The city was completely empty. Clusters of gems or various collars sparkled. The deep dwarf planted clusters of gemstones and crystals like someone would plant flowers. One home had a line of ruby red crystal clusters lying on the street leading to their house. Another Had a crystal hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier that had grown in place.

I had also found the source of heat. There were streams of lava, which came out like fountains and ran down into drains beneath the earth. They gave off an eerie red glow, but I could only see it when they were within range of my Light. The lava gave off a lot of heat, which told me I had been right when I hypothesized the deep dwarves had a natural heat resistance. I had accessed my dungeon store and active some of my resistance. I only needed to be at Heat Resistant to be comfortable walking up to the molten rock. Sapphire followed me and didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat either.

The place was as beautiful as Garnet has said, but there was something off about it. I had been bothered about something for a while, and I was only just starting to grasp what it was. Everything was too pristine. The archway had been completely decayed, but these buildings and all of the fixtures were perfectly fine. Was the city somehow protected where the archway was not? I considered that for a bit, but then I thought of another possibility.

What if it wasn’t the stone that was being eaten away? What if it was the images themselves? It wasn’t like acid rain at all. Something had deliberately eaten away at the archway. Why had it done that? I continued to walk along the empty streets, trying to see what was off about the city. The deep dwarf city was already so foreign to me that I could find a hundred things about it that felt off, so finding what was missing was difficult.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

However, when I was passing by a shop with a sign on it, I froze. The sign was made of stone, and it hung precariously out over the street. It was completely unremarkable, but I had just noticed what was off. There was no text on it. There was no image and no text. It was a sign that hung there for seemingly no reason, not to explain why it existed.

That’s what the city had been missing. There wasn’t a single piece of writing. There wasn’t anything that indicated any kind of information. There was something that had eaten away at all of the words and pictures. Not just those… where were the bodies? There were no monsters, sure… but shouldn’t there be skeletons? Dwarves ran and died, and yet there wasn’t a single corpse. Whatever had dissolved the people had also dissolved the statues.

“Lore…” My eyes popped open.

It wasn’t words, images, or even people. It was lore. A horrifying event that wiped out the deep dwarves would have created enough resentment and corruption to easily create a dungeon, if not a dozen dungeons. Underground where miasma and mana couldn’t flow freely, that dungeon would have assuredly implanted where it was created. That’s what happened to King Diorite. He held something back, and his dungeon flourished. Yet here, at ground zero, there wasn’t even the sign a dungeon had ever been created.

Had monsters swarmed in and slaughtered everyone, that would have been one thing. This was something completely different. Something had devoured all the lore. It had consumed history… all information. Just what was the Abyss?