As a dungeon my existence began underground, within the stones that would later become my home. I knew instinctively that this was how things were supposed to be. It was kinda like gravity in a sense, or how time never stopped going forward, a rule that was almost never broken. It of course could be broken, but it often wasn't.

The stone that surrounded me, the very same stone I was somehow in, gradually disappeared. It faded away over the course of... Time. Whether it was a week or just a few hours was a mystery to me. I just knew that a few minutes had certainly passed by the time the process had come to a stop.

By then, the stone that had made up my home had been cleared away. The area had transformed from a collection of surprisingly comfortable rocks to a decently sized room. There was no exit, or entrance rather, and the only thing within the room other than me was a statue.

For minutes I stared at the statue, my vision allowed me to see it from all angles except from below. It was a strange thing. The statue was made of stone and depicted three creatures in a tangled mess. One was a spider, wrapped around that spider was a snake, and the snake was being bit by a wolf.

Somehow I knew that the, odd looking, statue was important. What made it important, however, completely eluded me. So with lack of anything better to do, I tried to puzzle out the statue's meaning.

Was it some form of statement, a warning in disguise perhaps? Or was it symbolic of something? Were my instincts wrong and the statue was nothing more than what it appeared to be: A weird art piece in the middle of my home? More questions arose as I continued to study the bizarre statue.

Questions that were abruptly silenced when I felt something prod my mind. It was not a voice, nor a nudge, but a screen made of white light. With all the same suddenness that I had come into being with, the screen appeared before me. The words written on it in bold text told me what the statue was.

Choose starting monster: Spider, Snake, Wolf.

The statue's meaning became clear to me. It was presenting me with a choice; three options that could potentially define my future as a dungeon. I considered each of the three carefully, weighing them against one another in multiple categories.

First of the three to be eliminated was the wolf. While they seemed like a good choice, they just didn't feel like the right one for me. No, I was much more interested in the remaining two contenders. In them I could sense a lot more versatility, natural abilities that the wolf lacked and the potential to be more than just a mere beast. They had some nobility that the wolf simply didn't in my humble opinion.

Between the two, choosing one over the other was much more difficult. Both had traits I found favorable in future minions, namely poison. The power of poison wasn't to be underestimated, unlike a simple bite the effects of poison would continue to linger. It all but forced any potential invaders to retreat in order to receive medical aid. It could even dissuade them from ever coming back.

But the question was: which venomous minion did I take? The swarming spiders or the clever serpent?

The allure of noble blood was too much for me to ignore, I chose the snake. A decision made so much easier knowing that they could one day become true dragon's.

Once my decision was made the statue began to crumble away. First the wolf turned to dust, followed by the spider, and finally the snake. The dust then came together to form a large clump in the middle of the floor. Aforementioned clump, then gradually transformed into a mass of snakes.

They were small little things, the snakes. Each one was barely more than a foot long and seemed more than a bit frail. Thankfully it wasn't anything some dungeon magic couldn't fix. Which was something that I, once again, knew to be instinctively true.

Just as I came into being, so too could I alter my minions with nothing but a thought so long as I had the energy to fuel it. With the very same magic I was also capable of altering my dungeon, within reason of course.

Stolen novel; please report.

Using these abilities I took my first steps on the path to becoming a right and proper dungeon.

It began with making my minions more menacing. Taking one of them to use as a template for the rest, I began my work. Magical energy forced its way into my chosen minion, making him grow according to my whims. Once he was roughly five times the size he had begun as I stopped making him grow any larger.

Next I modified him into something much more fearsome. Sharper, and longer, fangs were added as well as more durable scales. His venom was made stronger, a lot stronger actually, and I increased his intellect. He was a true predator capable of hunting large prey on his own by the time I was done. A satisfactory minion.

Still, I continued. To make him worthy of the title monster, I gave him the inexplicable ability to rapidly regenerate from most minor wounds. And just for added flair I made his scales sharp enough to cut skin on contact.

A deeper understanding of magic would be required before I could give him, or any of my minions, the ability to do anything relatively magical. So for now I would settle with mundane changes I had already made and apply them to each of my minions. It didn't take long for me to do so. Now that I had already done it once I could do it on demand.

Soon all of my tiny snakes had been transformed into true, albeit non-magical, monsters. With little more than a few hisses they spread out and settled into the cave that was my dungeon. I watched them for a few moments before beginning the next step of my life as a dungeon.

Making my dungeon into a real Dungeon, that is.

Magic unseen swept over the entirety of my cave and changed it a moment later. The whole cave was made bigger, wider, and deeper in equal measure. Tunnels were carved throughout the surrounding stone, forming paths that ran above, below, and beside one another. Some I filled with traps, others I simply had a few of my minions go and lie in wait within.

Soon the simple cave I had been born in had been transformed into a twisting underground labyrinth that was severely lacking in light. Rather than remedy the darkness, I instead took advantage of it and made it so that my snakes could see in the dark. And for added lethality I encoded in their brains a certain draw towards all things bright. That way if an adventurer came into my dungeon with a torch of some kind they'd quickly get overwhelmed by my, soon to be, veritable horde of minions. Until acquired such a horde, however, my snakes would make for good assassins slinking about in the dark.

With both monsters and a proper first floor, I set to work on building some traps. They were simple things at first. Thin ground that would fall away to reveal a dangerous pit. Or stalactites that would drop from above on the heads of unsuspecting adventurers. Very few were more complex, and those that were ended up being well thought out ambushes.

A feeling of completeness came upon me as I finished my last trap. A readiness and eager joy to test myself upon whatever adventurers dared to enter my lair. An instinctual need and desire found within all dungeon cores. I was ready.

Unfortunately my ambitions would need to be tempered by patience. It would take some time before any adventurers found me, wherever I was.

So I waited,

... Waited,

..... Waited,

........ And Waited.

Days of boredom passed before something at long last entered my dungeon. It wasn't an adventurer like I had hoped, nor was it even human. The first being to enter my dungeon was a crab, a dog sized crab but a crab nonetheless.

Mostly out of a mix of curiosity and boredom, I let the crab be. My instincts demanded that I have my minions hunt it down and kill it, but I ignored them for the time being. After all it was just a big crab, what threat could it possibly pose?

My thoughts on the matter quickly changed, however, when the crab found and killed one of my minions. The crustacean simply reached out with one massive claw and snipped the nearest serpent in half. It happened so quickly that I was stunned and in shock.

Several seconds passed before I finally reacted. A command traveled through the minds of my many serpentine minions, telling them to remove the crab from my lair. Within moments more than a few snakes found their way to the crab and attacked it as a group.

They lunged at the crab, Jaws unhinged and opened wide. Fangs sunk into crab flesh, effortlessly going through its red armor. With a supreme speed the two snakes tore the crab apart, almost literally. They ripped one of its arms clean off and then, over the course of the next few minutes, they let their venom finish the job for them.

It was an unpleasant sight, one that awarded me with a surprisingly small amount of motes of magical energy, aptly named: Dungeon points. Which was, again, something that I just Knew. I absorbed the points like a fish in desperate need of water and felt a sense of refreshment come over me.

The feeling was immediately followed with another influx of 'points'. They came from beyond my dungeon, from the realm outside, and didn't stop trickling in. I wasn't sure if this was because I had met some unknown conditions or if the Points had simply chosen now to begin flowing into my dungeon.

Regardless of the why, the new source of dungeon points enabled me to do what all dungeons longed to do: Grow.