Rubble crunched beneath Gribble's clawed feet. He stood atop the heap of shattered stone, his sickly yellow eyes flicking over the carnage. Pillars lay toppled, their rune-carved surfaces fractured into jagged shards. Stones stained rusty crimson with dwarven blood.

The stench of death and smoke clung to the back of Gribble's throat. His nostrils flared, drinking in the aftermath of butchery. A few hours past, this chamber had rung with the clash of arms and the screams of the dying. Now only the crackle of flames and the occasional clatter of shifting rubble broke the sepulchral hush.

Gribble's green skin seemed to swallow the feeble grey light seeping through gaps in the ruined ceiling. Shadows gathered in the hollows of his gaunt cheeks, in the cruel twist of his lips. He lifted one hand, the sharp nails glinting like chips of obsidian.

Bones littered the floor. Skeletons contorted in their final agonies, scraps of flesh and torn armor still clinging to their yellowed frames. Gribble flexed his fingers, his eyes flaring brighter. Threads of sickly green energy twined around each corpse, knitting through ribs and empty eye sockets.

Bones rattled and scraped against flagstones. Skeletons lurched upright, their movements jerky, marionettes dancing on a mad necromancer's strings. Empty orbits flickered with corpse-light. Skeletal hands groped for notched blades and war-axes, the weapons they'd wielded in life now instruments of blasphemy.

Dwarven tapestries hung in charred tatters from the walls. Woven images once depicting the kingdom's history and heroes now warped to smudged nightmares.

Gribble's gaze snagged on one tapestry more intact than the rest. Golden threads glimmered through the soot-stains, limning a heroic dwarven king, his hammer upraised, his followers clustered around him.

Gribble snarled. He swung his hand in a sharp, slashing motion. Oily black flames leapt from his claws. They struck the tapestry, clinging, spreading with unnatural speed. Hungry tongues of dark fire consumed beard and crown, transmuting the king's victory into a death-rictus of agony.

The tapestry crumbled in on itself, warp and weft eaten away to drifting black wisps. Gribble threw his head back, laughing. The sound was the scrape of a whetstone on a rusted blade.

The grating creak of a shifting stone cut off his mirth. His pointed ears twitched, swiveling towards a narrow archway half-hidden behind a tumbled column. A furtive scrabbling, like rats fighting in the walls. But no rat had made that sound.

Gribble's thick lips skinned back from his teeth. Curse the dwarves. Too stupid to know when to lay down and embrace oblivion. He'd assumed his massacre was complete. That this shattered corpse of a chamber held no more life to be choked out.

He'd been careless. Sloppy. Left a few maggots squirming in the rotted flesh of this fallen kingdom. No matter. He rolled his shoulders, the joints popping. He'd remedy that oversight.

His hand twisted in a summoning motion. Viridian sparks dripped from his nails. A translucent wisp of emerald foxfire sprang into being over his palm, its unearthly glow throwing the craggy lines of his face into sharp relief.

The glow illuminated the archway and the short passage beyond. Gribble moved towards it, his feet nearly silent amid the rubble. As he approached, the scrabbling intensified, then cut off with a choked gurgle. Some broken thing trying to muffle its pain. Its fear.

Gribble's tongue flicked out, tasting the air. The flavor of desperation and impotent defiance burst across his senses like a spoiled fruit. He could almost see the wretches cowering in their bolt-holes, mewling prayers to their carved-bone gods.

All that effort to hide, to cling to the tatters of their pointless existences. Hadn't they seen what he'd wrought? Hadn't they witnessed their kin and comrades torn to steaming gobbets, flesh scoured from bone by the spells boiling from his lips?

There was no salvation. No escape. The sooner they embraced the purity of despair, the sooner he could grant them the mercy of utter destruction. But if they wished to draw out their suffering, to marinate in a few more precious moments of false hope, he was happy to oblige them. It was, after all, nothing more than they deserved.

