AN: I haven't read anything on this site for several years, so possible similarities to other stories are accidental. Reviews are much appreciated!
...And the Serpent Shall Poison the Heavens
CHAPTER I
Somewhere in the very border-space of the Galactic Alliance lurks a quiet, technologically superannuated solar system. Traffic between its handful of planets is extremely slow even during fusion crystal crash-sales, much due to the fact that most of its sparse population relies on old-fashioned junkyard spaceships. This hillbillyish astronomic object has simply been known as Solar System for eons now, which says something about the imagination of its natives.
Near a red hunk of rock dotted with the humongous ruins of ancient desert irrigation colonies, a bluish-green planet slowly revolves around its tilted axis. Its nickname, The Muckball, does not quite agree with its appearance. Thanks to the efficient waste allocation load lifter technology and other environment purification gimmicks its nomenclaturally uninventive population once left behind, plus a few peaceful centuries, the planet has finally re-acquired its true nature: bright, clear-watered seas and vast, ebullient forests. Albeit fresh, they, for the most part, sadly lack the teeming life of the far-off yesteryear. In many a woods, now only the wind howls hauntedly, remembering the ages when herds of well-fed creatures grazed the fields and the hunter never settled to sleep with an empty stomach.
As mentioned before, brainpower of certain higher capacity still trailed its surface and the neighboring worlds, even if the grand majority had fled the spreading pollution already during the second intergalactic kingdom of Tau Ceti. Nevertheless, this underpopulation and general isolation from the more advanced galactic quadrants had placed a hefty toll upon the culture. Superstitions and misinformation the Galactic Alliance usually frowned upon had spread far and wide. If the casual intergalactic adventurer managed to bumble one of the practically dead languages the suspicious and introverted bushwhackers currently spoke, likely only a few would know the name of the sitting president.
This story, however, does not concern over the ignorance of these natives, but of someone else's. It is also a tale of treachery, the price of megalomania, and perhaps of...love.
Now, let us glide towards the far north, into a nocturnal landscape guarded by snowcapped mountains...
Intense coldness hung over the sparse firs and gnarled dwarf birches. It was of the kind that bit like a swarm of particularly bloodthirsty mosquitoes equipped with hypodermic needles for some spare intake, humid and able to crawl through most clothing not officially stamped as vacuum-proof. The fluttering green curtain of aurora borealis hummed gently beyond the veil of icy mist sitting right above the deep dunes of snow. Stars twinkled amid the ceaseless dance of soft light, while rime clung to every rock face and branch yet peeking out of the white crust.
Any moment now, one might have expected a jovial old man clad in bright red to sleigh-ride across this idyllic wintery vista. However, instead of the merry jingling of bells and the swish of aerodynamically adjusted droindeer* antlers, a furious bellow rang through the air.
It was not polite. It was not jolly. It would not have been suitable for the ears of any underage Santa's Little, well, Smaller Helpers, had any of those little buggers stood present.
The cacophony was emerging from beyond one of the smoothly curving fells reigning over the landscape. Yet alas, some deuced fiend had marred more than the plain ethers here. Deep vehicle tracks crisscrossed the ground and lumps of oily, black soot peppered the otherwise so pure whiteness, while blaring floodlights broke the polar night's serenity. Grimy machinery clanked away wherever equally dingy robots lumbered about. Some distance away, a staggering spaceship sprawled on a patch of soggy, bare soil, the immense heat of its jets having melted away even a good measure of permafrost.
The original source of the incessant swearing appeared to stand in the middle of the whole chaos, although one might not have expected such a lovely rime-statue capable of emitting such blasphemies in the first place. In the strong beams of the floodlights, an almost angelic halo created by the thousands of glistening ice crystals surrounded the figure.
"Scrape it off! Scrape it off! Did I not order you lack-witted sniffle-snuffling lackeys to prepare my glorious suit with anti-ice before we took off?" Emperor Zurg raved, his clenched fists thwacking at the empty air.
"We...uhhh...forgot, my Evil Emperor," a grub with a scraper in hand whimpered. Three more were furiously scratching at the metal parts of Zurg's space armor, one sitting on top of his helmet and removing tiny icicles from the horns. A fifth was scuttling towards the self-appointed piece of royalty with a whole bottle of the desired goo under one arm.
