The Monster slept as it had for many a century. Still digesting the great feast it had had many hundreds of years ago on the medusae of Meduramanth. It didn’t sleep as men slept though, for it was still aware. It still watched, and it still moved.

It watched as humans moved into the castle it had cleared out, a castle long thought impregnable. It didn’t stir for this though as it cared little for humans and they didn’t find the entrance to it’s cave so they cared less for it. So through the humans it slept.

Then came the Wayfinder, a human, but a human who knew the Ways. The Wayfinder walked right by it, mapping out the cave and its entrances, drawing out where and how to get to the Monster. The Monster slept in its hole and watched this with curiosity, humans had never entered the Ways before. The Wayfinder moved off, mapping other caves and other paths. It was futile of course, the Ways could not be mapped for they did not remain fixed forever. Old paths would close and new paths would open up. Although humans did not live long enough to see that happen so perhaps to the Wayfinder the maps were useful. The Wayfinder didn’t bother the monster though so through the Wayfinder it slept.

Then the Wayfinder brought down more humans. The Guild of Messengers, a guild that sprang up right before the monster’s slumbering eyes. These messengers sold their services only to those who paid exorbitant prices and their very existence was a secret kept from most people for they feared what would happen to their business were the Ways to be discovered. Were other people to start learning of the instantaneous travel they could use. So no more people came through the cave in front of the monster save for the messengers. But there were a lot of messengers. They would walk in groups, chatting and laughing and carrying huge sacks of letters and notes, working for the most elite of human society. The monster was starting to dislike human society. It much preferred the age after that of gods and demons, when the world was still raw from great wars of magic and power and fortresses like Meduramanth were the only points of light and civilisation in the darkness. Now the world was noisy and full of bustling, laughing humans. So it did not sleep through the messengers. But it didn’t simply eat them all either, like it had the medusae. For among the messengers was a sorceress, the Arbiter they called her. She was young and still mastering her powers but the monster had no weapon with which to kill her. So it went to speak with its friends.

One night when the Ways were quiet and the messengers had delivered all their messages for the day the monster awoke. It took a while to open its many eyes and rouse its dreary brain for it had been asleep for a long time. But eventually, it awoke. And then it left its hole, climbing and crawling and sliding along through the cave, down the cave far too steep for humans and into the yawning caverns and labyrinthine tunnels that made up the Ways. There were paths in here that no messenger had ever trod for they were hidden from humans, too small, or too steep, or too high for them, but not for the monster.

It slid its way through the dark paths, its many eyes blinking and watching the caves for any who might sneak up on it. Nothing did. The Ways had grown quiet of their many dangers over the years, it seemed the humans had claimed them for their own. The monster would have to do something about that.

It found the High Chamber, the huge cave at the centre of the ways that had been carved out by Yorithen. Unlike the rest of the Ways it was no longer a natural cave, Yorithen had carved out shapes and structures in the walls, patterns and frescoes and gargoyles. The monster hated it.

At the ceiling of the Chamber stood the monolith. On the surface it was merely in a circle of stones but underground Yorithen had built a whole church around it. On the ground below were the faceless acolytes, so few of them left now after humans had destroyed them to clear the Ways, thinking them merely statues rather than the slow moving creatures they were. Every Stonetide fewer and fewer returned to the Chamber. The monster did not care, the faceless acolytes were made of stone and therefore not edible, and therefore not interesting. Yorithen though, she was interesting.

She hung on the ceiling beneath the monolith, her many tendrils and tails sifting through the ceiling feasting on all the worms and roaches and maggots that burrowed through the ground, inexorably drawn toward the monolith as it slowly absorbed all the dirt that touched it. Yorithen had built the Chamber to hold it up and she was constantly chipping at it and shoring pieces of it up as the earth around it was drawn to the monolith. It never looked any different though, Yorithen was good at what she did.

As the monster drew nearer she turned her faceless head to look at it and hissed through her tendrils. “What brings you here oh Monster of Meduramanth?”