The foxfire cast eerie shadows on the walls, green as gangrene. The wisp bobbed and gibbered silently as he entered the passage. The reek of terror grown thick enough to coat the back of his tongue. Gribble swallowed, savoring it.

He clawed a gestured. Behind him, bones clacked and rattled as a handful of his new skeletal thralls stumbled into motion. He didn't spare them a glance, trusting in the power of his magic to bind them to his will.

The passage kinked to the left, ending in an ironbound door hanging drunkenly from one twisted hinge. The wood was pocked with axe-scars, each mark black with clotted blood. Gribble kicked the door, his withered muscles swelling with stolen necromantic vigor.

Hinges squealed. Wood exploded into sodden splinters. The heavy portal slammed inward. It struck the wall, rebounded. Through the ringing echo, Gribble heard a yelp, high and pitiful with fear.

He stepped across the threshold, the foxfire swimming through the murk to orbit his head. The chamber was small and mean, more a cell than a room. Piles of smashed crates and barrels lined the walls, the detritus of a last, frantic attempt at a barricade.

In the center of the room, a lone dwarf crouched over a body. No, a pair of bodies. Two more dwarves sprawled brokenly on the flagstones. One was missing most of its head, its beard matted into a glistening sponge by the grey-pink ruin of its brain.

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The other corpse lay face-down, its stubby limbs thrown out at angles nature never intended. The haft of a broken spear jutted between its shoulders. Black fluid seeped from the wound, another stream dribbling from the scrap of meat that had been its throat.

The living dwarf spun to face Gribble. The creature was maimed, its face a hideous topography of burnt flesh and crusted blood. One arm hung limp, the bone poking through the skin. Its remaining hand white-knuckled the hilt of a notched sword.

Rheumy eyes squinted at Gribble through slits in the seared meat of the dwarf's face. Recognition and rage kindling in their depths. Its cracked lips worked, as if trying to dredge up enough moisture to spit.

Gribble cocked his head, considering the dwarf. The way it crouched over its butchered comrades, its ruined face set in a rictus of furious determination. An unexpected ember of grudging respect kindled in his shriveled heart.

Here was a maggot with some backbone. A worm that fancied itself a viper, valiantly rearing up to strike at the boot-heel poised to crush its egg-mates. There was something perversely admirable in that level of futile defiance. A piquancy that would add a certain spice to the inevitable slaughter.

The dwarf awkwardly shuffled around to place itself between Gribble and the door. It raised the sword in its shaking hand, the point dipping and weaving drunkenly. Phlegm rattled in its throat, bubbling out as wet, wracking coughs.

Gribble smiled. A stretching of lips that was all mockery and malice, as empty of true mirth as a bare skull. He stepped into the chamber, the foxfire's glow painting the blood-slick walls the color of spoiled meat.

The rattle of bones echoed from the passageway behind him. The dwarf's rheumy eyes darted to the dark opening. They went wide as the first skeletal warrior stumbled into view, its frame a jangling patchwork of grave-remnants and dwarven battle-gear.

The dwarf made a sound then. A low, wordless moan that needed no translation. In it was horror and despair in equal measure, the final tattered threads of courage frayed past mending by the sight of its kin defiled.

Gribble breathed in the sour reek of the dwarf's anguish. Let it roll across his palate like a vintner savoring a rare draught. His hand crept to the hilt of his own sword, the vicious black blade seeming to drink in the foxfire's glow.

The dwarf's eyes snapped back to him. The moan climbed into a snarl clotted with equal parts fury and despair. Gribble watched the mortal mind behind those eyes fray and snap, the last gap-toothed cog slipping out of alignment.

With a roar like a scalded bear, the dwarf charged. The sword arced wildly, black with blood and fragments of its wielder's sanity. The broken thing had finally found the mercy of purpose in its madness, embracing destruction as the only absolution.

Gribble's blade leapt from its sheath with a whisper. Chill ebon metal met notched dwarven steel with a shriek. Sparks showered, reflecting in the skeletal warriors' empty eyes as they crowded the doorway.