"Hrrhmhh...and yet I see you scarcely forgot to treat your own, inferior stooge-wear accordingly," Zurg muttered, cocking one exoskeletal eyebrow at the crewmembers. "This is an outrageous disgrace, this...this...GRARGH! Had I designed snow, or ice, or whatever confounded crap this is, with my crafty, evil claws, I would have turned it purple in the first place! Not this...this sparkly-warkly icky...uh...whatever! Now and forever more, I should radiate an aura of natty nefariousness, not appear like one of those wimpy modern vampires! Pthui! At least when I designed ol' Nossy, I kept it in character!"
After a while of furious scraping and spraying of anti-ice, Zurg swiped the last chips of frost off his cloak, and checked the status of his horns from a tiny pocket mirror. All appeared evilly swell again.
"Now...where was I? Ahh, indeed, the main target of this undertaking, which seems rapidly turning seedier than...a...well, a seedcake, although that comparison scraps the meaning entirely...hrmhhh... Anyhow..." He started striding over to a cluster of grubs that previously had burrowed a large hole into the mountainside. Now, they huddled before something that, despite their evident curiosity, did not look like much more than a vertical expanse of gray rock from his current position.
Zurg rubbed his hands together, making an ear-rending grating sound, and halted sharply behind the crewmembers. His tall, well-wrought frame cast a long, ominous shadow over them. Slightly trembling and squeaking, the grubs turned to face the vile grin of their master's helmet.
Ahh, this was more like it, his slightly mollified brain cells purred. So much dramatic effect could be achieved merely by placing the light sources correctly! Hmmh...perhaps he ought to employ the same tactics on Planet Z, if they verily proved so puissant. New gags were needed every now and then to astound this freak show of an imperial court, and to shoo away unwanted chumminess.
Gah, hopefully they would soon forget that whole snow angel burlesque...
He bent down to glare at the grubs, arms akimbo. "Well, well, are we getting any warmer here? Not that the actual temperature should vary, but figuratively speaking. Hmmm? Or shall I perchance be told again that hundreds and hundreds of hours of laboring shall fall down to some nitwitted eulogy reading 'Egil Longwossname drew up these runes to remember his dear auntie Hróðgærðagurgle, who died of blue tongue moss'? HUH?"
"Errr...w-we th-think this time...er..." one of the beetle-like creatures piped up.
"I am waiting; do not disappoint me this time," Zurg sighed, tapping one foot against the ground. Instead of the mighty, booming clang of his throne room's metallic floor, the latter went glurrpf blorrghff, which quite ruined the effect.
"Er...eh...we think we've found the right spot. You might wanna take a look at this..."
The brain pod presently inspecting the structure dug out from behind the masses of loose earth and debris cut in, "Well, I do mean, when does one meet a dry stone construction of the NE7-class, 598th subclass ferric period type [Qæns-Vendel] right in the middle of the northernmost Baltiska Förbundet, eh? I say! Towards the south, now..."
"I am not here to attend a geography lesson!" Zurg snapped. "Besides, I did behold many a blasted vastness of that so-called south, when you had to summon me here after every damned false alarm! Trees and lakes and trees and lakes and trees and lakes and a smattering of dreadfully clad yokels capable of nothing but scowling and repeating that ugly gargle of a sentence...uh...whatever heinous heathen lingo it was."
"Përqëlén hür-rï? Eh, ah, I deem that would be some primitive deity of theirs, whom they, upon seeing your majestic form, began to call for their aid in the utmost, blood-churning fear!" the brain pod tried, although it sounded hardly convincing.
"Hmmh..." Zurg tapped the grille of his helmet with a clawed finger, looking thoughtful, "and I recall you telling me the same thing about those hicks on the other side of the sea muttering that yevlaahndeh finyeh, whenever we endeavored to interrogate one... I wonder..."
