The stone had changed.
She noticed it first in the walls.
The familiar grey of Khazad-dûm had given way to something older, marbled with streaks of bone-white and deep crimson.
Great spikes of rock jutted from the walls at almost impossible angles, their sharp edges twisted as if the stone itself were in agony.
She had descended for hours.
Perhaps longer.
Time was already difficult to measure beneath the mountain, but here it felt harder still.
Her lantern still illuminated the passage, but its light seemed diminished, swallowed by a creeping fog that drifted through the passages and curled around her boots.
The air was damp and strangely warm. Somewhere ahead, water fell into water.
The sound repeated itself, echoing through passages she could not see, until she could no longer tell whether the falls were near or leagues away.
Litharil stopped.
She had heard something else.
A slow scraping sound, from deep beneath the stone.
She waited motionless, one hand upon the hilt of her sword.
Nothing came, yet she found herself unwilling to move.
There was something very wrong with this place.
Not merely the darkness, nor the strange rock formations that crowded the passages.
She had walked through dark places before, beneath the roots of the Ered Luin, and through caverns where even the light of the Eldar seemed unwelcome.
This was different.
Those places had been made by the world, or fashioned by the hands of those who dwelt within it.
This place felt as though she had passed beneath the world itself.
Here, the darkness was not just an absence of light.
It was its own presence.
Litharil kept her hand on her sword hilt and continued.
The passage descended into a broad cavern. She stopped at its threshold.
For a while, she simply looked.
A vast lake lay below, its waters dark and utterly still. Pale patches of glowing moss clung to the banks.
Beyond it, enormous mushrooms rose from the rocky ground, their swollen caps glowing with a sickly red light.
Above, the cavern roof disappeared into a haze of fog and jagged stone.
Great hooks of rock hung down from the darkness, some so enormous that they resembled the teeth of some great and terrible beast.
It was terrible.
But also beautiful.
Litharil stood watching the strange reflections weave across the surface of the lake.
Then something moved beneath the water.
Not a ripple.
A shadow.
It passed slowly beneath the green surface, so vast that for an instant she mistook it for a change in the colour of the lake itself.
Then it turned, Something pale pressed against the underside of the water.
Litharil stepped back and dropped into a low crouch.
The surface remained unbroken.
She waited, her hand tightening around her sword, but whatever lay beneath had already withdrawn into the depths.
She did not approach the shore.
Instead, she followed the narrow trail along the cavern wall, keeping the lake at a distance.
There were old Dwarven stones here, half buried beneath the earth, and the occasional broken remnant of a worked path.
In places, iron rings remained fixed into the rock, their surfaces eaten away by an age of damp and decay.
They had come this far.
She wondered what they had found.
And what had found them.
A low arch stood ahead, half concealed behind a curtain of pale fungus.
Beyond it, the passage narrowed between two walls of jagged stone.
She had almost reached it when the sound came again.
Scraping, closer now.
She turned, concealing the lantern in her cloak and readying her shield.
Across the cavern, beyond the glowing mushrooms, something had emerged from a cleft in the rocks.
At first, she thought it was a Troll, though no Troll she had ever encountered had moved in such a fashion.
Its shape was low and uneven, its limbs too long, dragging itself over the stone with a slow, deliberate motion.
Then the fog shifted.
And she saw that it had no face.
Only a pale, wet surface where a face ought to have been, and beneath it, limbs, or something resembling them.
The creature stopped.
Litharil held perfectly still, not even breathing.
Could it sense her, perhaps smell her?
The thing tilted its head towards the lake, then began to move again, its body slipping between the rocks with a dreadful familiarity.
It made no sound beyond the faint dragging of its limbs.
Litharil waited until it disappeared behind a spur of stone.
Then she moved.
Slowly, carefully, she passed beneath the arch and into the narrow passage beyond.
She kept her sword drawn, finding comfort in its weight, even if doubting its usefulness here.
There were things in Middle-earth against which a blade was a sufficient answer.
Orcs could be slain.
Trolls could be felled.
Even the great spiders of the upper halls possessed bodies that could be pierced and blood that could be spilled.
But here, she found herself wondering whether the things that dwelt in these depths truly belonged to the world she knew.
She had heard old tales.
Whispers of creatures that had crept into the deep places of Arda before the first dawn, things that had never known the Sun or Moon, things that had no names by which the wise might call them.
She had dismissed much of it as the fearful invention of those who had wandered too far beneath the earth.
Now she was no longer certain.
A faint glow appeared ahead.
Litharil slowed.
The passage opened onto a ledge overlooking another deep fissure.
Below, the stone descended in broken terraces, vanishing into a reddish haze.
