Scout duty sucked, and there’s little you could tell Emilia to change her mind about it.
The Cracked Marsh is rife with danger, everything from the variety of semi-magical wildlife that have adapted to it over the years, to the crackling lightning vents still left over from the calamity that formed the marsh. Normally she wouldn’t take one step on the craggy, water-slicked grounds, but with how close Witmore is, regular patrols of the marshland nearest to the cliffs Witmore stands on are required. Of course, the Guard are much too busy protecting the city (sitting in the barracks and getting fat as hoglins, more like), so the patrols are most often left to adventurers stuck in the Iron rank, like her.
So, she’s stuck out in a three man scout squad, trying to get the damned tinder to light on the driest slab of rock they could find to set up camp on. Eventually she threw the flint lighter to the side in frustration, groaning and falling on her back to look up at the sky. Ironically, it’s a bright and sunny afternoon, pinks and oranges bleeding into the sky, though the high humidity makes it unbearable rather than nice, the only thing keeping her from stewing in her armor like the inn’s soup last night is the light breeze coming in from the sea, barely visible from where they’d set up.
“Come on now girl, you’re going to give up on our fire that easily?”
“Oh shut up Bronswick, you’re the one with the flame affinity, I don’t see why I have to light the fire!”
“Experience girl, experience! If you ever want to climb the ranks, you’ll at least need to know how to light a fire on your own!”
Emilia rolled her eyes at the old man’s posturing. He couldn’t really talk, he’s one of those lowlife types that purposefully stay in Iron, coasting by on the maintenance check. If he wasn’t a decent meat shield she’d never have agreed to team with him. Tilting her head to the side, she spots the oddball of their little group, the fey-touched hovering over one of the little gaps in the craggy rocks featured all over the cliffside section of the marsh. They had one of their arms shoulder-deep in the crack, scrabbling around for something. Assuming they’d lost something, she sighs and gets up, walking over to see what’s going on.
“Talano? You good?”
“Mmm?” They turn their head to look up at her, wide eyes blinking in confusion. “Oh, I’m perfectly fine Emilia.”
She waits a moment for them to explain what’s going on, but they just go right back to looking in the deep crack, apparently scraping at something. She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, reminding herself not to shake the birdman silly. Somehow, she managed to get stuck with a weird one, they kind of fey-touched that never seem to understand how to function like a person. For example, implied questions.
“What are you looking for, Talano?”
“Potentia water!”
“...What?”
They finally pull their hand out of the crack, holding a ball of strangely vibrant moss, shoving it in her completely flat face. They smile like a child presenting a new pet, and she almost believes that they’d gone mad, until the tiny wisps of Potentia clinging to the moss ball brush against her cheeks.
“I thought I felt an oddly strong flow of life, and when I went to investigate I found this moss! I believe there might be a dungeon upstream-”
“Yeah no shit Talano!”
Ignoring all decorum, she grabs the fey-touched by the hand, dragging them back to the main campsite where Bronswick was quickly going from bemused to serious. Before he could ask what was going on, she hurled the moss ball at his stupid face, getting some satisfaction at seeing his gobsmacked look before her urgency put her to packing up her things.
“No time to talk, we need to get to that dungeon! Talano, do you think you could track it?”
Bronswick grumbled but got to work packing up along with her, the birdman standing off to the side with their head tilted a little, a second eyelid sliding over each of their eyes as they looked around. They hum a little, eventually nodding and pointing right for the sheer cliff wall to their right. Considering they’d only just been settling down for the approaching night, it didn’t take long to pack up and get moving.
The run is pretty easy-well, as easy as it can get when running over slabs of rock and tangly, wooden brambles-thanks to various reasons. Bronswick is experienced enough to walk through the hazards like they aren’t there, Emilia has her Rogue and Dancer skills along with natural balance, and Talano...is Talano. Before long, she could practically smell the Potentia trickling by in the little stream, growing more and more anxious.
They turn around a small bulge in the cliff wall, Talano in the lead thanks to their longer stride, but they all skid to a halt once they spot the entrance, Bronswick nearly slipping on the wet slate stone. The dungeon stood out with its angular walls of black stone, veins of turquoise color splashed across them. A faint ripple in the air hangs in the space in front of the structure, the barrier between the normal world and the space the dungeon controls bulging out like a giant soap bubble. In the slowly fading sunlight, a dull blue glow was prominent inside of the entrance, like a shining star in the night sky.
Something moving in the corner of her eye snaps her out of observing the structure. An eel-snake had somehow managed to make its way all the way here, drawn to the Potentia of the dungeon. Jolting back into motion, Emilia dashed ahead, pulling out one of her stilettos and tossing it at the creature, the edge of the blade shining with a white light as its trajectory bent and readjusts, slamming into the back of its head just before it could slither into the dungeon’s influence. They needed to keep it from absorbing any more creatures, especially something from The Cracked Marsh.
