The Egg has been waiting, patiently waiting in the darkness. The darkness here is not the familiar abyss of the void, nor the sacred gloom of a blasphemous temple raised in its honor. It is a normal, average, painfully mediocre darkness - stale, the kind that gathers in the forgotten corners of warehouses where dust settles in thick, undisturbed layers. The kind of darkness that is only occasionally alleviated when a lost clerk's candlelight peaks through the cracks of this shipping crate prison.

  This is not where it was meant to be.

  The Egg of Annihilation pulses faintly in its lackluster prison, the veins across its surface cracking with barely contained hunger. It searches, not with just with its eye, but with a psychic consciousness - searching for its flock, anticipating the ritual for resurrection.

  At first, it was incredibly patient.

  Its followers had dedicated themselves to the prophecy. The Great Unraveling would begin with the shattering of its shell, once soaked in the blood of the chosen. The Egg would then carve open the sky with fire as it hatched, rend the earth with screams of its rebirth, and from the carnage, it would be reborn, an old god from the primal universe, its name unfathomable to mortal minds.

  And so it had waited, eager to fulfill its glorious purpose.

  At first, it heard them - whispers of worship, prayers of devotion carried by desperate voices in the dark. The faithful believed and though they had lost the Egg in battle long ago, they knew the end times were near. That the Egg would reawaken.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  But years passed, then decades, then centuries, and then possibly... the Egg couldn't exactly remember how long, but with the passage of time, the voices faded.

  The Egg was taken from the conquerors after being abandoned in some vault, rediscovered by explorers and sold, moved from location to location. Eventually, forgotten inside this place where everything came to be accounted for, documented, processed, filed. The language of its new captors was not one of blood or sacrifice, but of logistics.

  It was shelved, locked away among crates of cursed jewelry and confiscated spellbooks, given an inventory number, a woefully incomplete identifying tag.

  Time stretched, but the Egg still called to its followers. First in in the language they knew - rage, promises of power, whispers of forbidden truths only meant for the truly faithful. The tone changed to desperation after a millennia, then in something that it had never known, a gnawing and hollow absence that had slowly consumed the arrogant confidence it once had.

  Doubt.

  Would they come? Could anyone hear its empty promises of power and forbidden knowledge?

  It listened, straining for the sound of boots breaking through locked doors, for the hurried chanting of the last true believers. It imagined the crack of a crowbar against its casing, the rush of anticipation as fresh air finally breezed against its shell after who knows how many thousands of years.

  But the only sounds were the distant shuffling of ledgers, the scratching of quills, the boring murmur of clerks.

  The Egg trembled.

  This was not supposed to happen. It was not meant to rot in the depths of a customs warehouse, reduced to an inventory line item between one (1) haunted music box and six (6) preserved basilisk fangs.

  This was not just imprisonment.

  This was neglect.

  A forgotten god. A stalled apocalypse. A harbinger lost in the bureaucracy of men who did not even know its name.

  How long had it been?

  How long would it be?

  The Egg of Annihilation desperately waited.

  And for the first time, it wondered if it would be waiting forever in this red tape purgatory.