“There are humans in my cave, far too many humans. With the monsters gone from the world now it is thick with humanity and they are infesting the Ways.”

Yorithen thought for a while, her tendrils twisting and engorging as they sucked up nutrients. “The medusae would have guarded their secrets had someone not eaten them all. Perhaps it is best that that someone suffers from their inevitable replacement.”

The monster hissed. “The humans will find your temple too, they are already destroying your acolytes.”

“I care little for the acolytes, stupid disgusting inedible things they are!”

“What about you? The humans will surely slay you to get to the power of the monolith.”

“They can try. I am far more powerful than-”

“They have a sorceress.”

Yorithen stopped speaking and it seemed as though her tendrils stopped twisting about quite so much.

“She is young yet but she is growing in power. If you can give me a weapon to kill her I will make sure you need never worry about these humans again.”

Yorithen thought some more, swaying slowly beneath the monolith. “Perhaps there is something I can give you. A gift, from the monolith to you, in exchange for the death of the sorceress and all the humans in the Ways.”

The monster grinned with its many many teeth. It had not expected Yorithen to give it a weapon. She didn’t trust anyone with her weapons, it most of all. She gave it a chain, the acolytes brought forward with a slowness the monster was willing to wait for, it wasn’t like the humans with their pitifully short lives and need to rush everywhere. A chain wasn’t much of a weapon but the monster knew it was all it was getting so it took it anyway.

The chain was made of stone, stone as smooth and cold as marble and at one end there was a hook of wicked weight and sharpness, sharper even than the monster’s claws. That hook could kill a sorceress.

The monster slid away, days having passed in their conversation and more having passed while the acolytes fetched the chain. Days in which the humans had made so many trips and journeys through the Ways as was their custom. Days in which the sorceress had grown and mastered her powers ever more. The monster planned to ensure there were very few of those days left.

As it moved back and forth through the Ways, returning to its cave it remembered the last time it had been so active. The attack on Meduramanth where it had eaten all the medusae and then gone through to their original home in the Wilderness and eaten the rest. They hadn’t had a sorceress but they’d had their own magics. The monster still felt the wound from the inkdrop blade before it had eaten the medusae that had carried it. It should have kept the blade rather than leaving it for whatever came along next. It’s claws weren’t very good at holding swords but a sword would have been better than a chain. It slid along dragging the chain behind it. It had wrapped it around its claws many times so as to not drop it and it could easily manipulate the hook at the end this way. The sorceress might be powerful but in the end she still had the body of a human, the body of prey.

The monster climbed up the steep cave and returned to its hole, careful to avoid any humans on the way, it unwrapped the chain then settled down to wait. It did not have to wait long.

At this time the Guild of Messengers numbered almost fifty members and each one was kept busy delivering messages all day for the elite of the Hallowed Realm and beyond. So they travelled regularly on the paths they knew. A group of five of them were walking past the path between Meduramanth and the Wilderness when the monster struck. The Arbiter was not among them so it did not use the chain, and it did not need the chain. The monster was patient, extremely patient, for time for it was different than time for humans, but it was also incredibly fast. Within seconds all of the humans were dead and eaten and the messages lay on the ground, undelivered.

The monster knew that more humans were unlikely to come the same way until the next day so it set off to track down more. One by one the groups fell and eventually the monster returned to its lair to wait for the next group the next day. To it, a wait like that was over in a blink of its many eyes.

The next group had the Arbiter though, she’d been sent out with all the remaining messengers to find out what had happened to all the groups from yesterday. This group was twenty strong and she’d brought monsters of her own with her but they were pitiful monsters. Nothing like the monster in the cave.

It fell upon the first monster from its lair and tore out its throat, throwing the human riding it off to break upon the walls of the cave. Then it leapt up as more monsters lunged at it, its claws meeting their bodies as they swatted at it, their weak talons doing little against its hide. The humans shouted at each other and ran about and the last two monsters moved in. The monster raised itself from the dead corpses of its two most recent foes and went to move forward. But the chain caught, the chain that had been wrapped around its claws, ready to kill the sorceress. It caught in the dead bodies of the monsters and dragged the great monster down. It fell awkwardly on top of them and felt weapons pierce into its skin, pain, something it had not felt in a long time.

