Zac stopped the flow. The slow, hypnotic, and insulting tick of numbers was erosive, a torture designed to wear the soul down through monotony. He looked away from the cascade, his mind empty. Was this another ploy of the Entity, this agony of boredom? Or simply the sound of his own reason eroding? He no longer knew. He was only aware, again, of being a plaything in an experiment of which he grasped only the cruellest contours.
His thoughts, fleeing the void, drifted toward Uldor. The Regent of Silence had failed. How could such a power have been overcome by the Entity's primordial hunger? The confrontation must have been cataclysmic. Since his rebirth in the grotto, Zac had not dared to venture outside. Naked, without armor or Morngul, he was nothing but fragile prey, an anomaly of flesh in a world of stone and nightmare. His only concession to the system was using just enough Healing Stagnation to keep his stomach from devouring itself out of hunger, a pathetic echo of his former survival.
The depths had shaken for days, a tectonic fever that must have, once again, remade the labyrinth. And Uldor's millions of raised creatures? If their master had been annihilated, were they as well? Or did they wander, a leaderless army, in the dark? He had to know.
A weary sigh, heavy with the gravity of a decision taken in the depths of the soul, escaped his lips. He knew what path he had to walk: the path of difficulty. No more shortcuts, no more unholy skills. He was done with ease.
He rose, his numb muscles protesting, and began to walk along the lake. His bare feet broke the obsidian-like surface of the spectral water, water that did not wet, but instead seemed to seep in, stealing away a fraction of his warmth. Then his foot struck a submerged mass: hard, angular. He almost fell, just managing to keep his balance. Looking down, he saw a massive silhouette lying at the bottom of the shallow water. The carcass of a Balrog, its maw twisted in a silent scream, sculpted in stone and petrified rage. It was the one he had killed. It had moved. Zac understood: Uldor's breath had reanimated it, but its path had led here, into the cascade's water. It had suffered a second death, drowned by a force that was the antithesis of its nature. A commonality between them, kinship of the damned. His eyes were drawn to the demon's sword: a blade of solidified shadow and fire, magnificent and far too large for him.
Suddenly, a connection sparked, a memory flickered in the emptiness of his mind. The Balrog's fire. The mithril. Morngul. He could start again.
A new energy coursed through him, born not of power, but of purpose. He still had his bag. He set it down on the black rock and poured out its contents. The precious minerals, salvaged months earlier in a life that felt like another's, glittered, a constellation of forgotten light on a ground of despair. He had materials. He had his Shroud for fusion. He had a heat source: the dormant lava in the Balrogs' cavern. But how to cool the metal? The first time, chance had provided him a mineral imbued with the Balrog's black fire and the mystical water. How could he move the lava here, or the water there? The answer was in his empty hands: he could carry water, trip after trip.
A plan. An insane, grueling plan, but a plan. He would forge a new weapon. One not born of evil, but of his own sweat, his own will.
Yet he remained trapped in the same cruel paradox: to explore safely, he needed a weapon; to forge the weapon, he had to explore defenseless.
He sighed again, but this time, the sigh was less weary, a sigh of a man beginning a task.
The journey was a brutal baptism, a return to the fragility of his early days. The geography had been violently reshaped. Without his stealth, without unholy strength, he was no longer a predator. Fear, that cold and half-forgotten ghost, slipped its hand into his again with every dancing shadow. He entered what had once been the Spider Cavern. Now it was a sooty mausoleum. The malevolent glow was gone, replaced by a black, oily grime covering everything. The webs, once lethal works of art, were now nothing but charred strands that broke at the faintest breeze. Silence reigned. Everywhere, charred carcasses were strewn across unfamiliar ground. He searched for the remains of the skeletal spider but found nothing.
He pressed onward, burdened by an ever more oppressive solitude. He encountered no living soul, no dead. He began to suspect he was the last survivor of the depths.
In the Balrogs' cavern, the change was even starker. The giants' staircase was bare, cleared of the legions of crawlers. The black stone steps and runes were once more visible. On one side of the cavern, a huge breach gaped in the wall, an opening into unknown darkness. That must have been where Uldor's army had stormed forth.
He was alone. The idea that perhaps he would not need a weapon after all flickered through his mind, a warm, dangerous thought. He crushed it before it took root. Hope was the first poison in this place.
He laid out his minerals with care. Nearby, he found a recess in the rock, a natural bowl. He ran his hand along it, feeling the smooth, nonporous surface. It seemed watertight. Here, then, was his workshop.
The plan was fixed. His quest, defined. He would fill his bag with water, return, empty it into the basin, and repeat. Again. And again.
It would last an eternity.
One more.