It is often wondered what exactly is required to birth a Dungeon Core. Theories run rampant as to their origin, for they are many and varied. Some Dungeons dwell in isolated mountains, others in swamps, yet more in forests. Rarely are they discovered near any known Dungeon, putting paid to any theories of reproduction or germination. Stranger still are the nature of Dungeons - some take the form of natural caverns, barren or teeming with life. Others take the form of ancient ruins, alien to all races or clearly identical to the architecture of a civilisation that holds no knowledge of any settlement near the Dungeon that took their form. Adding to the mystery are the outliers, Dungeons with no known peers, singular instances of a Dungeon found in a city's sewers, beneath the waves in a coral reef, discovered already ancient beyond all reckoning in the burnt shell of a rock from the heavens fallen to the firmament.

Yet stranger still are the personalities of Dungeons, some seemingly without limit in their creations, others rigidly locked to a single theme. Where one Dungeon is a silent tomb filled with endless traps throughout its labyrinthine corridors, another teems with mana-spawned creatures that lurk in thick, subterranean jungles that conceal entire tribes of sapient Dungeon-spawn. Where one Dungeon's creations claim their master speaks in their mind, those of another might feel only its directives as emotions and impulses, yet another's know no communication at all, simply doing as they will. Some Dungeons speak openly, their words emerging from no mouth to welcome or harass adventurers; but even these speak in a thousand tongues, known and unknown, in accents familiar or never heard, in a single language to all or being heard by each listener in their own tongue.

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Scholars and clerics the world over have spoken at length of their theories and beliefs, of resurrection, foul ritual, divine intervention or more esoteric tales of unfulfilled souls from another realm. In truth the requirements are surprisingly plain, if rare. Each Dungeon Core is born to its own unique circumstances that affect what it will become but all stem from a plain and rather dull origin; albeit one rarely occurring - a single gemstone exposed to enough mana to fill its capacity, lying beneath the surface of the world, touched by air born high in the clouds travelled unobstructed to breath life into the darkness.

One such occasion comes to pass, deep below the earth, a winter breeze carrying flecks of snow into a shaft dug long ago. It eddies, losing its flakes to the sullen, lifeless air below, skirting the surface of that interface before falling below down a wall shaped and carved by beings remembered only by the proof of their labours. Across a dusty floor cracked and rent it falls further still into the depths of a chasm far below. Into chambers untrod by any living soul or beast, lost to time it basks in the dim, scarcely reflected light of forged metals and precious stones polished to a sheen desperate to glisten. Bouyed, it flows deeper towards the light, through toppled gates, ruptured walls and splintered flagstones until it emerges into a bright room cast upon its side, its contents fallen against one wall. With the last remnants of crispness, of fresh and vibrant gales and zephyrs, it skirts across a pulsing gem, teeming with mana -