The Unseen Terror Returns (And Gets Closer)

The encounter with the dwarves had left Gnikpaugh jumpier than a cave cricket on a hot rock. For several "cycles" – marked by his usual routine of sleeping, eating unidentifiable gunk, and occasionally trying to teach himself to juggle with smooth river stones (a venture that usually ended with him hitting himself on the head) – he avoided the deeper, more structured tunnels, sticking to the familiar, if less promising, hunting grounds. My brief moment of resonant familiarity with dwarven craftsmanship was replaced by endless vistas of slime-dripping rock and Gnikpaugh’s backside as he peered into crevices.

We were in a relatively wide cavern, Gnikpaugh attempting, with my dubious assistance, to pry a particularly large, shiny beetle from a crack in the wall. He was using my tip as a lever, a practice I internally decried with a string of silent, pointy imprecations.

If you bend my tang, Gnikpaugh, I swear I’ll find a way to give you a splinter in a place you can’t reach…

Suddenly, he froze. The beetle, momentarily forgotten, scuttled deeper into its crevice. The familiar, if unpleasant, sounds of the cave – the drips, the distant skitters, Gnikpaugh’s own heavy breathing – seemed to fade, replaced by an oppressive, unnatural stillness.

Then, the cold hit.

It wasn’t the gradual chill of a deeper passage; it was a sudden, shocking plunge, as if a door to some arctic hell had been thrown open nearby. Gnikpaugh’s breath exploded from him in a thick white plume. The faint luminescence of the fungi on the walls seemed to shrink back, their glow turning wan and fearful.

“N-no…” Gnikpaugh whimpered, his eyes darting around the cavern with wide, animal terror. “Not… not Big Cold again!”

This time, his reaction was different. Last time, he’d dropped me in his panic. Now, learning a sliver from past terror, he clutched my hilt so tightly his knuckles were white even beneath the grime. He didn’t run blindly. Instead, he scanned the cavern with frantic haste, found a deep, narrow fissure almost hidden behind a curtain of pale, dead lichen, and squeezed himself into it, pulling me in tight against his chest. He was still terrified, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane, but there was a sliver more thought to his actions. He was protecting his "lucky shiv," even in his abject fear.

Well, points for improvement, I suppose, I thought, though the sentiment was overshadowed by the sheer, bone-penetrating dread that was once again seeping into my metallic being. At least this time I’m not face-down in potential monster spoor.

The presence, when it came, felt closer than before. The cold was more intense, a palpable entity that seemed to suck the very warmth from the stone around us. Through Gnikpaugh’s tightly shut eyes – which still afforded me a murky, terrified internal view of his panic – I couldn’t see anything. But I could feel it. An overwhelming pressure, like being at the bottom of a freezing ocean. A silence so profound it felt like the universe itself was holding its breath, afraid to make a sound. And a sense of ancient, Cthulhu-level malevolence that made the dwarven patrol feel like a pleasant tea party.

It was passing through the cavern we had just vacated, its nearness a palpable wave of dread.

A desperate, instinctual urge rose within me. Warn him! Tell him to stay still! Tell him not to breathe! Do SOMETHING! I focused all my will, trying to project a sense of caution, of immobility, into Gnikpaugh’s fear-addled brain. It was like trying to shout through a thick stone wall. My subtle combat nudges were useless here. I had no voice, no way to directly communicate the sheer, overwhelming wrongness that was just a stone’s throw away. The frustration was a cold, sharp counterpoint to the external chill, a fresh kind of torment.

Oh, not this again, my internal monologue ran, a desperate attempt at normalcy in the face of utter cosmic terror. It's like being trapped in a particularly upmarket, sentient freezer with an invisible, malevolent elephant who really, really doesn’t like goblins. Or daggers. And my idiot taxi service is currently trying to become one with the rock, which, under the circumstances, is probably the smartest thing he’s done all week. If I had teeth, they'd be chattering. If I had lungs, I'd be screaming. As it is, I'm just going to be very, very pointy and hope for the best… and try not to think about what happens if ‘the best’ isn’t good enough.

The presence lingered for an eternity compressed into minutes, then slowly, agonizingly, began to recede. The oppressive cold lessened fractionally. The suffocating silence eased. But the fear, and my own galling helplessness, remained.