Thrice in my life I had nearly died, all in the opening minutes of it. My fledgling mind had consumed the legacy of another in the very milliseconds I had begun to form. I had ceased to think and so to exist for some unknowably eternal splinter of time when I knocked myself from my birthplace. Literally, I had been seconds at most from death in the gullet of the Thaumivorous Cave Crawler. The turmoil of those experiences was writ large in my young mind. I was a mere two days old. They were defining moments, moments etched in me more starkly than any other I'd had to date. The tumult of my spiraling mind scoured even those from me, the sandstorm of thoughts eroding me, down to the smallest elemental particle of self.
In those lost memories, foundational and terrifying, lay the cause.
The sense of Wrongness that swirled in me is impossible to describe. I was not me. I was me. I was both and I was neither. It is the most fundamental truth of life, so self evident that even the mortal races have stumbled across it. What thinks, is. A living being is a thinking being, the thoughts of that being are the being itself. Their physical form is simply the vessel, a receptacle of self. A chemical binds to a nerve, causing a cell to polarise, which in turn causes a cascade that sends an electrochemical signal through a network of interconnected glia and neurons until they reach an energised fat, water, proteins, salt and carbohydrates. A ray of light penetrates a mineral shell and reaches a mana rich core. Both methodologies result in a thought that comprehends what lies before it, names it, processes a response. Without the thought there is no self; no individual. Therefore that elemental reality can be proven - I was my thoughts. My thoughts were me. I was young and unlearned, I had not yet sought to analyse the meaning of sentience, what it meant, what it was, what I was. Most Dungeons never do. We are stone. We are Dungeons. We are.
In the aftermath of the Scarlock's invasion, I had emotions that were not mine. Values I did not have were compromised, opinions not my own made themselves known. I had had them for some time, though never so strongly. Until now, my thoughts and the other were in harmony, synchronised. Now they leaped apart, recoiling from one another. Two swirling streams of conscious, anathema to each other.
I had been invaded and I had triumphed. Enemies had entered my domain, my realm, myself and sought to destroy or enslave me and my creations and they had reaped their bloody reward. To exterminate them in turn, prevail against their machinations was only Right, to gain pleasure and satisfaction at their deaths the most natural thing in the world. At the rich rewards of mana and Dungeon Points they gave me, strengthening me was satisfying and natural, a meal to be sought after and thoroughly enjoyed.
To gain pleasure from combat was a failing. The adrenaline of the fight should be neither sought or avoided. The death of even the most foul enemy should not bring pleasure but relief at one less evil in the world and security their end brings. To revel over the ruin of an enemy when one's allies lay injured on the field was disgusting. It was a warning, a red warning writ in bold strokes of blood that a warrior was becoming the enemy the clan would next stand against.
It was the proper place for my minions to stand between my core and invaders. They could earn value, weight and consideration but at the end they were tools. Tools exist to be used. I had created them and to expend them in my name was only Right. Their pain and suffering was of no conce-
WRONG! Even one's tools were to be respected, the labour that went into their creation honoured by the use of their craft. To treat those people in your care with such disrespect -
The thoughts fought and clashed through my mind, not as sentences as I have laid out here but as concepts, instincts and reactions. My mana flared and burst in the Library, contracted so tightly around my core as to be blinding to any mortal eye that saw it. Each thought was intercepted by a rebuttal, freezing out my mind in an interminable stalemate of warring ideals. My mind split further, forming a third track that was more me than either side, thinking nothing but aware of both others. What thoughts it had were mere observations of what whirled around it, yet they were more coherent than either. From that isolated spectator I slowly coalesced, became able to think and so to exist once more. I was logical, entirely analytical - my emotions seemed entirely consumed and contained in the two factional thought processes. It allowed me a clarity I often lacked, unknowing. The 'Dungeon' thoughts were more easily understood, clear and straight forward but...hungry. There was a shape to them, a sort of built in blindness - a self centered narcissism that craved the attention of mortals, the exhilaration of destroying them and the satisfaction of devouring their beings as mana. Yet it hated them, a spiteful petty emotion. The other thoughts were...alien, yet compelling in their own logic. They were communal, seeing even objectively lesser beings as equal by some strange weighting I could not grasp. They valued craft and labour, both for their output and for the mere effort expended for it's own worth. It almost saw that effort as a sacrifice to a greater entity, the sacrifice of time and energy by an individual to their society. Where the 'Dungeon' side ultimately valued its holdings and servants merely because they belonged to it, saw their expenditure only as resources to be managed, the other saw them as having value in their own right. I couldn't help but notice that was closer to how I viewed Argent and even to an extent Kelter - if they could earn my caring for them and desiring to keep them alive, was it so hard to believe the other goblins could do the same? Or that I could not simply choose to extend that value to them?
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At first I wondered if the other thoughts were due to my attunements - Collaboration, Precision, Order. The thoughts valued the work and measure of its attendant mortals, saw them not to be wasted, to be used for a greater whole and expended only in direst defence of that whole. It rang with the calls of duty and honour, of measure and defiance. It saw itself as one last bastion against the darkness, a bulwark of civilisation against the coming night, cried out with a burning need that if the clan must succumb to the black entropy of time then it would not go quietly, it would rage and blaze so bright and fierce that the afterimage would cow the dark for all eternity. Even in the emotionless depths of logic that resonated with me but one thing caught - the clan. The other's thoughts spoke of clan and kin, of hearth and home. These concepts did not exist to a Dungeon, even my division of my goblins into three tribes was simply organisational...wasn't it? I had called that captive core my kin, recognised it as being like me but...now I saw how hollow that kinship was. I saw its similarities to myself, raged against its captivity because I saw this Teshul Unzodothrem's intentions for my own core. Were I not influenced by these other thoughts already and by Leshalinod's legacies I would likely never have chosen those terms. The thought of my benefactor made me fear for a moment of outrage that the long awaited boot had dropped, the price of their aid finally coming to call. Perhaps it sought to attain new life across the bounds of time by overtaking my core, that these were its thoughts but again that word...clan. Dungeons are by our very nature clanless. We cannot birth or create new cores, nor can a gem attain the necessary mana to become a core near another. That mana would be inevitably claimed by the existing core.
No, the other thoughts were not from my attunements or another dungeon but a more primal source. They were Dwarvish. The stone memories I had absorbed and consumed and made, unknowingly, a part of my emerging consciousness. The theory was easily tested. My certainty calmed the storms of the two splinters of myself, not quiet by any means but enough I could reach out with my mana. My world reopened, taking in the Chronicle Vault once more, reaching past the carved Histories of my kind and the mechanical guardian I had inherited, up to the levels above. I saw Argent hurrying down before chattering Matrons, still regenerating her hands and forelimbs and focused my attention briefly to order them to return to their duties, Argent to return to me unescorted. Then, in the storerooms I had made, I found what I was looking for. Dwarven fossils, hundreds of them. If I was right, that these thoughts were the relic of Dwarf slain in some bygone age I would soon know.
My light cohered around an arm, dissolving it into motes of mana.