For a few minutes, the only sounds were their heavy breathing and the distant crash of waves and squalls of birds. Sighing, she inches closer, pulling the still slightly twitching beast away from the dungeon by its tail, pulling her stiletto out of it and wiping the blood off on its scales. Sheathing it once more, she walks back over to her companions, bag off of her shoulders in order to stuff the beastie inside.
“Alright, we’ve got an actual, gods damned dungeon pretty much right underneath Witmore, facing the tidal swamp of various deadly creatures. The fuck are we supposed to do?”
“Aye, quite the sight too. What do you reckon’ll be in there by now? No clue how long this thing has been here-”
“It’s a fresh sprout.”
The stout man stumbles on his words, both of the humans looking to their companion. The owlman’s secondary lids were folded over their eyes, giving them a look at magic that no human could see on their own. They seemed almost entranced, as they watched the cavern, words spilling from their mouth as more of an afterthought than a true conversation.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“The roots make it hard to tell what’s inside, but I can see the outline. It’s only about the size of a small cave, no twists or turns or corridors. We must have caught it only a few days after its emergence.”
“Roots…?” Emelia murmurs to Bronswick, but he merely shrugs and waves for the fey-touched to move forward.
“Welp, you’re the one with the magic sight, best you take front.”
Talano blinks their eyes, the extra membrane clearing away once they open, and gives the both of them a smile as they take the lead. Emilia herself hesitates as they approach the barrier, but drives herself forward on sheer will. If she wanted to be a real adventurer, she’d need to be able to face anything. She couldn’t let a baby dungeon get the best of her! Stepping in with Bronswick after Talano, she shivers at the feel of the foreign aura pressing down and mingling with her own.
She’d only been to a dungeon once before, during her days as a rookie, out at Vestholm. The aura it emitted always seemed to be trying to drown her in bloodlust, urging her to be aggressive by mere proximity. Predictably, its monsters had been terrors, willing to gnaw through each other for even a chance at killing an intruder. Her trainer had restricted her and the rest of her training group to the top floor, where the monsters were most frequently culled, but it had still been a harrowing experience.
As the group stepped into the almost supernaturally dark cavern, the dungeon’s aura mingling within her own, she felt...curious? And caution, though surprisingly little aggressiveness. The feelings being pressed down on her were more like an inquisitive child looking at an interesting creature then something that wants to kill her. Just as she thinks she’s gone mad from the stress, a scroll pops up in front of her, confirming the feeling.
========================================================================
Diver’s Boon: The Scholar (Miniscule)
Little is known of this aberrant structure, made of sculpted stone. The air here seems oddly tranquil, perfect for a scholar to muse on the mysteries of the world.
Effect:
Mana-based skills form slightly faster than normal. All Scholar-Type skills gain a minor boost in effect while within this structure.
========================================================================
She looks to the other two, Bronswick looking back at her with a raised brow. Talano, of course, has ignored the Boon, instead looking at the shorter hexagonal columns right at the mouth of the cave, their tops covered in something green, little trails of light green sap flowing off the sides.
“A bit odd as a Boon, wouldn’t ye say girly?”
“Yeah, I thought I was going mad until I saw the scroll, but considering what it says I’m still not sure.” She shakes her head and sighs, moving forward to cover her absentminded owlman friend’s back for any potential danger. “Come on, we’ve got a job to do.”
The stout man simply shrugs, moving in front of the both of them, pulling a glowstone from his pocket and hanging it from a jacket hook, the pale glow helping to light up the cave more. The black stone seems to absorb the light like a void, but the slight sheen of condensation and the reflective veins of metal outline the shape of the cave well enough. The shadows cast by the odd shape of the stone does weird things to her perspective, though.
As they venture a few more feet inside, they find the oddest things. Plants. Well, it’s not that strange to find plants, in fact they’re quite common in dungeons for whatever reason, but it’s usually wild growth, like if you put a jungle in a cave. This looked like a garden, multiple layers growing as high as her chest along the walls. It’s too...organized, too intelligent. Honestly it’s giving her goosebumps.
The miniature hall widens out shallowly into a small, vaguely circular room, mostly taken up with those terraced gardens and a big, black pond. In the far back, a stair-like set of the stone columns lead down to the pond, the top of each column filled with a small amount of water before spilling down to the next one, eventually falling to the pond below. With the dim lighting from the glowstone, small, colorful, sparkling stones shine in the stream and pond, obscured by thick, wavy lines of seaweed and odd, fuzzy-looking lilypads. The plantlife is rife in this room, most of them familiar from her time in The Cracked Marsh, others similar but very much different.
