The makeshift workshop was ready, a symphony of opposites orchestrated in the silence of the cavern. On one side, the lake of lava pulsed with infernal heat, a sea of liquid fire painting orange reflections on the black walls. On the other, the small puddle of mystical water, carried journey after journey, rested, a shard of liquid obsidian, calm and cold. And between these two forces, Zac had carefully arranged black stones on a patch of smooth ground, sketching the shape of a long, slender sword. A primitive mold for a creation that defied all rules.
He knew what he was about to attempt was heresy. The master Dwarven or Elven smiths, with their millennia of metallurgical lore, would laugh at his inexperience and rudimentary tools. But they didn't have what he did: knowledge of primordial magic, the will of the condemned, and a despair so pure it became a creative force.
He took a deep breath, the hot air stinging his lungs, and began.
His first attempt was a pathetic failure. Using a large flat stone like a makeshift ladle, he tried to push a tongue of lava onto the ores. The metal heated, glowed, but wouldn't melt properly, the lava solidified too quickly. A dull rage, an echo of his old impatience, rumbled within. He mastered it. Rage fed the Entity. Concentration was his alone.
He started over. This time, he took a sturdier shard of rock and, with the patience of a prisoner engraving the walls of his cell, carved the exact shape of a blade into the black and vitrified soil. It was a long, exhausting task, but he managed a satisfactory result: a perfect negative of the weapon he imagined.
Then came the perilous dance. He placed a handful of mithril and other shining gems in his Shroud, using the cursed cloak as an improvised crucible. Shielded by its magic, he approached the lake of lava, holding everything over the liquid fire. The heat was a physical assault, a presence that sought to consume him. He activated his healing skill, a soothing green glow keeping burning wounds at bay. Slowly, the ores liquefied, becoming a ball of blinding silvery light.
With precision born of desperation, he transported the molten metal and poured it into the mold. The contact was violent. Acrid smoke rose, the shrill sound of searing stone fighting the intense heat.
The metal began to set. Before it could harden completely, Zac wrapped it in his Shroud again and, with a fluid motion, plunged cloak and glowing crude blade into the mystical water.
The shock was total. There was no fierce hissing, no billowing steam. Instead, a crystalline sound rose, almost a song, and the water glowed with a soft light. The mystical fusion was working. This time, what he felt was not corruption or hate, but something soothing, a harmony between the fire of creation and the purity of water. When the cloak finally stopped vibrating, Zac withdrew the blade.
His breath caught. It was a longsword, a gray-blue seeming to have trapped starlight and the depth of dusk. Perfectly straight, its surface was mirror-smooth, nothing like the crude blade he'd made. It radiated energy he'd never known before: a calm, neutral power waiting for a will to guide it. It was neither greedy nor hateful.
Zac brandished it. In the flickering glow of the lava, its pure sheen was a promise. A sign of victory.
Armed with this new purpose, he set off to explore the depths. Only one place remained: the last page of his subterranean tale, the bone cavern.
As he approached, a familiar but intensified feeling seized him: a deep, inexplicable unease. The pride of his new creation was crushed by an overwhelming sense of impotence. In the cavern, nothing was as before. Uldor's death had sounded the death knell for the necropolis. The towers of bone had collapsed into chaotic heaps. The mountains of skeletons had disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed them, leaving the ground much lower than before. There was no soul, no specter, no skeleton, nothing. The silence was total, but the pressure was stronger than ever.
Then, he looked up. Death gazed back at him.
The empty sockets of the skull were no longer empty; they burned with an icy intelligence, a malice older than hatred itself. Ancalagon the Black stared at him, not as a beast looks at prey, but as a god looks at a mistake to correct.
His new sword, so full of promise, seemed as insignificant as a shard of glass. He was a man standing before a storm the size of a continent. The necromantic veil surrounding the titanic skeleton pulsed, a heartbeat of pure agony. The legacy of Uldor. An apocalypse at rest that Zac had awakened by his mere presence.
Then, with a slowness that was the purest expression of contempt, the dragon moved.
Its tail, a mountain chain made of bone, was wrenched from the far wall. The vault wept avalanches of stone. The ground cracked. The creature wasn't attacking the cave; the cave simply disintegrated beneath its weight.
His mind just had time for one last, pathetic thought: run.
But his body already knew it was pointless.
The world became a symphony of pain and shattered bone.