Beastly Crime

For  a thousand years, Daniel Moon had waited. The room was small, its walls etched with runes that pulsed faintly in the dim light. Chains hung from his wrists, though they were more symbolic than functional, his confinement was bound by the spell, not the steel. His claws scratched idly at the stone floor as he listened to the silence of a world he hadn’t seen in a millennium.

“It’s your fault,” Daniel whispered to the darkness, his voice rough like sandpaper. It was the only voice he’d heard for centuries. This statement wasn’t meant for himself but for the memory of the one who put him here. He hadn’t aged, and hadn't needed food or water. But the years had done their work on his mind, fragments of his crime sharp but scattered. The fire. The screams. The tower collapsed under the weight of his rage. All of it had blurred with the endless solitude.

Until today. The runes on the walls flickered erratically, their glow dimming to near nothingness. A low rumble shuddered through the chamber and the door -- an unpredictable slab of iron creaked open. The spell that held him crumbling with time. Daniel stood, his massive form unfolding like a shadow that refused to shrink under light.m He stepped forward cautiously, his claws clicking against the cold floor. The air outside the door smelled wrong. Stale, devoid of the scents of life. No humans, no beasts, and not even the decay of nature. Just emptiness.

The hallway beyond was covered in dust, the walls cracked and weathered. He ascended stairs that had once echoed with shouts of soldiers dragging him to his cell. Now they were silent.

Emerging into the open, Daniel squinted at a sun that was pale and sickly. Buildings lay crumbled, their skeletal remains piercing the sky. Roads were fractured and overrun with weeds, yet there was no sound, no animals, no wind, no signs of life. “What have they done?” he growled, his voice echoing into the void. He moved through the ruins, his senses on high alert, though there was nothing to detect. The world was his, and yet it was dead. Fragments of memory returned clearer now, His crime was wrath. An uncontrollable fury that had razed a city. He had been locked away to save the world from him. Yet as he pieced together the silence, the abandonment, he realized the irony. They had destroyed themselves without his help.

Daniel let out a low, gluttonous laugh that echoed through the empty streets. The beast was free, but there was no one left to fear him.

“All of this.” he announced to no one, “and it’s still your fault.”