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You stumble over what appears to be a stone fireplace, the spit wood that use to rest over it having long rotted away leaving a rusty kettle sitting in the remains. Some small items of clay surround it, little more than shards in the gravel. Further on there are slots carved into the rockface, but if they are tombs then they are without occupants. No, not tombs then. Buried men have no need for fireplaces and pottery. They must be beds, half-a-dozen of them plus one. So. Men must have once lived here. Not many, this desolate rock was never home to even a miserable hamlet or neolithic tribe. But a few. And perhaps, judging from the spartan comforts to hand, not for very long at a time. There is nothing to indicate whether they were dedicated hermits, or were rotated out. Like lighthouse keepers. A remote guard post, perhaps. Or jailors.
Seek. Deep. Into. The.
The fate of these men becomes clear enough as you step into a yawning cavern, your torchlight illuminating little and the thin light from same source elsewhere from outside reflection doing little more. What is apparent is that you stand at the edge of a vast pool. The water here could be impossibly deep or barely reach the shin. In the thin light you cannot tell, and you have no intention of dipping your toe in to find out.
The glint of metal on the ceiling in the flitting light from above catches your eye and causes you to look up. It is not a comforting sight. Some just show the slightest sign of tarnish on the silver. Others are so rusted they are little more than strings of dangling scrap metal. What strikes you most is not their varied conditions, but the variety of sizes. Some are as fine and delicate as a noblewoman’s necklace; others are as enormous as the cast iron links used to block off Port Bounty from seaward attacks. Small fortunes in weight alone but for their ruined condition. But the one thing these chains all have is that they are broken, hanging limp and loose from the cavern ceiling like the cut strings of a puppet master.
The wary tension that started as a prickling feeling on the back of your neck has now evolved to include sinking feeling deep in your gut. The chains would have held something suspended over the water in this cavern How large you cannot say, but something terrible was one chained here. The wards the once kept it from being set loose on the world have been broken.
And they have been broken for some time.
Seek. Deep. Into. The. <span class="mu-s">ABYSS. </span>
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