Egg of Destruction

Note: Image associated is from Ironage.media, specifically their prompt, 'The Chrysalis'

Esmeralda had found it. After six moons spent following the Roc'tor giant clan through the Dragon's Teeth Pass and the Wildlands beyond it, she had found the hidden stronghold of their kind. Fabled Doth'roc, the Cave of Creation itself.

As she stood at its mouth, her mind reeled within her, at once screaming to run away and to delve deep into the storied abyss before her. Even her magi intuition was of two minds, terrified and inexorably drawn within, not only by the warp in reality that had travelled with the Roc'tor but now by something faintly calling her from deeper in the cave. A soft, sibilant call, tickling her ears at the edge of hearing, but duty demanded her find the warp first.

As she crossed the mouth of Doth'roc, her fears fell away, squelched within her by the cave itself, she thought, as new energy waxed within her, driving her on. There was no light in Doth'roc, yet her eyes felt no struggle in telling her where anything was; even the footsteps of the Roc'tor were evident in the floor, with no dust nor dirt to see them in. She meandered through the labyrinthine tunnel as time faded from any reckoning, with no divergences in the path before her to lead her astray. Nothing of the tunnel gave any sign of how it had been made or why. The walls were sheer and perfect, with no tool marks upon them, the floor flat and even, sloping gently down, occasional turns in the path causing her to lose track of the direction she was moving.

Eventually, what felt like leagues deep in the earth, she saw a flickering light ahead. Orange at first, shifting like torchlight, it became yellow as she approached. Strangely, she couldn't hear the crackle of wood nor the soft hiss of oil to tell her what had birthed the light ahead. She had noticed that as she followed the path, the voice from the mouth of the cave had grown slowly stronger, now unmistakably present but soft as a mother's voice to her sleeping child. What it was saying she couldn't rightly tell, the words alien to her, yet her intuition seemed to understand, lulling within her, drawing strength from the unknown sounds haunting her steps.

Soon, she saw the origin of the light, a chamber carved in the rock on one side of the tunnel. The chamber, unlike the tunnel, bore many signs of both life and the living. Armour, ropes, ladders and shelves were everywhere within it, and wooden supports held the room from collapse. But those only dimly filtered into her mind as she stared, stupefied, at the gargantuan egg straight from the oldest tales. Twice her height and easily four times around as she could splay her arms, ruby red with black veins and thick ichor leaking from its apex, it sat in and on fire, the only light she had seen in Doth'roc.

She did not know how long she stood staring at a myth made real before her. Eventually, she realized that the sibilance of the voice had fallen away, and the words became clear to her as though she had been underwater at first and now heard it clearly for the first time.

"When the firstborn return home, and the second creeps in after,

When my final child wakes from his long slumber,

I shall return from banishment by the Crafter,

And drown the world in darkest umber."

Fear ran rampant down her spine and wild through her mind as every warning her mother had given came screeching back after nearly two decades of life without her. The Queller was real, and Esmeralda had heard its voice.