Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Dread Lord who showed up late
As was foretold: the monolith of black glass, unbreakably enchanted, sharp-edged as the day it was made in magical defiance of time and erosion, cracked suddenly from top to bottom.
From the fissure, a mighty inhalation, and then a roar, and the sundered block shattered like ice around the flexed and steaming figure of a man — more than a man: a gigantic study in stylised perfection, chest heaving, breathing its first since entombment. Prophesied in its return, malign in purpose, swelled and pulsing with dark power.
The dread lord extended his arms to the sides, as if displaying himself to a cheering audience, and bellows again, then turns in a slow circle, surveying all that is his, all that will fall before him, all the points of the compass, all the way to the horizon and beyond.
His brow slowly furrows.
This is not his first thousand-year slumber. The world shifts, he knows; but this is — strange. The mountains he remembers are ground down to barely-rolling flatness. The sun in the sky is weak and bloated, an ailing red. There is no sign, anywhere in any direction, of any habitation, construction, or the motion of any living thing; only empty ground and thin, low vegetation.
A second, much smaller upright monolith, etched with some kind of inscription, stands a few dozen paces ahead of him. He approaches it, without fear; he is the dread lord, and he fears the works of no being. It appears to be the same eternal ensorceled material that has encased him for his long sleep.
It is engraved with the same legend, over and over in dozens of languages, ranging from ones even he considers archaic to ones unknown to him in their presumable recency.
By binding arcane-legal treaty, in perpetuity, as negotiated with a full convocation of twelve senior Legislation Elementals beneath the lunar eclipse of the year variously known as:
- 5662 Treaty Year
- Second of the Iron Decade, Thirteenfold Iteration of the Magnificent Cycle
- Bismuth-Silicon-Quickdamp-Carbon 77
- Flowering Clematis, Websterian Period
The area within a radius of one hundred Reform Dwarven Yards in all directions of this marker constitutes a Special Solution Timezone, in which one second is especially defined to pass in the same observable duration as one year in the timezones outside it.
May the Dread Lord return as foretold, in the fulness of all the seconds of his entire prophesied thousand-year stay.
Wrought by the hand of the Dread Lord Recurrence Calendrical Solutions Council, Malia the Many-Angled presiding. — Behold my works, ye dreadful, and despair!