The decision was made. It had crystallized in the silence of his mind, not as a flash of genius, but as the slow, inevitable formation of a glacier. He could not destroy his jailers. He could not fight them. But he could starve them. And for that, the main pantry had to be sealed.
He left the relative safety of his grotto, his new blade in hand. He had not given it a name, but he sensed its nature. It was not greedy like Morngul. It was calm, balanced, a thing with a purity almost painful in this abyss of corruption. In the faint glow from the waterfalls, its grey-blue surface did not reflect the light; it seemed to drink it in and transmute it into a gentle silvery luminescence. This was not a weapon of destruction. It was an instrument of realignment, a surgical scalpel for the soul of a dead god.
The journey to the necropolis was a pilgrimage through a world doubly dead. The silence was absolute, a leaden shroud weighing heavier than any monster's scream. The caverns, once teeming with nightmarish life, were now cathedrals of emptiness, their echoes returning nothing but the solitary sound of his own steps. Zac no longer felt the fear of a predator lying in wait. He felt a deeper, more existential terror: the fear of being the last living thing in a universe that had forgotten the very concept of life.
At last, he reached the threshold of the ossuary. The psychic pressure was a physical force, an invisible wall pushing against his mind. But this time, he had not come as prey. He had come as a surgeon. He knew the risk. If the dragon saw him, even for a second, it would be the end.
His plan was born from this constraint. It was a mad plan, a gamble based on the arrogance of gods. A creature of such size, a consciousness of such scale, would scan the horizon, watch the entrances of its domain. It would never expect a threat coming from beneath, from its own foundations. He would not confront the dragon. He would climb it.
He approached from the flank, slipping between the debris of collapsed bone towers, using the shadows cast by the titan's own limbs to hide himself. He reached the colossus's hind leg, a structure the size of a hill, its claws as long as petrified trees. To touch the ancient bone was to touch the cold of interstellar void, no warmth, no life, only dormant necromantic energy and unfathomable antiquity.
The ascent began. It was not a climb, but an exploration of a geography of death. He scaled a mountain of fossilized tendons and bone plates as vast as public squares. He pulled himself up along the femur, then began the long, perilous crossing of the spine. Each vertebra was a monolith, their alignment forming a mountainous ridge lost in the darkness of the vault. He was an insect crawling over a deity's corpse, praying the god would not stir in its sleep. He always stayed below the line of sight, a ghost upon another ghost's back.
For hours, he climbed, his focus a solitary beacon in an ocean of suicidal vertigo. He was no longer a man. He was intention made manifest, pure will strained toward a single goal.
Finally, he reached the neck, an ivory-black causeway leading to the fortress of the skull. Here lay the greatest danger: he was now near the seat of consciousness. He crawled, pressed close to the dragon's nape, every movement calculated to be silent and unseen.
And the dragon sensed him.
The titanic head did not turn, but the light in its sockets shifted. Cold, patient intelligence was replaced with sudden curiosity, an unspoken question. The necromantic shroud around it rippled, like a sea agitated by invisible wind. Zac froze, his heart threatening to pound so hard the vibration alone would betray him. He held his breath, held his very existence. After an eternity (perhaps ten seconds), the dragon's eyes became calm again. He had not been noticed. Not yet.
Now or never.
Ignoring the terror screaming in every fiber of his being, he drew his blade. The sword's silvery glow seemed to sing in response to the dragon's dead light, a note of harmony in a symphony of dissonance. He ran. He ran across the polished bone scaffolding of the skull toward the precise spot he'd pictured, where the cranial plates met, where protection was thickest, but the creature's essence must reside.
The dragon, now sensing this time the run, this anomaly skittering on its bones, began lowering its head, its sockets angling down toward Zac.
He had only seconds. Gathering his last reserves of strength, he jumped.
In a time-suspended instant, he flew, his blade pointed downward like a wasp's stinger challenging a titan.
He struck.
There was no metallic clang, no spark. The blade slid into the ancient bone not with a crash, but with the sigh of a key finally finding a millennia-old lock. It sank to the hilt, planted like a banner of purity in the heart of corruption.
The impact was not physical. It was conceptual.
A sound rang out, though no ear could hear it. It was a note of perfect music, a major chord played at the heart of creation, a vibration of harmony propagating through the entire skeleton. The spectral light in the dragon's eyes flickered violently, candle-like in a tempest. For a fraction of a second, its malice was replaced by infinite confusion.
A psychic scream tore the cavern, a cry of utter frustration and pain that belonged not to the dragon, but to the Entity. Zac felt the connection between farmer and cattle distort, a thread unraveling. He had planted a seed of order at the center of chaos, a slow poison that, over centuries or millennia, would make the dragon indigestible, neutralizing it as a food source.
Zac was hurled away by the psychic shockwave, his mind aflame. He rolled across the skull, then plummeted into darkness.
His Shroud caught him, slowing his fall. He landed hard on a pile of broken bones, hundreds of meters below.
He awakened near the falls, body battered but will intact. He had accomplished the first step. He had sealed the pantry. Now, only the last item on the menu remained: himself.
He sat cross-legged, took up his position, and began his litany anew.
The war of attrition had begun. The dragon was neutralized. Now he had to starve the farmer. The task was the same, but its meaning had changed. No longer an attempt at redemption. It was an act of war, a war waged by a single soldier, one second at a time, in the silence of the abyss.