The hapless minion quickly changed topic, and gesticulated towards the revelation. "Ah-eh... If I might attract the attention of Your Nefariousness with this-"
"I am warning you, blubbering bootlicker, if I am forced to acquaint myself with another Sven- or Ketill-infested carving of some clodpated churl not even cognizant of the charisma of the character Z-"
"Actually, my liege, they had devised a letter for this splendid sibilant-"
Zurg folded his arms across his massive chest, and subtly changed position, so that his shadow fell this time directly upon the brain pod. The lenses of his helmet burned bright red. All present six grubs winced horribly, and attempted to hide behind one another at the same time, inadvertently forming precisely one-fourteenth of the stepdance pattern used in the sixty-seventh strophe of the traditional Slugavian double-wedding march.
"WHAT have I told unto you about interrupting the soon-to-be grand emperor of the whole universe? HMMM? What have I told unto you pipsqueaks about those blasted, pointless infodumps you geekbrains keep hurling at me? So, fine, dandy, capital, the Egilwhatsits were slightly more civilized than one might have expected. Yet, what of the tidings I have been anticipating for the past three years? HUH? Alright, I admit that the last trip to this sordid savage-land of swamps and skeeters did not exhibit yet another example of a perfect disaster, as it seemingly directed us back to the correct trail. Nevertheless, this better be the very end of the correct trail, or I will personally select you incompetent numbskulls as the first test targets of the omni-death ray, when it finally shall gloriously arise forth from the planning board!"
Wheels squeaking, the trembling brain pod turned one hundred and eighty degrees on the spot, and zoomed to shed more light on the enterprise, both literally and figuratively.
Soon, at the servant's summons, a hornet duo pushed closer one of the unwieldy floodlights, directing the beam at the excavation. Indeed, one would not have expected to meet such a construction in the middle of a complete wilderness, not to mention inside a mountain. Even to Evil Emperor Zurg, used to ridiculous space opera clichés like heroes infiltrating his fortress via the air conditioning system, this seemed like something out of a pulp fiction of the lamest kind.
"This better be the real thing and not some lack-wit's idea of a practical joke..." the emperor hummed under his breath, glaring at the wall of neatly stacked, even-sized stones in front of him. No lichen grew on them, so the assembly had lain hidden perhaps from the very start. Several meters high and broad, the wall sealed off a perfectly square opening cut into the side of the fell. Right in the middle, held firmly in place by smaller rocks, sat a meticulously decorated rectangular slab. Upon it, amid intricate knots, silhouetted figures of humanoid warriors, and the typically associated monsters, snaked a string of dense writing. Well, at least to Zurg, it looked like the same brand of gobbledygook as met hitherto.
Phth, perhaps he ought to have snatched the harnesses of this operation fully into his own hands, and actually studied the blasted gibberish. Now, he had to rely on some bloody bugs and canned internal organs to understand even the teensiest bit of progress. However, languages had never been his bravado. Evil scheming and bidding on rare Troll Dolls on Z-Bay, now...those posed no problems. But these pesky pests called grammar and spelling...bah. On the other hand, nerds willing to devote their pathetic lives to some primeval thingamajig were always freely available. A person just had to seek for the right one, catch them, dissect them, slam the working brain into a jar, and ka-blam. Some surrendered their minds willingly, some did not. With the latter kind, a few years of floating in an immovable tank and counting dust particles commonly did the trick.
He tapped at the slab with one finger. It made a pleasantly deep, there-might-be-a-cave-behind-ish sound. The finger sensors of his exosuit signaled that this baby had been formed of natural materials, not of some cheap plastomache or, in the worst case, projected light.
"Well, it does feel, look, and whatever it is that the rest of you can do with your senses, accurate," Zurg mused. "Now, decipher it, and we shall discover whether I must find permanent replacements for a certain part of my staff or not."
Stuttering, the brain pod began to read the inscription out loud, in a form suitable for His Imperial Monoglotness. Accordingly, the emperor's grin widened along every new word.
About one third through the winding inscription, the minion suddenly halted.
"What? WHAAT? Whaddusitsay, whaddusitsay, wannawannawannaknow!" Zurg hopped from one foot to another with excitement.
"Er..."