Thick growths of fungus clung to the lower walls, their swollen bulbs pulsing with a dim, blood-coloured light.
She could see a bridge farther along the ledge, an ancient Dwarven construction spanning part of the fissure.
Beyond it, the rock rose into a great spiral of worked stone.
The Endless Stair.
She could not see its summit, nor even the first great turn of its ascent.
It climbed into the darkness above, disappearing somewhere far beyond the reach of her lantern.
For the first time in many days, she felt relief.
The Dwarves had left a path.
There was still something of the old world here.
She took one step towards the bridge.
Then she heard the breathing.
It came from beneath the ledge.
Slow.
Wet.
Patient.
Litharil froze.
The sound was not that of a beast resting after a hunt.
There was no rhythm to it, no familiar rise and fall.
It seemed instead to be the stone itself drawing breath through a thousand narrow cracks.
She lowered her lantern until its light fell upon the edge of the path.
Something clung beneath it.
Long fingers, white as the belly of a drowned thing, curled over the stone.
They were thin and jointed in too many places, their nails pressed into the cracks.
A second hand appeared.
Then a third.
Litharil retreated without a sound.
The fingers tightened.
A pale shape began to rise from the fissure, unfolding itself against the rock.
She caught a glimpse of a narrow head, blind and smooth, turning slowly towards the light.
There was no anger in its movements.
No hunger that she could recognise.
Only a terrible certainty that it had found something.
She did not wait to see more.
Litharil turned and moved back along the passage, keeping her steps measured and as soundless as her skills permitted.
Running would bring her crashing through the narrow tunnels, and she had no desire to discover what else might be listening.
Behind her, the breathing continued.
Then came the sound of stone breaking.
She quickened her pace.
The passage divided ahead, one branch descending towards the red glow of the mushrooms, the other rising through a narrow cleft in the rock.
She chose the higher path and climbed, pressing herself against the wall where the stone narrowed.
A shadow passed across the entrance below.
It moved too quickly for its size.
The sound of scraping drew nearer, then stopped.
Something was on the other side of the stone.
She could hear it shifting its weight. A faint clicking followed, repeated several times.
Litharil kept her hand upon her sword.
She thought of the light that had once filled these halls.
Of the Dwarves who had worked this stone, believing that every depth could be conquered by strength and skill.
Of their great roads and mighty pillars, raised to endure for all the ages of the world.
How little they had known of what lay beneath them.
The clicking ceased.
For a long while, nothing moved.
Then the shadow withdrew.
Litharil remained where she was until the silence had settled once more.
Only then did she begin to climb, and she did not look back.
Perhaps hours later, she found the remains of a Dwarven camp in a hollow between two great ridges of stone.
Broken tools lay scattered beneath a thin coating of dust.
A rusted cooking pot rested beside a cold hearth, and the remains of a low stone wall offered some small shelter from the drifting fog.
The place had once been a refuge.
She could still see the care with which it had been made.
The stones fitted together neatly, the hearth placed against the wall, the entrance facing away from the worst of the drafts.
Someone had tried to make this place habitable.
Someone had sat beside that hearth and believed they might see the next day.
Litharil stood among the ruins for a long time.
There were no bodies, that troubled her more than if there had been.
She set down her pack, but did not light a fire.
The idea of trying to cast warmth and light into this darkness seemed foolish.
She ate a little lembas in silence, listening to the distant falls and the occasional groaning of stone.
Fourteen days beneath the mountain.
Fourteen days of stone and darkness, of lost roads and forgotten halls.
She had come seeking a relic, some small remnant of a kingdom that had vanished into ruin.
She had expected danger.
She had expected grief.
She had not expected this.
The upper halls of Moria had been a tomb, and her memory of its life had moved her deeply.
These depths were something else entirely.
A place beneath memory.
Beneath history.
Perhaps even beneath the reach of those powers who had shaped the world.
Litharil paused beside a narrow opening in the rock.
Far below, the green lake shone faintly through the fog, its surface as still as glass.
Beyond it, the great stone hooks descended from the unseen roof, reaching into the darkness.
For an instant, she thought the whole cavern resembled the open jaws of some monstrous thing.
And she, a tiny figure upon its tongue, had wandered too far to turn back without being noticed.
Hope, she reminded herself, was not the belief that no darkness remained.
She had lived too long for that.
It was the choice to continue, even when the road ahead offered no promise of safety.
So she turned from the lake and followed the ancient stones upwards, towards the Endless Stair.
Behind her, deep beneath the Foundations, something moved.
And far below the last glimmer of her lantern, in waters that had never reflected the Sun, something opened its eyes.
