Beneath 1- I Sleep

Bingo #: I21

Prompts: purple; snowcapped

Tall they stand on the edge of your dreams, purple faces erected steadfast, topped with pure, un-melting snow Towering far above the rest of Hithaeglir, they glisten by sun or moon: the columns that uphold the tales and legends of your people.

What once lay beneath them- the greatest work yet greatest fear of the Khazâd- now crumbles under the mountains. From the outside, they are objects of beauty, the icons of your heritage, testimonies to your past renown; their violet sides and radiant argent horns are fair and grand and breathtaking.

Beneath, though, beneath lie the ruined mansions where dust accumulates upon the anvils long at rest, where the forge-fires are eternally cold and the bellows silent. Underneath the famed peaks, below the vast, dead metropolis whose carven pillars slowly erode untended to powder, below the darkened workshops and cheerless halls whose splintered floors are coated with rotting skeletons and blunt, corroded weapons- grim memoranda of the Dwarves' last stand- lie the mines. Massive and unsearchable, now utterly wasted, emptied of the true-silver bonanza once to be found there, the mines are now little more than gaping holes, chasms opening over a fathomless abyss: the abyss where I slumber.

Too long have I lain here, watching and waiting, resting and hungering, comatose, a smoldering fire awaiting only the slightest spark to be ignited into a devouring inferno. I crave stirring; I lust after battle and blood. Justly you speak of me as the Nameless Fear, for no title can proclaim my full terror.

Come, little ones, I dare you to awaken me.