"Whaaaat? This must be the real deal; what does it say? Oooh, I'm getting chills; this is so iniquitously titillating! Soon the whole galaxy, nay, the whole universe shall dance on the palm of my hand, and that pestilential Lightyear shall be but a damp squish mark on the sole of my boot! Uahhaahahaahaaah! Rwahahahah hohoho hoh huaah hiih! Tell me the rest of it, now! Prettyplease?"
The grubs observing their master's sudden congaing in the snow shrugged at one another. No matter how many years of steady in-house employment, one just never got used to Emperor Zurg's insane mood swings.
The brain pod coughed. "Well, it does confirm that within lies either the Second or the Third, in addition to devoting a whole verse to the one we seek. But...the rest. I am...I am afraid I do not recognize the language. It utilizes the same alphabet, alright, but otherwise appears to lack even the remotest of similarities, with, well, anything."
Fortunately, Zurg let this one pass, thanks to his newfound state of mind that soared somewhere far above the definition of jubilant.
"Bah, whatever. Regarding the usual content of these stones, it might just as well be someone's laundry list that got added in later." Eyes shining with glee, Zurg rubbed his hands together, making a grub or two fish out earplugs from their back pockets. "Ooh! Crack it open, now! Ahahaah, this is like one of Nana Zurg's Easter eggs: full of sinfully delicious chocolaty goodness, and it shall all be mine! MINE! UAHHAHAHAHAAH HUAAH HAAH!"
Behind the emperor, who had just dug out a little horned party hat from the mysterious recesses of his robe and set it to teeter atop his helmet, an elderly grub raised a cautious hand.
"Uh...Your Wickedness, if...if I may be so bold as to...a-ask something?"
"Hmmh, I did recently say something about interrupting me when I'm gloating, but I shall let it slide this time. Now, what is it?"
"Ah-um...is it wise that we're, erm, poking our noses into something of this ilk? Figuratively speaking, obviously, seeing as none of us actually sports a nose, saving of course My Evil Emperor. It's just that...this feels like meddling with the occult, and nothing good ever comes out of that."
"Huh? And wherefore should anything good come out of my ventures? I'm a bad dude and meddle with bad things! Why, I'm practically kvlt myself! Indeed, I am so br00tal and trve, that instead of the common black tosh, I only listen to purple metal! Now that's what one might call meddling with the kvlt!"
"Eh...naturally, Your Br00talmost Kvltness, but...do we actually possess any true knowledge of how to handle, erm-"
"Handle schmandle. Now smash that blasted wall open, before I return to my ol' cranky self," Zurg snorted, dismissing the worried servant. "Or, better do it myself, as, once again, I am surrounded by naught but lily-livered milksops! Bah, why does the employment agency for evil overlords insist on sending me these sissies even after years and years of complaining? Hrrmh, thought they might have finally learned."
With an impressive swing of his cloak, Zurg took a step back, and raised his right arm towards the rippling curtain of the aurora. In a flash, the partially pliant nanotube tech of his suit encased half of the limb inside a bulky, four-cannoned blaster. He was just about to fire a hefty load of plasma at the obstacle, when the brain pod stopped him.
"Wait! Don't do it! That might cause trouble to anything...organic residing within, or perhaps beyond!"
"Hmm. You may have a point. The...erm...plant? You think it might affect...?"
"Well, nobody can tell where, or even when, the next point of continuity might exist. Perhaps my liege might spare the plasma blaster for something slightly more...smashing, pardoning my pun?"
A moment later, Zurg was greedily following at the steadily widening hole in the wall, as individual stones were neatly laser-cut out and carried away. At one point, he found himself unsuccessfully trying to gnaw on his gauntleted fingers through the grille of his helmet, which merely resulted in one of those hideous scratching noises the poor ears of the grubs scarcely tolerated.
One more stone, two more stones, and then I can jump in, he chanted in his mind. One more stone, two more, three, and then the first step on the escalator leading to the ultimate domination over everything has been conquered... One more...
When the opening, started from the upper right corner to prevent any collapses, reached down to a level about a meter above his head, Zurg could resist the temptation no longer. He jumped up like a spring in caffeine high, caught a hold of the edge, and with a single fluid movement hoisted himself up and over, into the yawning dark chasm beyond. Briefly, reddish light replaced the prior gloom.
