Gribble's chest heaved, each breath stabbing his lungs. Brambles snagged his mildewed rags, thorns gouging his pocked hide. Spindly legs churned through the mulchy loam, kicking up clots of sodden leaves. Yellow eyes goggled in their sockets, black pupils flaring.

The distant baying made his bowels clench, a cold squirt of panic. Grimrock's hunting howls, the royals' guttural bellows. Gribble could smell their bloodlust on the wind, a rank musk of sweat and iron.

He plunged off the game trail, scrabbling into the choked undergrowth. Briar vines scourged his cheeks, bearding them with bloody scabs. Gribble ducked his bulbous head, feeling grubs and beetle larvae squelching under his soles. The snarled bracken seemed to snatch at him with hooked claws.

The forest darkened, canopy swallowing the smeared light. Spindly black trunks crowded close, knobby with burls. A brown murk clogged the spaces between, rancid and fungal. It rasped in Gribble's nostrils, coated his tongue with an oily film. The air was thick enough to chew, soupy with spores.

Fibrous creepers snaked down, noosing his neck, snagging his arms. Gribble thrashed, ripping free with tattered sleeves. Roots humped from the humus, sow teats caked in mold. He stumbled over their warts and crevices, barking his shins bloody.

Fear sang shrill in his skull, a dog whistle of panic. It shivered in his marrow, palsied his joints. Gribble's heart slammed against his ribs like a caged stoat, lipid and rabid. He could taste its drumbeat on the back of his tongue, a hot copper thrum.

A granite jut rises sudden from the gloom. Gribble slewed around it, clawed toes digging divots. Broken stone steps buried in detritus. Carved columns choked in strangler vines. The ruins rose about him, a jumbled reef of forgotten glory.

Gribble hunched, hands braced on knobbly knees. Phlegm rattled in his lungs, bubbled out his nose in reeking strings. The stitch in his side throbbed like a red coal, a spike driven between his ribs. His thighs trembled, sinews fraying.

The stone was gritty under his soles, ancient and mossy. Roots had buckled the foundations, cleaving the cyclopean blocks with fibrous wedges. Lichen crusted the lintels, patterned them in greens and golds. Ferns unfurled from tumbled cornices, delicate and defiant.

The forest had devoured this place long ago, digesting it down to a bony goyle. Gribble stared, baffled and entranced. The geometric precision of the stone, the fluted pillars - unnatural shapes, impositions on the fluid contours of branch and leaf. A monument to vainglory, now erased.

A weathered plinth squatted before him, brooding in a snarl of ivy. Gribble shuffled closer, brow furrowing. Runes marched across the pitted face, precise and alien. Angular glyphs in a grid, fretted with queasy sigils. They seemed to wriggle, swim before his eyes. A throbbing ache kindled behind his temples as he tried to focus.

Gribble reached out, traced a stunted finger over the graven marks. They were incised deep, edges crisp and unworn. A frisson shivered through his arm, cold as meltwater. The stone seemed to pulse under his touch, gravid with eldritch energies.

The runes flared blue-white, a biting actinic glare. Gribble flinched back, shielding his eyes with a tattered sleeve. The light seared his retinas, left ghost-blurs drifting across his vision. The smell of ozone scorched his sinuses, a crackling electric stench.

Shapes moved in the dazzle, resolving into uncanny figures. A diminutive goblin, hunched and scrawny, clad in rancid rags. Gribble boggled - it was him, down to the last pock and wen. The effigy's arms were upraised, its mouth an O of exultation. A nimbus of crackling power wreathed it, actinic tendrils snapping from its fingers.

The scene blurred, flowed like reflections in a scrying pool. Now armies clashed across blasted plains, pikes and polearms flashing in the sanguine light. Trolls in blackened plate, goblins in rusted mail, tearing at each other with savage abandon. Gore sheeted the ground, glistening and ropy. Viscera steamed in drifts.

And above it all towered Gribble's doppelganger, grown colossal, monstrous. Lightning forked from its claws, searing rank after rank to charcoal. The earth buckled and split, magma gouting from fuming chasms. Forests combusted into walls of fulminating flame, smoke boiling across a blood-bruised sky.

Gribble staggered back from the onslaught of images, bile searing his gullet. His bootheel caught on a root and he sprawled, cracking his coccyx on the shattered flagstones. The light from the runes winked out, plunging him back into clammy shadow.

He lay panting, cheek pillowed on moldering humus. Tremors rippled through him, a deepwater shuddering that seemed to rise from his very cells. The runes' searing afterimage danced behind his lids - the clashing armies, the wasted hellscapes, and himself, bloated with unholy power, an engine of annihilation.

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Gribble squinched his eyes shut, grinding his knuckles into the sockets. Tears seeped through his lashes, streaking the ancient grime caking his cheeks. His bladder let go, a hot stream soaking his breeks. The stink of urine mingled with the loamy rot of old growth.

What did it mean, that stygian portent? Him, Gribble, the clan cull, the drudge and kickdog, a lynchpin of destiny? The craven worm inside a wyrm's skin, shaking kingdoms to rubble with his rage? The image was grotesque, absurd, as warped as a drunkard's fever dream.