It yanked the chain free and roared a terrible roar that shook the very cave around them. Then it forced itself up, the chain tearing blood and organs out of the corpses and spraying them everywhere as the monster brought its claws down on these new threats. It tore through one monster, then the other, then it fell upon the screaming, running humans. It killed one, two, three of them as they ran around beneath it, they were fast but it was a predator, an apex predator, it was faster.

It spun toward the remaining humans and saw the Arbiter facing it, clearly afraid. She said something in a pathetic human language, something that should have meant nothing to the monster but it didn’t. It meant ‘stop’. So it stopped.

Then it shook itself free of the enchantment and lunged forward anyway, the humans fell before it and the sorceress fled. It lunged for her, its claws tearing into her body and her acidic blood spraying all over its skin, biting, burning, so much pain. But the pain was almost over, the sorceress was almost dead. Tearing her body between its claws it went to move the hook toward her then realised it was gone. It looked around in a panic and saw the chain had gotten caught in the bodies of the monsters. The hook was buried somewhere in there, the chain still wrapped around the monster’s arms. The remaining humans were pushing the whole pile of bodies toward the steep cave that led away to the High Chamber. The monster threw away the sorceress’s torn up body and dashed toward the humans but it was too late. All the corpses and the chain with them plunged over the edge and rolled down into the darkness. The monster was fast, it tore up almost all the humans as it had rushed toward them, but it was not fast enough to stop the bodies from plunging over the edge.

The monsters the sorceress had made might have been pathetic compared to it but combined they were heavy. Too heavy. The chain went taught and the monster toppled over into the cave, clawing and scrabbling on the way down. It crashed into the bodies at the bottom and felt some of its bones break beneath it. It twisted and writhed in pain, desperate to get that chain free, to get that hook and get back to the top where it could rip apart that sorceress.

The cave started to rumble. It stopped writhing, had crashing to the ground dislodged something? Was writhing going to set the cave crashing down around it? It looked up with many eyes and saw the sorceress, or what was left of her, standing atop the cliff with her hands outstretched, sending her sorcery into the walls of the cave, controlling the elements.

The monster writhed harder, more desperately but every movement just seemed to wrap the chain around it tighter. Rocks and pebbles and dust began to trickle down around it as the cave shook. The monster let out a howl of rage and fear and pain and then the cave fell on top of it. Burying it in agony.

Atop the cliff the Arbiter and Erissa, the last Messenger fled the crumbling cave. The Arbiter cried, she had been unable to stop the monster, all her sorcery had been for nothing when it had come to protecting her friends. She vowed to train, to make her voice strong enough to command anyone to do anything. She started by telling Erissa to run faster. Erissa ran faster.

Down in the cave the monster lay wounded, its body ruined and crushed. But the monster didn’t die, it was far too strong for that. Instead it went back to sleep, its hibernating slumber where it watched the world around it. It watched the humans stop coming through the Ways in groups, now only one came through at a time, except when that one was training up their child. It watched more humans happen upon the Ways from the Wilderness side and use them to capture Meduramanth, setting up a supply chain from opposite ends of the world just like the medusae had done. It watched the woman walk through, right by its old lair carrying that hated sword that had taken its name. But things were different this time, this time while watching and sleeping the monster had someone to talk to.

“I can help you,” spoke the chain. “I can get you out but you will have to do something for me.”

The monster agreed, there was nothing else it could do. The earth rumbled and shook and moved and slid away and the monster was free. It limped back to its cave but the Ways were changed. Old paths had been closed off and new ones had opened. Its lair was gone so it slunk off to find another one, the chain still dragging along behind it.

Outside, in the Wilderness, the Inkdrop Queen and her sister watched the cave crumble in behind them. That would prevent anyone from following them back. They’d be safe from the sorceress now.