"One heck of an acrobat for his age, eh?" a grub mused.
"Well, they do say laughter is the best medicine to a number of ailments, probably even seniority. And he does laugh a lot, I grant you that," another responded.
"Come on, you loiterers!" Zurg snapped from behind the wall. "I do not stomach such lallygagging when I am laboring away in... Wait a twinkl...ooh, this is-"
"Yikes, prolly some trouble ahead! Get the ladders up, now, hurry, hurry, hurry!" the nearest grubs shouted almost in unison. More crewmembers and mini-hornets spilled out from behind various pieces of machinery, guns at the ready. Nonetheless, when the scattering of insectoids poked their heads past the hole's lowest rim, they found the overmaster of all things purple gawking awestruck at a rather peculiar view.
A huge, cave-like chamber wrought into the bare stone of the fell opened before them. Sections of the walls had been inlaid with white quartz, now awash with a bloody tinge from Zurg's flashlight. A minimalist's nightmare, some bygone workaholic equipped with a particularly sharp chisel had sculpted and engraved every inch of rock with mind-boggling detail. The heads of many snarling beasts glowered down at the company from the heights. Along the walls, warriors fought their eternally frozen battles, seafarers faced the perils of the deep over and over again, strange creatures attacked one another, women raised their drinking vessels to hail a battler riding a spidery-legged steed, among myriads of other epic spectacles.
Above everything, an enormous ouroboros encircled the whole pageantry, its head dipping down to touch the floor near Zurg. The single yellow eye, shaped of some glassy, honey-colored material, seemed to scowl at this impetuous group of intruders. Everything bathed in a chthonic silence. For once, even Evil Emperor Zurg had been struck dumb by something other than purple and z-lettered.
The ceiling represented the most curious aspect of the whole complex. It looked like one gargantuan tree root, twisting and curving some twenty meters above them. Occasionally, it would branch and touch the floor in a pillar-like manner, yet always folding back into itself, even if that meant passing through the gaping maw of a stone beast or the puffy pants of a sculpted warrior. Even the emperor's sharp wits could not discern where the root began or ceased to exist. It merely was, an anomaly in space-time.
"This...this...this, oh, this sinister splendor!" he finally managed, tears glimmering in the corners of his eyes. "Oh, I must take fashion tips! Ah, this organic touch is simply marvelous in contrast with the sharp edges; we must get something akin to this into Dreadnaught's throne room immediately! Inject a bottle or two of the Essence of Purple into it, and that should do away with the yucky poo-color."
"Uh...I don't think we should remove...er...well, this-" someone blurted.
"Not this very one, you dolt! I daresay I do apprehend the nature of this, and it shan't and probably can't be merely sawed off in a jiffy. Nah, pilfer something from Rhizome, and toss it into the mutation chamber. We'll figure out something peachy with the lads and lasses down in the Cryptobotany Department. Now, however..."
Slowly, the emperor set out to explore the uncanny hall. He did not pay too much attention to the lavish decorations any more, having now a completely different goal in mind. Battle scenes...yesyes, he had faced a fair few of those during the past decennia. Nothing novel or spiffy there, and his weapons certainly would overcome those lamentable ferrous sticks a zurgazillion times.
Besides, abandoned temples and whatsits of this caliber frequently harbored the typical array of booby traps: spiked pits, poisonous darts, rolling boulders, and a wad of other insipid implementations. Craters, how could it possibly come to pass that culture after culture-even cave-aliens separated by tens of parsecs and devoid of spacecraft tech-always repeated the same, predictable set of contrivances? Gah, what an interstellar Gordian knot indeed.
He progressed more cautiously now, tapping the walls and floor tiles as he did so. For some unconceivable reason, the T-ray scanner of his lenses refused to function properly, and any possible sinister mechanisms embedded into the walls remained a mystery. Odd, indeed. He would not have expected such primitive lowbrows capable of comprehending radio frequency blocking. Unless this phenomenon had something to do with...well.
He let his gaze sweep crosswise the chamber, and along the tangled loops of root-ceiling continuing into the far distance. The grubs following at his wake remained silent and fearful. Something truly was amiss here, in an eldritch kind of fashion. Take those blasted black shadows dancing across the further reaches, now... Bloody jumping blazars on a stick, the doorway was practically stuffed with high-intensity floodlights, which should have rendered that kind of darkness impossible!
