Power breeds resentment in the hearts of those who become its prey.
When his hour had come, he felt every stab and each thrust. His dark and corrupting lifeblood spilled onto the cold floor and seeped into the cracks. All that remained of him then, was an urn shrouded in shadow. There the remains of the Dread Lord laid. His assassinators had scraped his essence into this unsuspecting urn, sealing it as though such a vessel could bind what had been unleashed, to bury the enemy forever.
But ashes were not so easily silenced, for the body could be slain, but the spirit may yet survive.
The air around the abandoned urn grew thick and the faintest of whispers rose from within, a sound that could have easily been mistaken for the mundanity of wind. Yet, it was no wind. As the urn was tilted by an unobservable entity, the ashes did not spill as lifeless dust but moved with a purpose that defied natural order, and with a sudden and anguished lurch, poured forth like a torrent. The ashes sought the cracks in the chamber floor and the veins of the earth. It was through these crevices they slipped like shadowed water, disappearing below into the blackness. The earth itself seemed to draw them in, as though compelled by ancient hunger. Down went the ashes, sliding through narrow, suffocating passages where even light dared not tread; an unholy pilgrimage into the bowels of the world.
The ashes traveled beneath the surface, weaving between roots that writhed like veins and bones. They plunged deeper and deeper, into the dark where silence was not the absence of sound but the death of it. The air grew hot, thick with sulfur and molten stone. It was here the ashes hesitated. Then, the flames came, and they erupted in a roar of inevitability as though the fire had waited an eternity for this moment. The ashes caught the light, first faintly, then with a ferocity that bordered on agony. They writhed in the heat, their particles scattering and converging again, struggling against the consuming inferno even as they surrendered to it.
The remnants began to change. What had been ash was now becoming embers, and what was embers then became something more; something darker. Shapes formed, hollow and skeletal at first, and then fuller. A grim reconstruction, piece by agonizing piece. into the form of a grotesque, monstrous silhouette. Eyes that did not yet see; limbs that twitched but could not move for they had not yet formed fully. The earth around this morbid, macabre event trembled as if dreading what it knew would one day, in the future, escape the cracks. Compelled by the domain of that great beast of calamity, its name unholy and unspoken, the Shadow would assume a new form, and one day emerge again.
