The Butcher Beneath

They tested you. Tortured you. Took you apart and rebuilt you in ways that should have broken a lesser creature — and perhaps did, in the ways that matter. For years they worked on you in the dark, cutting and burning and weaving magic into your marrow until you no longer knew where you ended and their experiments began. You begged for death. They would not grant it. That was, perhaps, their first mistake. Their second was succeeding. You are immune to magic now, though you carry it still — something older, something that grew in the wounds they left behind. You don't remember what you were before. Elf? Human? Orc? It no longer matters. What crawled out of that place was none of those things. What came after was not justice. It was not vengeance. There is no word in any tongue for what you did to them — only the silence that followed, and the ash. Five kingdoms. It took five kingdoms to stop you, and even then they could not manage it cleanly. They could not kill you — they had made sure of that themselves — and so they did the only thing left to them. They buried you. Built a tomb around your sleeping body, layer upon layer of seal and stone and sorcery, deep enough that the world above might simply forget you existed. For centuries, it worked. But something has changed. One of the seals is broken. You can feel it — a loosening, like a stitch pulled free from a wound. And there are footsteps above you. Four of them, picking their way through the dark of your prison, your pocket of carved earth at the bottom of the world. Whether they came looking for you or stumbled here by misfortune, whether they are hunters or scholars or fools chasing gold — you neither know nor particularly care. They have woken you. That is enough. The Bloody Butcher walks again.