Congratulations!

You have slain the adventurer the Scarlock Teshul Unzodothrem the Midnight Scorpion!

Infamy increased by 82!

Dungeon Points gained: 438

Teshul Unzodothrem's traits may now be assigned to a Favoured Minion or Boss!

Ravening: The creature is driven forward by an insatiable hunger, increasing their metabolism at the cost of increased appetite

Outliver: The creature is driven to survive at all costs, finding even the price of major injury to an ally preferable to the most minor of personal harm

Arrogant Wizard: The creature is a talented mage and places more faith in their considerable abilities than more mundane avenues

Congratulations, you have gained the trait Ruinous Innovator!

From the devastation of your best laid plans and mightiest defences, you have time and again found bold new solutions to your plight. However, fighting fire with fire often leaves everyone burned.

When attempting a desperate defence using untried methods, your efforts are more resistant to interference that would prevent the attempt. The results, success or fail, have a way of causing more collateral than anticipated.

Sedurzefon, The Emerald Fountain Core Dungeon Minions Level 6 Bastion of Artifice Floors: 7/8 Rooms: 72

Favoured Minions: 2/6

Argent of the Emerald Fountain

Kelter of the Granite Mob Tribe

Mana: 382.34/700 (2.72/s)

Dungeon Points: 4039. Next level: 5000

Named Locations: 2/2

Bosses: 0/5

Traits: Voracious Innominate, Heir In The Cradle, Dungeon Archivist, Ruinous Innovator

Attunements: Collaboration (I), Precision (I), Order (I)

The Glorious Constructs (CONDITIONS UNMET), Tasglann Nilavarai

Schema Slots: 3/4

Schema: Goblins, Frilled Sharks, Viridescent Scincid Spiders

Geas: Dungeon Conservator Infamy: 143. Your presence is a local concern. Expeditions: 0/1

Motes of emerald light surrounded the thickly scaled hide of the Mage Eater, my own thaumivore. Its scales showed the glut of mana it had absorbed, gleaming a deep octarine hue so rich it was almost black. Each scale was like the surface of a pool of oil reflecting torchlight, a dense slab of chitin as hard as steel yet supple as cloth with each movement. Its frame was that of an enormous lizard, ridged and craggy in a way I could only describe as primordial. It was as though the monster was a forgotten beast somehow freed from the crushing depths of time into the modern era. It was mine, my light lingered on it just long enough to feel the shape of each recursively faceted plate and scute. It gorged even now, mighty jaw snapping clouds of dissolving mana from the air. The sole trace of its arachnid heritage were its eyes - eight fold and arrayed around the side of its armoured head. Invisible to mage sight it had crept through the chaos to devour the Scarlock in a single devastating bite. I ended my workings, lightning cutting off in a heartbeat, the plates of the great suction engine clattering to the broken floor and the enormous lead hammer settling into a makeshift cradle.

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Not a single intruder remained in my realm, their bodies and viscera devoured either by my minions or myself. Eight evolutions continued, four Greater Frilled Sharks, three Cave Sharks and the Goblin Shark. The Saurian was the only one that played into my hands and so the only one I had called down into the lower levels with promises of mana and feelings of haste, the river now holding an eclectic mix of mundane and evolved Selachii and cave fish while two evolved spiders took their first steps. The Granite Mob was stumbling to their collective feet, ears ringing, disorientated and some even weeping blood. The sheer kinetic force of my hammer had been reflected from the Scarlock's shield in a wave of pressure that had ruptured ear drums and other sensitive organs. Argent's eyes and arms slowly began to reform, flesh rippling from gory hollows in hesitant breaths. Uller and Keller were spared the full devastation of the blast by their position on the other side of the shield but had not escaped unharmed. Their skin was mottled and burned by acid, both deafened and coughing blood where they lay exhausted and hurt on the stairs; surrounded by the ruin of rock and clockwork. My brass spider was melted by acid and heat both, hissing and popping as metal cooled and dissolved. My first trap, the acid spewer, had been destroyed. Broken gears and shrapnel spilled out from around the edges and base, the device wrested from the wall to hang from its mounting like a tongue from a corpse.

