The old songs called it a titan’s grave, but the songs were wrong. It was the skull of Merlin. Once, Merlin had been a dwarf, a bitter, stunted thing filled with more spite than blood. But when the dark entities beneath the island crawled into his chest, they rebuilt him! They broke his bones from the inside out, stretching his tendons, ballooning his flesh until he dragged himself through the trees as a misshapen colossus. He had collapsed here centuries ago, dying under the weight of his own unnatural mass, but his malice never left the soil. His spirit still hung over Dolrain like a fever.
Inside that cavernous dome of yellowed bone, his brain hadn't rotted. The pressure of the ancient curse and the island's terminal agony had crystallized it into jagged, glowing shards. Pure, volatile power caught in calcified glass. On the mainland, men who traded in dark secrets would pay ten gold coins for a fragment the size of a tooth. A fortune, spent at the very edge of the world.
But the dwarf’s tomb had its own defense mechanism.
A shape shifted at the mouth of the cave, lumbering through the dark. It was a distortion of flesh and shadow, an aberration whose head was split cleanly in two, its hollow eyes reflecting the absolute void creeping over the island. It snorted through unseen nostrils, its heavy limbs dragging across the roots. It didn't belong to the natural order; the old scrolls of the chierics couldn't touch it. And deep in the woods, whenever the violence reached a fever pitch, whenever two identical strokes of horrific fate fell back-to-back, the dark space inside the skull would shudder and spit out another one of these mindless, heavy-handed guardians.
To get the gold, you had to slide past the meat-grinder and step into the dark of the skull.
Mining the crystals wasn't a matter of muscle; it was a test of sheer willpower against the lingering thoughts of a dead, mad dwarf. Focus, and you could pry loose a sliver of the artifact. Lose your nerve for a single second, and a residual, post-mortem spasm would shake the giant jaws, snapping the teeth shut and leaving nothing but crushed boots and a red smear on the stone.
The desperate men who managed to scramble back into the light held the glowing stones like talismans. Some, broken and bleeding from the forest fight, would swallow the calcified shards raw. The crystal would melt under the tongue like burning acid, rewriting their biology, knitting shattered ribs and closing gashes in an instant. But if the body rejected the foreign magic, the soul itself would buckle. And for the truly wretched, the crystal took total control, cracking their skull open, splitting their face in two, and turning them into another blind, thrashing thing bound to the mouth of the cave.
The trees were groaning now, their roots snapping as the island's perimeter began to buckle into the sea. There were only a few minutes left before the final format of Dolrain. In the deep shadows of Zankoku, the last survivors kept digging into the brains of a dead dwarf, fighting for coins they would never live to spend, while Merlin's colossal shadow stretched across the dirt like the final line of an ending script.