The dwarf's sword shattered, shards of metal spinning across the room. One of the razor shards carved a line of brilliant pain across Gribble's cheek. He laughed again, his tongue darting out to lap at the welling ichor.

His blade sank into the meat of the dwarf's belly, grating on the cage of ribs. He twisted his wrist savagely, metal grating on bone. A loop of glistening intestine, gray as a drowned man's finger, flopped wetly from the gaping slash.

The dwarf's scream tore at its throat, flecking its beard with gobbets of blood. It clutched at its spilling guts with its one good hand, trying vainly to cram them back into the ruin of its stomach.

Gribble ripped his sword free. Loops of bowel draped his wrist like glistening ropes of rancid sausage. He flicked them away disdainfully. At his gesture, the skeletal warriors surged forward as one, bony claws grasping.

They fell on the dwarf in a clattering tide, bearing the twitching meat to the flagstones and tearing. Gobbets of flesh flew, blood spraying in abstract patterns across the walls. The dwarf's screams spiraled up into an agonized gibber.

Gribble stood over it all, drinking in the raw sounds of rending meat and splintering bone. He closed his eyes in an almost sexual ecstasy, feeling the dwarf's agony pour into him, filling some empty space behind his ribs.

He held up a hand, fingers splayed. The skeletal warriors froze, their gory work nearly complete. Only the dwarf's head remained, barely recognizable as anything that had once been thinking flesh.

Gribble crooked a finger. A gasp of foul air escaped the ruin of the dwarf's lipless mouth as its skull rose from the steaming spread of its body. Gobbets of meat sloughed away, followed by the wet slither of exposed brain.

The skull slipped free in a parody of birth. It drifted to orbit Gribble's head along with the cold flame of the foxfire. Empty sockets flickered, filling with a rotting emerald radiance.

Gribble turned and strode from the chamber, his grisly trophies bobbing in his wake. Gore squelched beneath his heavy boots. In the passageway beyond, more skeletons waited, their bones gleaming wetly in the spectral light.

The skull's jaw clacked and gibbered silently, mouthing imprecations or pleas. Gribble cared not. They were all the same to him. Meat and bone and squealing souls, all fodder for the dark machinations of his will.

He had an empire to build, and this pathetic midden heap of a fortress was only the first loose stone to pry from the crumbling edifice of mortality. One by one, he would topple their castles and crack open their yellowed philospher's scraps, until all that remained was the purity of the void. And he, Gribble, would rule over it all, the last fading scream before the fall of the eternal night.

The thought warmed him, a hideous dopamine rush better than the most decadent flesh or the headiest mead. His shoulders shook, not with weariness, but with a terrible, silent laughter.

He mounted the steps leading out of the ruined keep, trailing his grisly honor guard. The guttering flames were lower now, the smoke thicker. It seemed to part before him like a noxious bridal veil.

He reached the great rent in the wall where the main gate had once stood, now a gore-splattered wound in the keep's carcass. Beyond lay his army, a seething mass of rot-green wisps and bleached bone. An unliving sea, its depths pregnant with poisonous oblivion.

Gribble paused at the threshold, his gaze traveling across that vista of horror. The thing squatting in the center of his chest squeezed, not with sorrow or regret, but with a pure, distilled thrill of malevolent anticipation. This, all of this, was only the beginning.

With a final hacking bark of laughter, he raised his blade overhead. The foxfire raced down the ebon metal, wreathing the sword in ghostly corpse-light. At its master's signal, the unliving army rippled into motion.

As they marched from that shattered keep into a world as yet unaware of the onrushing tide of its extinction, Gribble could not help but feel that perhaps immortality was not so elusive a thing as the mortal philosophers had always preached. For as long as his name endured, whispered in the final fading nightmares of a doomed existence, would he not, in some twisted fashion, live forever?

The thought pleased him. And that, perhaps, was the most terrible thing of all.