He had a nasty feeling that the final destination of this part of the quest skulked within that accursed wannabe special effect. Anyway, it was getting on his nerves. How dared it simmer with such vain bravado before his wicked might? No other who or what or even when-and the very least of all some cloud of occult-y wossname-was permitted to frighten his dear ol' grubsies; that was a privilege reserved only for him!
"I shall NOT digest any more of this damned abracadabra and oogabooga!" he snorted, clenched his fists, and activated his rocket boots. At least that way, not a single, sneakily rotating flagstone was going to surprise him. "Come on, I deem our terminus lies ahead, beyond yon, uh, root-loopies."
He pointed at two underhanging sections of root that apparently marked a boundary of some kin. The wavering, raggedy shadows seemed clumping together just behind them, forming that annoying bit of impenetrable gloom.
"Hmm...a nebula of some exotic matter could always come into question..." he mused, air-parading onwards. Nevertheless, that hardly explained why the hall felt much longer than what his plain sight registered. The distance to the root duo should have been a mere twenty to thirty meters, not two-three hundred. Furthermore, he ought to have reached the...infernal obscuration many times by now.
That blasted botanical bizarrity must have served as the major culprit. Perhaps it truly perverted reality somehow, possibly opening wormholes into alternate realities, and...well. Had he not pried one such warp open himself, and discovered the horrendous fate of his failed 'twin', an emperor demoted to a pathetic burger-flipper? Craters. And yet...
Above, the ouroboros slithered frozenly, and the beast heads snarled mutely at the trespassers, their green and amber-hued eyes seemingly burning with a fire of their own.
Then, suddenly, Zurg noticed that he had flown past the pair of curious upside-down columns. With that, everything turned dark.
Schnick, flick. Snap, snip.
Flick flick flick zip.
Emperor Zurg swore under his breath. Why did NOTHING WORK? Every switch only pivoted back and forth, dead as an incinerated slug. Moreover, he did not possess the faintest inkling of his whereabouts, or whether he even might have lost his consciousness for a while. What was this bloody blackout bubble, and why did only Nobody respond to his calls? Not a single mechanical part of his exosuit bothered to jump alive, not even the handy flashlight extension.
Triple craters.
Fortuitously, he was not some dolt barely graduated from the preschool for teensy weensy evil overlordlings, and always carried a few backup plans in his pockets.
The internal cooling of his marvelous evil armor had obviously also busted. Dancing damocloids, his brains might start soon melting inside this sweat-inducing bucket. Just as well, the lenses were less active than a fossilized sloth inside a lump of dried concrete, and thus utterly useless.
He unscrewed the helmet from its vacuum seal and grumpily tossed it over his shoulder. It went clang against what sounded like the familiar fell-rock. Hmm, perhaps he still lingered somewhere inside the mountain, even if...well. The air was still cool and humid, but nowhere near the bitter midwinter frost that had soiled his entree back...uh...over there somewhere. Wherever somewhere was, that is.
He brushed damp hair out of his eyes and began rummaging around in the folds of his robe. Even if concepts like dark and the blackness of an endless abyss appeared all badass and inspiring in theory, one, alas, had to rely on light to get some sense into this world.
Now, marching practically back into the Stone Age made his techno-savvy mind weep. Yet, were not these, uh, stereotypical mystic caverns supposed to contain luminous mushrooms or something? Why had he been so cruelly denied of the privilege of mushrooms? Grah, he wanted his shrooms, and NOW!
None cropped up out of the darkness, no matter how hard Zurg squinted. Eventually, he created his own light with one of those ancient fossil fuel igniters.
Blinking in the pool of light, he goggled open-mouthed at the surroundings. He still stood inside a cave-like chamber, alright, but perhaps indeed in a different reality. Raggedy white mist-not the icy kind of the snow plains but clammy and unpleasant-hung in the air. The giant root yet knotting and spiraling above him pulsated slightly, as if pumping sap, or...whatever it was that plants did on their leisure. To his right, a gray, unadorned wall loomed beyond the shrouds of white. To his left, now...
