collapsing star

Today the adventurers I had been accompanying reached the lair of the beast they had been tracking; a glacial chasm cut deep into the earth in the frigid northlands. The area was frigid and treacherous, the holy warrior who had pledged to protect me having to save me from slipping down the valley wall thrice in the hour it took us to descend.

The stone of the chasm walls was heavily warped, surely a testament to the creature's evil power bending the area to its will, and the ice-encrusted bones of some massive and ancient beast must have served as where it slept, taking up much of the floor of the chasm. The group decided to attack the beast as it slept, and I was, as stipulated by my benefactor, set somewhere out of the way of danger to observe. I would have been rather useless in a fight, anyway.

The fight was terrible and bloody, the monster bellowing in some ancient tongue I had never heard as they fought. It was the holy warrior that landed the final blow, sinking the dark blade her carried into the monster's neck.

What followed was chaos.

The creature's death must have triggered something, as there was an awful sucking noise, followed by a burst of blinding light and searing heat, which left me blinded for a time, despite having been able to throw up a defensive barrier just in time to save my life. One my vision returned to me, I set out to survey the aftermath.

The blast had scoured the chasm completely, the ice melted by the sheer heat and already refrozen in the sucking cold that followed, forming jagged spikes of ice that reflected the epicentre of the detonation. The only intact places were the circle that my barrier had covered, and a smaller one that held the prone but alive form of the holy warrior, no doubt sheltered by his god. His friends were not as lucky; we never found more than scraps of them.

We left the chasm together in silence, and the icefield beyond was as devastated as within had been, ice spikes from the blast extending out what must have been a mile in every direction. The holy warrior abandoned his sword on the way back to town, and I had never seen a man so broken before in my life.

I write this now from the inn in the town, and I vow to never come back to the northern wastes, for fear that more beasts like that dwell under the ice.