legendary blade he was after.
Nothing. Not even a simple iron knife. The dwarf had died holding only his own empty hands.
Kaoz’s scream of fury echoed off the walls. Frustrated, he brought his heavy heel down upon the dead one’s ribcage, over and over and over, until the ancestor of the Akka’s was nothing but a smear of white dust and splinters.
“Where Grim!” he howled, but then he remembered. “Shaitan Five Drukka in Depths!”
His mind flashed back to the me – The Master of Skulls. When I’d sent him on this quest, my alter ago as The Shaitan advised him of important details.“Five Drukka,” I had whispered to him with knowledge I’d gained by reading King Arwin’s Diary. “Kon-Herr Arwin III and his Doomed Five. They took the Grim to the Deepest Depths as a final act to protect it. You, Kaoz, must pluck it from Arwin’s cold fingers, Kaoz. Find it and bring it to ME.”
Kaoz looked at the ruined dust at his feet. This had been the first. A scout. A nothing.
“Waste Time.” Kaoz spat. “Kaoz not fail.”
Kicking the bones one last time, the Myz marched deeper. The passage grew colder, the walls soon sweating a dark, viscous moisture. Over the next six hours, the Myz discovered two more of the Doomed Five. Each time, the frenzy took him; each time, he defiled the remains in a white-hot rage when the black blade failed to appear. He smashed their skulls against the obsidian walls, his strength fueled by the agonizing vigor Inanna had gifted him.
The hours quickly bled into a half-day’s journey. The torch in his left hand was a nub of charred wood, and his supply of wood and oil was dwindling.
“Three,” Kaoz counted, his voice a rasping whisper. “Where Arwin?”
Doubt, cold and slimy, began to crawl up his spine. He had found the first three within six candlemarks, but the tunnel had stretched into a seemingly endless ribbon of black stone for double that time since. The silence was louder now, a singing in his ears that sounded like a thousand voices whispering in a language of stone he didn’t understand – the evil Drukka language.
“Wrong way?” Kaoz wondered, his yellow eyes darting toward the shadows that danced at the edge of his light. “Kaoz miss door?”
But there were no side-tunnels. No hidden alcoves. Only the singular, downward spiral into the lightless gut of Akka. He couldn’t stop. To stop was to let the shadows catch him. To stop was to face the Queen’s wrath without her prize.
“Kaoz march,” he grunted, his boots heavy with the silt of the deep. “Kaoz find King. Kaoz find Grim. If mountain not give… Kaoz kill mountain.”
On Kaoz trudged. Deeper he delved. For how long, who can say. Countless hours passed as the descended through a throat of black glass. He’d ventured for so long that eventually he moved in a state of rhythmic delirium, his single remaining torch a guttering, orange claw scratching at the absolute night. The heat of Inanna’s blessing had curdled into a cold ache in his marrow, but his obsession drove him forward, one heavy thud at a time.
Finally, he rounded a sharp, twisting bend where the dark walls were covered in black sludge – that’s when his foot caught on something solid and unyielding—not a stone, but a tangle of metal and bone. With a snarl of surprise, the Myz was suddenly pitched forward and he slammed into the freezing floor, his torch skittering across the stone, threatening to go out in the wet muck.
“KRA!” Kaoz scrambled to his knees, his breath coming in ragged, white plumes. He snatched up the dying light and held it over the obstacle that had tripped him. His yellow eyes widened, the pupils pinning into needlepoints. He hadn’t tripped over a rock. He had tripped over a tomb!
Before him lay the final two members of the Doomed Five. They were tangled together in a desperate embrace of rusted iron and bone, their hollow sockets staring up at the ceiling as if waiting for a sky that would never come. Unlike the scouts he’d found earlier, these two were draped in the heavy, ornate Rhokkium mail of the Royals, the rainbow-hued links dulled by an age of mountain-breath.
“Final two,” Kaoz whispered, in awe. “King here.”
Rage and greed quickly surged through him in a toxic cocktail. He began to tear at the remains with bestial intensity, throwing aside weapons and armor that echoed like funeral bells in the narrow tunnel, before ripping into their clothing and packs.
“Where, stone-pig?!” he howled, ripping apart he larger of the two corpses. “Where Inanna prize?!”
As he hauled the skeletal torso upright, something caught the flickering light. Attached to a broad, cracked leather belt was a scabbard that was a masterpiece of dwarven craft – the material of the blade holder was made from blackened silver and etched with runes that seemed to writhe in the torchlight. And while Kaoz couldn’t see the blade itself, it was the pommel along that made Kaoz’s heart stop – embedded in the blade’s base was a blood-red ruby, carved with the singular, unmistakable sigil of the letter “G.”
Kaoz gasped – could this really be the magical dagger of destiny he’d been questing for? Had he really found it?
Nervously, with a hand that had strangled mortals the world over, but now shook like a dry leaf, he gripped the hilt. The blade was not merely cold; it had a kind of hunger – like sub-zero frost that bit into his calloused palm, demanding a price in heat. He felt a phantom vibration hum through his arm, a low-frequency growl that resonated with the very marrow of his bones.
