A boy lived on a cliff laced with uncountable caves crawling deep
inside the earth.  He did not know how he got there, only that this
was how things were.  He explored cavern after cavern, never
remembering if in his adventures he had seen this one before, or had
it only reminded him of something other he had seen before?  He lived,
without marking the passage of time, eating the bountiful berries and
roots, without a home and yet everywhere was his home.  He remarked
that there were no others, but yet, were there not, was it his place
to say?

One day deep in a cavern, further into darkness than most of the caves
led, he saw a brand of iron, virulently rusted, sticking into the wall.
It filled him with a foreboding to see it there.  He knew, somehow,
that it had been a weapon, and his hair stood in terror that he
recognized this to be so. He reached out to touch it, fearing ... knowing that
it would unleash some ancient darkness upon him.  Once he pulled his
hand back with a jump, but again, with trembling fingers, he reached
out.  It was cold on his hand, flakes of iron staining his skin. But
when upon it he put the slightest weight, something gave way, and the
wall began to crumble, the rock shattering before him, swallowing the
iron as the cave opened up. 

It was darker in that tunnel, suffocating.  Odors of rotting flesh
filled the air, stifling his nose. Still deeper he went, the
reflections of sunlight fading to near black until his eyes adjusted
to the scant luminosity of faintly glowing lichens.

Before the boy opened up a great pit, sunlight now seeping from a gash
over head. What he saw there buried felled the boy to his knees.  A
litter of corpses, thousands upon thousands, filled the pit, their
bones showing, the flesh still rotting and festering with worms and
maggots. 

Then he remembered.  It was here that he had lived.  His village was
attacked. They had sent him, for his feet were the swiftest, to
warn their sister town upon the surface and to beseech their help.  But
reaching the mouth of the cave, he had faltered, and fell into the
pool at the foot of the cliff.  Then all had gone dark as he fell out
of memory and sunk in deep water, and when he awoke uon the shore, 
both villages were gone, slain, all faces only memories and carrion to
feed the fetid birds.