After the few minutes of walking down the first flight then rounding the end and walking the other side, the bottom was completely black. In the forest above there was enough moonlight seeping through the leaves to at least make things visible from afar. Down here there was no such luxury.
Magnus thought this was the perfect time and pulled a dark lump from his pocket. He lightly tapped it against the wall and felt dust and pieces chip off of the object and fall to the ground. The newly revealed sections of the item emitted a feint purple glow and that was all the light Magnus needed to begin to make out the large entrance hovering in front of him. As he scanned the doorways he noticed symbols lining the edges, one on each brick making the outline of the doorway. The curved archway at the top also has these symbols, but Magnus recognizes none of them since they were not any language he had ever seen. He stepped through the doorway blightrock in one hand and rusty sword in the other. As he passed through the symbols covering the archway began to glow a deep blood red.
His foot met with mud as soon as he stepped through the doorway. Not surprising him considering the amount of water that had just splashed through. After ten or so steps he hit dirt again. It was no longer the stones that made up the stairs down. With even quieter footsteps he was not going to complain. As he moved forward the blightrock dimly lit the area around him, every now and then he would have to duck under or move around a particularly long root that extended all the way down from the trees above. The cave was large enough to let the monster he was tracking pass through easily. Well over 3 stories tall and wide. With the dirt on the ground again he could tell from the tracks that had reappeared that the entity had passed through some time before. The cave also had a slope downward, although hard to notice except for the fact that walking was easier and didn't have the usual resistance Magnus observed.
He walked on and eventually made his way to a fork in the cave, going two separate paths. It would be obvious to tell which was taken by the tracks, but something on the walls caught his eye. He walked closer and saw gouges in the dirt similar to the tracks on the ground. He followed them with his eyes for a time until they were lost in the darkness behind him. He began walking towards the way he came and after a few hundred fathoms he realized they were likely all the way back to the beginning of the cave. He gulped his saliva and began to wonder what kind of monster he was following as he saw the same gouges all along the wall of the other side as well when he walked back to the fork.
He began to analyze the two different paths. Both just as large as the main cave he was in making him unable to rule out one or the other from a distance. Only one way to find out he though to himself. Stepping forward and as his foot hit the ground, his heartbeat once again spiked. Horrified he stood completely still.. His lack of care had probably killed him... and he knew it.
His nose had given it away. He slowly turned his head upward and partially buried in the dirt of the ceiling, three stories above him, lurked the atrocity that had likely murdered his whole town.
For just a moment he saw it. Skin plastered on and hanging from its body, long strips with bones still hanging on, and some patches smaller than his hand, glued on by dried blood and overlapped by other patches, rotting and giving a completely brown appearance. It's limbs were too many to count in that tiny fraction of a second, extending all the way to the edges of the cave, all meeting a mass in the center. Eyes dotted it in different place, not its own eyes, but human eyes, and still moving meaning the monster was using them. Only ever seeing it from afar as he walked down the road earlier that night, he froze. *I never should have come here*, he thought to himself in dread. His usual confidence evaporated in the face of the abomination.
It flew out from the dirt it had buried itself in dropping straight on top of Magnus. Rocks and clumps of dirt came along with it in the tons. His vision slowed, every moment slowed, and he felt as if his life was ending as the monster fell directly on top of him.