Yet the shrine had shown it to him, in all its annihilating clarity. Gribble the Despoiler, Gribble the Doombringing, the world shriveling to a cinder at his behest. As if the Great Powers had looked down on all the squalor and brutality of his life and said "yes, this one, this spat-upon scrap, we shall make a god of him".

Gribble rolled onto his back, stared sightlessly at the gloaming canopy. The forest croaked and skittered around him, a susurrus of small lives. He barely heard it over the clamor in his skull. His thoughts chased each other like ferrets in a sack, yammering and nipping.

If it was true, this mad prophesy, then what was he to do? Embrace the power the runes had shown him, batten on it like a leech, until he'd swollen fat with theurgy? Until he could unleash devastation with a crook of his finger, could make the earth vomit up its flames at his command?

Part of Gribble thrilled to the notion, a savage glee fizzing in his blood. To shed the flinching worm, the bootlicker, and rebirth himself as an iron-thewed titan. To grind Grimrock beneath his heel, to send Griz and Krub scampering with their tails between their legs. To carve out a legend that would echo down the ages, a tale of gob triumphant.

But another part, some guttering ember of decency, curdled at the thought. At the wanton ruin the runes had shown him, the mountains of festering dead. The forests scoured to bone and ash, the earth convulsing like a disemboweled snake. Could he truly embrace that yawning abyss of power, knowing what it would make him?

Gribble had only ever wanted to be left alone, to scrabble out a meager corner of peace. A scrap of a life away from kicks and curses, away from the yoke of his wretched blood. But it seemed the world would never allow him even that small dignity. Would never let the worm lie quiet in the mud.

He thought of his hideaway, his secret sanctum in the bog hollows. The den he'd scratched out a handbreadth at a time, thatching its roof with reed and sedge. A mean, smoke-stinking hovel, but his, hard-won, some small bulwark against the casual cruelties of the cosmos.

And Grimrock's thugs had smashed it like a child's sandcastle, in a spasm of moronic malice. Had ground its last splinter to pulp under their boots, hooting and braying. And why? Because they could. Because it pleased them to do it. Because the world was hard and vicious, and stamping out the small joys of lesser souls made them feel tall. Made the lead weight of their own pointless lives seem a gramme less leaden.

Gribble felt a heat kindle in his guts at the memory, a smoldering ember flaring to sudden flame. The old familiar rage, the chained cur snarling in its kennel. All the slights and beatings, the insults and deprivations, the grinning joy in his tormentors' eyes. They rose behind his lids in a red kaleidoscope, each one a coal heaped on the pyre of his fury.

Gribble bared his blunt teeth at the uncaring boughs above. Felt the anger transmute, flow into some new and uncharted channel. A power rose in him, as implacable as an undertow, as scalding as forge-fresh steel. It suffused his limbs, quivered in his nerves, sang a war song in his skull. The worm turned, shedding its blind carapace. From the dung and muck, the dragon-shape reared its flame-wreathed head.

He lurched upright, clenched fists trembling. The forest reeled around him, edges blurred by the thundering in his ears. His heart battered his ribs, a battle drum setting the tempo of transformation. Gribble's lips skinned back from his teeth, a rictus somewhere between a snarl and a mad, exultant grin.

No more. No more the kicked cur, the midden roach. If this was to be his destiny, then by the Powers he would seize it in both claws, drink it to the dregs. He would learn the secret geometries of this place, glut himself on its eldritch formulae. Swell and bloat on thaumaturgy until continents cracked at his tread. And then Grimrock, and Griz, and Krub, and all their sneering ilk would learn the price of prodding a worm. They would learn it in the color of their own blood, in the screams of their loved ones.

Gribble's rage buoyed him, lending a manic strength to his starveling limbs. He pushed to his feet, swaying like a sapling in a gale. The anger was a crucible, smelting the dross of his old mewling weakness, leaving something hard and keen as a blade. His path unfurled before him, writ in an actinic crackle behind his eyes.

It led him back to the stone, its runes still seething with bottled lightning. Gribble reached for them, tracing the abstruse sigils with a reverent finger. The power sleeted up his arm, bright ice and scouring flame, imprinting itself on his psyche. It was a start, a single swig from a bottomless flagon. He would drink it all, in the end, swelling like a glutted tick. And Grimrock would pop him at his peril.

Gribble turned from the stone, fixed his gaze on the crumbling portico behind. Shadows clustered thick beyond, fecund and gravid with secrets. He stumbled toward them, a giggle bubbling in his throat like marsh gas. No more running now, no more mewling flight. Let Grimrock come, with his pig-eyed bravos and their rusted cleavers. Let them chase the worm into his labyrinth of newfound power.

They would learn, in that feculent abyss, the truth of an ancient adage. There can be no heroes without dragons. But ah, there can be dragons without heroes.

Gribble shambled into the haunted dark, chasing the ember glow behind his eyes. And for the first time in his misbegotten life, his lipless mouth peeled back in a rictus grin, he felt the unfamiliar ache of a strange new emotion.

Hope.