With a slow, agonizingly steady pull, he withdrew the blade from its blackened sheath.The metal—if it could be called metal—was a matte-black stone so dense it seemed to pull the light from the air. It was darker than the obsidian walls, like a sliver of the void itself shaped into a needle. As it cleared the scabbard, the edge was so impossibly fine that the air itself seemed to hiss in protest, a soft, serpentine whistle that made the hair on the back of his neck stand rigid.
“Must know,” Kaoz grunted as a terrifying clarity took him.
He looked at his torch—the lone, flickering lifeline that stood between him and a blind, stumbling death in the lightless labyrinth. The flame was a guttering, sickly orange, feeding on the last of the rancid oil, casting shadows that danced like mocking spirits against the obsidian walls. To extinguish it was madness. To douse it was to invite the mountain to swallow him whole, to become another nameless skeleton in the gut of the world.
But the fever of the Goddess was a wildfire in his brain, a white-hot obsession that demanded the truth. He could no longer endure the agonizing uncertainty of the dim light. If this was a common blade, he was dead. If it was the King’s prize, he was a god.
Without allowing himself another moment to let reason take hold, he plunged the dying flame into the freezing, black mountain muck.
<HISS>
The light vanished.
Nothing happened.
Check that – something did happen – Kaoz’ world didn’t just go dark; it ceased to exist. An absolute, suffocating blackness swallowed the Myz whole. It was a darkness so thick, so heavy, it felt like the cold hand of a god pressing against his wide-open eyes, clogging his nostrils, and filling his mouth. The sensory deprivation was a physical blow, a violent disconnection from reality that made his inner ear scream and his head swim in the void. Kaoz reached out a meaty hand, but he could not even see his own fingers in front of his face. He was no longer a black night of Kagor; he was a speck of dust trapped in the infinite, crushing throat of a bowels of the flat earth.
“Kaoz fail!” he gasped, but the sound of his voice was flat, eaten by the stone.
He waited, despair gripping his heart. Not sure what to do. Hoping against hope that Inanna would come to save him – or at least destroy him – to end this torture.
One heartbeat. Two. Five. The silence grew teeth, gnawing at his sanity. The blade in his hand felt like nothing more than cold, dead rock.
Kaoz a fool, the thought clawed through his mind. Shaitan lie. Innana trick Kaoz. Gods abandon Kaoz.
Despair, cold as the mountain roots, began to coil around his heart. He was alone in the deepest grave ever dug, holding a useless trinket while the dark prepared to feast upon him. He opened his mouth to howl, to curse the Goddess who had driven him to this suicide—
But then, the miracle happened..
A microscopic spark, a needle-prick of diamond-blue light, pulsed in the very center of the black stone. It didn’t flicker; it throbbed like a waking heart. Before Kaoz could draw a breath, the spark bled outward, a ghostly, ethereal radiance racing down the gutters of the blade like liquid lightning. The light was not warm; it was a frozen, crystalline glow that cast the tunnel in terrifying hues of frost and violet shadow, carving the Myz’s silhouette against the obsidian walls.
As the radiance intensified, the ancient stone began to speak. Vertical letters, carved by hands that had been dust for more than an age, it began to shimmer into existence down the length of the shaft. They burned with a cold, white fire that seared itself into Kaoz’s retinas, spelling out the ultimate promise:
G — R — I — M
The reality of his triumph crashed over him like a breaking dam.
“YAAAAAAAAWWWWP!” Kaoz screamed with passionate exuberance at the top of his lungs. The sound was a primal, ear-splitting explosion of victory. It held such violent exuberance that it transcended language, a roar that challenged the mountain itself. The vibrations hit the stressed obsidian ceiling above him, and with a tectonic groan, the rock gave way. Tons of stone and ancient dust came crashing down just yards ahead, sealing the lower path forever—but Kaoz didn’t care. He had the light. He had the power. He had the world in his hand.
Kaoz laughed, a high, discordant sound that danced off the falling debris. He turned his glowing prize toward the shattered remains of the dwarf king he had just robbed. With a cruel sneer, he leaned over the skull of Kon-Herr Arwin III. “King Pig hide in belly of world, Myz take heart. Arwin dust. Kaoz King!”
With a final, spiteful stomp, he ground the King’s skull into the floor, pulverizing the last of the Drokka line into grit.
Renewed by a manic energy, the Myz didn’t trudge back to the surface, he double-timed it up the incline, the blue glow of the dagger lighting his way like a spectral lantern. The ten-mile climb felt like a sprint.
“Nothing stop Kaoz!” he growled, his eyes fixed on the distant promise of the surface. “Kaoz kill Ramssee. Kaoz go to Inanna! Kaoz become God!”
I’ll be honest with you – it would have been nice to know this at the time. I could have avoided a lot of trouble for myself. But no matter. As fate would have it, Koaz’s prize wasn’t what he thought it was. And all of us – gods and mortals alike – would pay the price for his crime.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 