Aristotle teaches that any good story ends in catharsis: the final confrontation of the protagonist with El Guapo - which might well be the protagonist's personal El Guapo. In the fantasy genre, which is escapist, this is externalised. Stephen Donaldson's Illearth trilogy is a meta-commentary on that.
Either way, Beowulf's dragon ends Beowulf's arc. In fantasy the whole setting is structured around that Elder Evil. Westeros offers nothing beyond its song of ice and fire. That leads to problems where the setting involves men like us: we are new to civilisation. So our Elder Evil can't be too old, either.
George Martin from the outset knew this. He figured it this way: if the evil which hated us from the ancient time is to be confronted, it must be confronted on the terms of ancient technology. On terms of fire, and of the stone of fire which is obsidian.
I've been looking into Monte Cook's The Banewarrens lately. We have an advantage here in that we can actually watch it taking shape in the author's mind. The adventure came out of that genre where the tomb-robber disturbs something he shouldn't. This had already been roleplayed, from the first decade of D&D - famously in Gygax's work: Tomb of Horrors and Lost Temple of Tharizdun. Cook here took his cue from Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane and then The Power That Preserves, that the world's "banes" were collected in one spot.
In The Banewarrens, their collection and interment happened in somewhat-recent memory. We know because the first bane released - so among the last interred - is a mortal, or an elf anyway, born maybe a thousand years back and locked into the outer 'Warrens not long after. So constrained, many of the banes in there are well-within the memory of those taking notes: the local Church remembers a Sword Of Truth, and its enemies want the Black Grail. Also the recent-ish timespan provides some rationale as to why nobody has yet burrowed in there to extract some banes for himself. Cook's backstory on Malkith, explaining how the banes got in there in the first place, is a tragedy of human good-intentions on par with the King Priest of Istar; which Hickman had accommodated into a recent past, so why not Cook for the Banewarrens.
But then this author got hubristic himself.
The city Ptolus exists only because of those 'Warrens, which are visible from miles away in the massive Spire which the Earth herself raised up in self-protexion. The banes in it may well be the worst evils, and the most amount of evils, on this planet "Praemal". Cook sketched all Praemal around the (Donaldson) theme that the banes had to be sealed away, because the forces of good could not easily push them out of the plane entirely. Like Donaldson's Land, Praemal was a prison-planet.
When Ptolus got its full gazetteer, readers learnt that the Spire wasn't under a thousand years old. It was over eight thousand years old. To offer some perspective: our Iron Age is 3000 years behind us; our literate age 5000 years, probably about the same for the wheel and bronze. 6000 BC is barely Chalcolithic. Of course that Sword Of Truth is steel, along with many many banes in there.
Cook kludged this with a civilisational-reset, in Goth Gulgamel. Its builder the "half-god" Ghul was a bane-worshipper. His rampage starts - in the new calendar - in the 440s BE by which we're now 721 IA. He's killed 55 BE. Four centuries under Sauron, Cook figured, should be enough to pound back any civilisation. Goth Gulgamel not only helps the designer to push back the Iron Age on this world, but he's the setting's own Worf: where one's unable to replicate Malkith's career, he builds up Malkith's reputation.
But in answering these questions, Cook opened up more questions. Where Banewarrens could explain how various actors remember banes and lost treasures from a milennium ago, Ptolus makes less easy to explain seven more of these. The best minds of sixteenth-century AD Europe remembered little of eighth BC Babylon or Egypt, and next to nothing before that.
Spells like comprehend languages, legend lore, and commune or maybe even akashics dragged in from Arcana Unearthed might help here. Still. Once you're resorted to magic, you've kludged.
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