Abruptly, a grin of harebrained enthusiasm spread on his face. Hah! Jim-crackin'-dandy, there it was! That construction could possibly play no other role, unless it purposefully attempted to decoy any explorers.
Zurg sighed. Well, since the pods and the confounded creepy-crawlers had more or less temporarily deserted him, there was only one way to find things out.
He started walking over to the low, circular structure of austere stone stagnating upon an ever-so-poky hill, all too aware of the dreadful racket his boots made against the flagstoned floor. Well, the insides of bedrock belonged to one of the quietest places the universe could hide in its mists, so perchance he ought not to be too worried about the effect.
Or, should he?
Oddly, he found himself slicking back his messy hair and coning his beard with his fingers. What if the...uh...it was not there? How was one supposed to awaken...uh...something like that anyhow? Sing a song? Yodel? Cha-cha-cha around the well? Burn a sacrificial cow and offer its heart to the...thingy? Those old scrolls had never prepared him for this. Perhaps, just perhaps, he might have advanced too rashly...
What if it found evil emperors a tasty dish?
Besides, he had already indulged in all that swearwordy noisemaking back there, and nothing had answered. What if it comprehended merely that disgusting heathen lingo that occasionally sounded like a pigeon trying to coo backwards? Also...eh, no. His doubts concerning the truth behind these ancient legends had utterly melted, no matter how many suspicions had spun around his skull only a few hours back. That half-rotten manuscript had illustrated most details correctly, not to mention all these recent, eerie experiences that kept merely adding grains of truth to the growing heap of testimony...
Ah well, he had stepped into the figurative dragon's mouth now. The knee-high ring of the gaping well jutted out of the floor mere inches away from him. Absently, Zurg fingered his beard. Should there not be a...a bucket and a winch or something lying about? Or, had they even invented such advanced machinery back then?
There and then, he decided to tear the annoying suspense into shreds. He rapped the nearest stone hard with his knuckles, booming, "Hello? Anyone down there? I, Zurgamaxantas of planet Xrghthung-simply known as 'Z' among friends, family, and foes-order you to awaken!"
The chamber's many-faceted walls multiplied Emperor Zurg's call, making snatches of individual words bounce around and mingle with one another. Finally, even the last reverberation died away, and the former sepulchral serenity ensconced the knoll of the well again.
He peered into the darkness of the hole. More swirling shadows greeted him instead of a reflection, and no bottom could be discerned form this distance. Frowning, he was just about to toss in some rocks, when a great jolt made his legs buckle. After a moment, the ground trembled again, and a dense cloud of dust blew out of the well.
Coughing and wheezing, Emperor Zurg knelt by the ring of stone, holding onto the edge. The dreadful rumbling, grinding noise of shifting stones now issuing from every direction conceivable made both his ears and teeth ache. Even the very bones it reached, chilling the blood and tensing every nerve on its unstoppable journey.
Zurg briefly wondered whether he had unwittingly risen onto the arena of his last judgment. All those poor ickly grupsy-wupsies that would now become bereft of his guiding hand, shedding salty tears of lamentation at their master's passing in the eternal night of Planet Z...
One more mountain-quake shook the hall of the well beneath the root. The raspy, thunderous subterranean base of a voice that finally answered his summons felt ghastlier than all the unearthly experiences of today stitched together.
"Hvat er þat manna er í mínum sal, verpumk orði á?"
Footnotes:
*Droid reindeer. Real reindeers were slaughtered beyond extinction during the War of False and Anti-Santas**, and unfortunately, their DNA had not been preserved either.
**This war flared up when the, allegedly, real Santa got heavily fed up with all the imposters and particularly the novel, tradition-opposing movement of Anti-Santas: blue-clad women who insisted on stealing the previous year's Christmas presents of wee li'l innocent tots on the following Midsummer's Eve. Finally, the so-called true Santa won the bloody feud with the aid of craftily placed mistletoes that brought his adversaries together and calmed them down in a fairly mushy manner. It is said, that a couple of centuries later Santa forsook his ancient home and moved to North Polaris, where he has kept headquarters ever since.