The odd thing is that there didn’t seem to be any Warped. No tumorous growths, no barkless brambles, even the insects she could see didn’t seem off in any way. There was a single razorwing pix floating through the eddies of magic, already nearly double the size a normal one would be, and yet it was the only one there. She’d have thought that there would be swarms of the things!
Floating above the pond, the core floated at the center of its oddly tame domain, shaped very oddly. She’d heard that dungeon cores tend to simple shapes, spheres, squares, crystal cuts, etc, but this one was oddly complex, kind of lumpy and wrinkly, with a little bulge at the bottom that tapers sharply into a rod. Basically, nothing was the way it should be and she was very concerned.
Bronswick seemed to be feeling the oddness too, looking back and forth for some hidden threat. He probably knew even better than her that something was off here, there simply was no reason for a core to leave itself out in the open, even a baby core would have embedded itself in the ceiling or something. Everything was just...calm.
Talano, of course, completely ignores the atmosphere, instead squinting at the pool. They kneel down, lightly dipping their hands into the water, dragging their hands through the black sand and pulling some back up into the air. They stare at it intensely, despite the fact that she hissed at them to stop messing around, before taking another look around at the strange gardens. The fey-touched gives the core a wide, silly smile, before standing back up and turning to the two of them, an odd sense of purpose in his posture that she’d never seen in them before.
“Alright, that’s about all we’ll see here. I suggest we head back to Witmor and report it in, that should give the dungeon plenty of time to get some proper protections in place for any greedy types that might want to take its core.”
“Shouldn’t we-”
“Come on now, there’s the Leaving’s Offers to do!”
Emilia watches the fey-touched walk past her and Bronswick, pulling a coin bag out and letting the sand in their hand slip into it. She looks back and forth from them to her human team mate, very much confused, but gains nothing but another confused look in return. After a moment she just sighs, slowly following the humanoid back to the entrance, hating her life just a little bit more.
They stop in the space in between the barrier bubble and the dungeon entrance proper, turning to face it once more. She and Talano get down on one knee, out of anxiety for doing the ritual for the second time and respect for the being, respectively. Bronswick, the old lump, simply sits down on the rock, complaining about his knees despite his skills. Talano leads the Offering, being both familiar with and passionate enough about it to do the whole process properly.
“For those who fell in the past, and for those who will rise in the future, we of the present leave these gifts, in hope that we may achieve great things with the lessons and experience gained today.” Talano’s tone is solem, but with a hint of excitement, likely from whatever they saw in that black sand, but she ignores it, instead focusing on what to offer.
Talano, somewhat typically, pulls a necklace from under their shirt, a primal thing made of hemp string, carved bone, and different feathers, along with a single ‘gem’ of amber. Obviously they wanted to encourage more growth in the dungeon, despite the fact that’s usually never considered a good idea. Bronswick simply shrugs, taking his glowstone off of its jacket hook, leaving it on the stone next to Talano’s necklace. She takes a few more moments to think, before sighing and pulling out her lucky rat’s tail. She’s pretty sure it’s not actually lucky, but it was magically preserved and had saved her in a few fights just from being a weird thing to throw at people. It was also the most harmless thing she could think of to give a dungeon, while still letting her say she was following the ‘give something meaningful’ rule of Leaving’s Offer.
A long moment passes, and they break from the ritual, getting up and walking out of the barrier. Looking back, the three of them watch as the dungeon seems to come alive again, their offerings dissolving into motes of magic and light. The density of the Potentia the dungeon was giving off already seemed thicker, and as they turned to make their way back to Witmore, the faint sounds of grinding stone and warbling water rushing by rock fill the air, growing fainter the further they get away. She stole a glance at Talano, seeing the determined gait in their steps that forced Bronswick to jog just to keep up with them.
“Are you sure that was a good idea? Just leaving it alone, to do whatever it wishes with whatever animals might come in?” They give her a grin, made slightly disturbing with the double-canines found inside, despite the fact the owlman literally wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“Of course! It was producing enchanted sand, the kind that’s built into the fabric of a material. Specifically, sand that encourages good growth with everything else, I get the feeling it's an Artisan dungeon.”
She had to blink at that, delving into her thoughts. She didn’t know much about Artisan-type dungeons, but she remembered that they were considered the Orven to the normal dungeon’s Warg. Much like the domesticated cousin of the Warg, Artisan dungeons don’t rely on monsters and aggression for protection, instead focusing on making new things, often producing plants and animals that can actually survive in nature, rather than being ravenous monsters. The reason they were so rare is that organized forces usually were not the first to come across them, usually being destroyed by some bandit group and sold on the black market. If this one was, they were going to end up with a lot of conflict in the near future.
Gods, she really hated Scouting duty.