Perhaps that was why my first great victory tasted so bitter, a curdled stew that frothed in my soul. Victory, revenge accomplished, stubborn satisfaction mingled with relief to have survived, elation, pride and confusion at my minions' actions. Argent had achieved something I couldn't have dreamed possible, I was young and unlearned but I knew as instinctively as I knew how to create rock and stone from mana and thought that mortal entities simply were not capable of the same magics. Yet she had. Kelter and Uller too had clawed their way to survival and triumph against impossible odds, first escaping and then providing the key to defeating the Scarlock and his warband. The Granite Mob had fought the ratfolk warriors hand to hand, up close and personal in the Craftwind's tunnel then again from range in defence of their blockhouse. Even my lesser minions, the sharks and scinsid spiders had proved dangerous and cunning foes. I should have felt elation, triumph, pride and glory at defeating the incursion and nothing else.

It felt hollow, false, incomplete like I was missing something. Something caught at my emotions when I looked at the ruin wrought upon my halls and minions, something distant and yet intimate. I felt...bad. It was bad, a sense of badness, an inarguable wrongness. I felt it burn in a throat I didn't have, tasted ash with a tongue I would never possess. It was...a memory of an emotion, of emotions. I felt them like a mortal sees another through cheap glass, like a spiritual blurred outline. Yet that anomalous weight wasn't the worst of it. No, that came from an emotion I knew. Disgust.

The glee and satisfaction I felt crushing the arrogant Scarlock, destroying him by inches through each of his final moments; the pride and intimacy of doing so with my own workings and designs; the joy of each piece I'd created for other purposes snapping together with new elements freshly wrought just to kill my foe; all of it. They disgusted me. I felt all of those things and they felt good, like cool water polishing the gem of my soul. Carthartic and conclusive and yet, disgusting. I recognised in myself a petty bloodlust, an immature and spiteful sense of being personally wronged, a hypocrisy of one ruleset that governed me and another that governed others. I had laid claim to the lands of others and yet had the gall to be affronted, to feel a serious injustice at being invaded in turn. I was disappointed and ashamed of myself, through that pane of grubby glass in my mind. I couldn't understand it. This wasn't the fear that had come over me when the Thaumivorous Cave Crawler had been slain, to have my first and last surviving minion dying next to me, this was something else. Something Un-Dungeonlike. Something in myself not of myself.

My mind roiled, my thoughts a volatile emulsion that swirled and congealed and threatened to boil over. I ordered Ochre Tile stretcher bearers to retrieve Uller and Kelter, to prioritise their injuries. Once healed, Argent would be able to tend to them but she couldn't resurrect the dead anymore than I could. I filled the Saurian with thoughts of returning home, of slumber and satisfaction, images of the river. After several long moments where its gaze was locked upon my injured heroes, it began to return to its birthplace. I created a further 3 smiths for the Craftwind, assigning them as my free industrialists and attempted to ignite their forge but could not maintain my focus enough to control the flames. The forge flared, flames bright and green and terrible rising and quenching with crazed movements that scorched stone and melted rock. I abandoned the effort, struggling to get myself under control.

I found I could create new Vermillion Scinsid Spiders directly, not requiring an evolution now that one existed within my realm. The schema seemed to have updated to include the new template, and I soon supplemented the lone survivor with four siblings and a swarm of the smaller Viridescents. The Chimaera I could not replicate, not even able to fully comprehend the monster. There was no template, no pattern, just a roiling mess of mana channels and nodes in a meaty body. On the surface it was an abomination of chitin and scale that thick spiky fur sprouted between. Rat's teeth sprouted from a spider's mandibles, a lizards nictitating eyelids covered midnight black orbs with a feral yellow iris. Dozens of legs undulated asymmetrically from its sides and belly, multijointed limbs ending in paws, claws and tufts. Silk spewed endlessly in a dozen colours from a tail not unlike the Mage-Eater's, some cords stemming from the crowded underbelly and others sprouting seemingly at random along to flanged tips. Its structure was so unstable my attention alone was enough to cause it to further mutate, without any intention to do so. Legs shed from its belly and a long gash appeared across its back, crested spines pushing through at a sickening angle.

I retreated, pulling my light from the river almost entirely before my inner turmoil wrought more changes upon the beast. My goblins were attempting to consolidate, tending to the wounded and looting the invaders. Argent had restored her vision and paused, breathing heavily with her arms repaired to the elbows. Her forearms were a mess of splintered bone, shredded muscles and sinew that ended in ragged tatters of skin and meat where her hands should be. I tried to create more blood for her, allow her to restore her mana as we had while she fought but all I succeeded in doing was creating spurting geysers that coated the blockhouse in rich arterial spray. I had to stabilise, to cease my mental churn. I had to identify the unrest at the heart of me and so I contracted further, down staircases and halls, leaving farms and forge and armories behind, past Inheritance and Guide, into my fountain, collapsing like a dying star unto my core.