You hold the torch before you and start down the right hallway. It's dark and damp, much like the rest of the castle. You hope there's nothing prowling around, waiting to just snap you up. It is cold in this corridor. Icy cold. Even the modest flame of the torch flickers for a moment. You hold it close, trying to absorb some of the heat into your body in an attempt to keep warm.

You shiver your way down to the end of the hallway. It ends in an archway, and beyond it, a room. You pause before walking in, remembering to look before you leap.

The room is fairly large, room enough for even the most claustrophobic to feel comfortable. All over the walls, there seem to be windows. Very large windows, with no glass, but metal bars. You can't see beyond them, even though this room is better lit than any other room you've seen in the castle so far. You decide that this room is safe to enter, and you stride into it slowly.

You walk all the way to the other end of the room. You are startled to find that upon closer inspection, the walls seem to have dark reddish stains on them... Blood? you wonder. You look down at the paved ground and the entire floor appears to covered with a fine, gray soot. You kneel down and touch it. It is slightly grainy and smells like burnt milk. The stench makes you cough violently. You have a horrendous coughing spell, but it seems to last minutes longer than it should. You look up and discover that through the windows, a dense black fog seems to be rolling in and collecting at the doorway. You stand up and hold out your torch, waiting for whatever comes.

The fog condenses completely to form an excessively large Dragon. It takes up the entire doorway, cutting off any possible escape route.

It glowers at you, its whip-like tail lashing back and forth violently. It stands crouched in the archway, poised to spring.

You try to pull out the bars of one of the lower windows, but to no avail. You whirl back around and hurl the torch at it, hoping to startle it long enough to let down its guard. Perhaps then you can run past it to freedom.

No such luck. With one easy movement, the Dragon raises its head and extinguishes your one weapon with one small poof of fire. The few ashes sprinkle over its nose, and the Dragon shakes its head and sneezes. You hang back as far away as possible, sensing that you too will meet the same fate as the torch.

The Dragon rears back and you are suddenly consumed in a white hot burst of flame. You never imagined anything so painful as burning alive. You run at the Dragon, screaming. It only builds up your pyre of melting flesh. As your skin melts off, you come to your last conclusion--the soot on the ground was the ashes of the bones of thousands of poor, pathetic souls who, like you, were foolish enough to pry into the secrets of the Dark Isle.

Try to remember what your mommy taught you this time....