He did not so much run through the thick forest underbrush as stagger awkwardly as fast as he could manage. His footfalls were uneven, occasionally dragging along the dew-soaked grass rather than rising and falling. While he was more or less facing the direction he was moving, he did so at ever-shifting angles, as though preparing for the future itself to strike at him. His eyes were wide and wild, scanning every shadow cast by the canopy in the soft, imperfect morning light for the innumerable threats he knew must be stalking him there.

Every so often, thoughts would enter his head that verged, just slightly, on what could be loosely described as rational. But before he could fully decipher them, some sound behind the trees, some rustling in the thicket, some caress of cool morning breeze, would drive all thoughts from his head but the need to push onward. Somewhere, there had to be safety. Somewhere, there had to be respite. Somewhere, there had to be a way to end this nightmare and wake back up into the life he should be leading.

Still, there was a certain pattern or purpose to his movements that he himself was in no condition to see. He shunned easier ground in favor of harsher, more uneven terrain. He allowed thorns and brambles to tear at his flesh when he could have chosen paths comparatively clear of obstructions. Although exhausted beyond words or thought, he moved past places of relative safety where he might have found just a few hours of precious sleep. And his path took him always deeper into the forest, where the old growth trees were beginning to wither and die.

He had no idea, of course, how long he stumbled onward, but when he arrived to where he did not realize he was going, his sense of wonder momentarily overcame his exhaustion. Towering above him, nearly as tall as the oldest healthy trees, was a massive structure that must once have been a temple. Long and wide stone steps climbed languidly up toward an expansive stylobate that disappeared into the shadows of the great marble columns lining it. Sections of the stone steps had been torn apart by trees of frightening strength that had pushed their way upward from beneath them. Most of the site was overgrown and overrun with moss, vines, and foliage.

He was up the ancient steps and into the temple beyond before he truly realized he was moving. The temple’s interior was cavernous. Like the steps, sections of the floor had been shattered by time and by the mindlessly persistent growth of trees in the soil below, trees that were now fully grown up through the temple itself despite the almost total lack of sunlight within. In fact, the interior of the temple was barely distinguishable from the forest outside apart from the imperfect floors and walls that had moved aside for the forest.

They must have been speaking for long minutes before he finally began to hear the whispers. At first, they fluctuated in volume to rise just to and then fall just below his hearing. In time, they seemed to speak more steadily, and once they did, he never lost them again. Even then, though, the whispers made no sense. They were gibberish at best, or perhaps spoken in a language he had never heard, a language he had never fathomed.

Worse yet was the knowledge that the voice – or voices, he wasn’t sure – was impossible. There were no signs of people or even animals having come through here in at least an age, and the insects that skittered around did not seem like the conversational types. Further, the whispers did not seem to come from anywhere in particular. They seemed instead to come from everywhere at once, or perhaps just where he was. But regardless of where they came from, they simply continued to come.

It must have been hours later, although he would never know for certain, when some of the words started making sense to him. Just some, here and there, and never more than one at a time, but some of the words started to have meaning. They were still not spoken in any language he knew, but their tone alone spoke of words he knew: strength, safety, magic.

The whispers were promises of power.

He didn’t know at what point he agreed to the whispers’ terms. He knew he did not fully understand them, for they whispered in strange and unknowable words, but he understood what they offered. Once he had, the whispers seemed to pull him, leading him away from the temple’s entrance and deeper into the forest-choked and desiccated structure. He came at length to a staircase descending into the black earth, and he followed it down as it wove through the massive roots supporting the invasive trees above.

At the bottom of the stair was a tiny room, not even twice as wide across as he was tall. Once, perhaps, it had been some kind of vault or reliquary, but now most of the floor and walls had been destroyed just like those of the temple. In the center of the room was a stone pedestal, still standing but slightly askew because of the partially shattered slab it stood on. Atop the pedestal lay a single amulet, the plainness of its design belying the value the whispers insisted it held.

He approached the pedestal and the amulet slowly. Whether his lethargy was a product of reverence or fear, even he did not know, and the whispers would not tell him. The amulet was in the shape of an insect, a scarab of some sort, and forged of a black metal that was barely visible in the thin light that seeped from the imperfect ceiling. He reached out a hand and hesitated, for as he drew near the object, the whispers suddenly increased their fervor, and more words, or the feelings of words at least, surrounded him.

Strength. Safety. Magic. Power. Revenge. Escape. Position. Greatness. Vengeance.

Broodbringer.

His hand was shaking now, and as that name came unbidden into his mind, a word that he had never heard, never read, and did not – could not – understand, that shaking began to pain him. There was something terrifying in that whispered word, something that carried in its clutches the weight of a coming doom. But that doom was power, and power was what he had been promised. Solemnly, he grabbed hold of the amulet, and the sound of his scream broke the silence of the forgotten temple.

He had been promised strength, and he received it. He had been promised safety, and few could hurt him now. He had been promised magic, and he at long last reclaimed it. The Broodbringer offered many promises of power, and those promises would be kept. The one promise that was not made to that one exhausted, running man was the promise of sleep, for he would not sleep again.

There was far too much work to be done.