Because of how many of us were sent into the dungeon, and since there were only eight doors, it was unlikely that we were going to find a path that no one else had already been down. We could have checked every door, but in the end, it wouldn’t have mattered. For one, we wanted to be moving towards the direction of Eraztun’s outer wall, in case a tunnel led to the outside and we could escape. So most of the doors were out of the question. Escaping from Berenguer was, in many ways, the most important thing, though pissing him off was pretty high on the list, too.

But besides that, we were looking for the core of the dungeon. Despite the way the entrance looked like a central hub, it was not the core. Cadoc informed me that the core, unlike what you might think, may not be anywhere near the center of a dungeon. The dungeon and its influence spreads from there, but it does not necessarily spread equally in all directions.

But everything would be connected. Eventually, the eight paths would either converge on the core, or some would reach dead ends, and we would have to turn around. And even those dead-ends might contain treasure. So there was no point trying to avoid our fellow travelers - either we would bump into them, or we wouldn’t. Still, we were doing our best to avoid the ones we already knew were hostile.

Is it too much to ask that the other groups are friendly? I asked myself. I practiced my best Tom-smile as we entered the room, just in case. But without a mirror, it was just an exercise in muscle memory until the smile felt right.

The room we had entered before had been dark, but this room was lit by torches lining the walls. Much of the room was still shrouded in shadows, but I could more or less see what was there.

What was there was bodies.

The smell hit me first. It smelled like sulfur and copper, sewage and blood.

The other thing, just as oppressive as the miasma, was the silence. Nothing stirred here. I would have sworn I could hear my own heartbeat as it throbbed in my chest.

Slain Kalamuzi lay on the stone floors. Blood stained the walls, and body parts were strewn haphazardly, unmoved from where they had presumably landed. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining a ratman head flying off in an arc, as I peered into the beady eyes of a beheaded Kalamuzi, who seemed almost to stare back. I turned away.

Most of the bodies, I realized, were laid on piles of straw, filthy clothes, and other trash. I doubted that the other adventurers would have done that.

“A barracks,” Amaia said. “They were sleeping.”

I had been coming to a similar conclusion. This wasn’t the scene of a battle, but a slaughter. Somehow or another, the last group through here - or the first of them, if there were multiple - had managed to kill the Kalamuzi as they slept.

“So close to the entrance?” I asked, slowly navigating a path through the carnage. “Were the Kalamuzi getting ready to attack the surface?” I shuddered, thinking how only one wall had separated this scene from where we had slept the night before. Though the Kalamuzi must have been long dead by then, so we were still in no real danger. Probably.

“It is unlikely they had a plan, friend,” Cadoc responded. “These are monsters barely above the level of animals. Perhaps they were preparing for an attack, or perhaps sleeping next to the entrance never even struck them as strange.”

“They clearly weren’t prepared,” Amaia added.

I slipped on the ring so that I could levitate over the blood, and keep from tracking the filth everywhere. Cadoc and Amaia could figure out a way through, or they could get dirty. As long as they didn’t bring the smell with them, I didn’t care. Stealing from Berenguer was feeling better all the time. It felt like walking on clouds.

I scolded myself for the joke, but I didn’t pay myself any mind. The humor was helping me deal with my gruesome surroundings.

I hovered near the bodies, looking for anything valuable. But either the bodies had already been picked clean, or they’d never had anything on them to begin with.

Some of the corpses, I noticed, had no wounds. I wondered what had killed them - poison? An unrelated disease? But then I noticed the blue lips of one, and the cold that still seemed to emanate from him, and I was able to guess at whose footsteps we were following. I only hoped she was friendly.

There was little else in the room, which had clearly been only for sleeping. Still, I marveled at its construction. It was a rectangular room of smooth stone, which had either been painstakingly carved from the rock, or the stones had been hauled here at even greater expense. I found it hard to imagine the Kalamuzi - with their little hands - building such a room, and even moreso the entrance chamber. Had the rooms already been here, before the Kalamuzi and the dungeon took them over? Or had the dungeon created them, somehow?

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It didn’t particularly matter. This room seemed to hold nothing for us, so it was time to move on. Another door was directly across from where we had entered, and we pushed ahead.

The next room was a new hell. It would be a long time before my eyes - and especially my nose - forgave me for the torture I was bringing them. The smell was that of rotting and burnt food, and a fire still burned in a primitive clay oven - I say primitive, but it was honestly quite impressive that these monsters had figured out how to build one, if they had.

This was another room carved of stone. Square, and smaller than the last. A few tables set up next to the oven, in the center, and not much else. The fire in the oven told me that someone had been using it recently, but I couldn’t imagine how anyone - even Kalamuzi- could stomach to cook or eat here. The food piled on the tables had gone bad long ago, and it crawled with maggots, and I had to turn away before I vomited. I was afraid to even breathe in there.

There were three doors leading off from that room. Our first real chance, I thought, of finding a path no one had yet taken. We picked a door at random, desperate to leave - the one to the right of where we’d come in.

Gone was the smooth stone. Instead, we entered into a long tunnel - a cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites. I was impressed with myself for remembering the difference. I recalled what a teacher had told my class back in school - stalactites are the ones that hold tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites are the ones that might poke you in the ass. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I remembered it, so it had worked. Suddenly free from the oppressive filth of the ratman living spaces, I allowed myself a chuckle at the memory.

“Think this leads to the surface?” I asked. I slipped the ring off, now that there was nothing to avoid at my feet.

“Impossible to know,” Cadoc said. “Might lead straight to the core, for all we know. I would not expect the dungeon to give us hints. Straight on.”

But Amaia had raised a hand, signaling us to wait.

I couldn’t see anything. The cavern stretched out before us, and thankfully the stalagmites were only against the edges, so there was a clear path forward. It was dark, but the light from Cadoc’s torch carried far. There was a little patch of green some distance ahead, maybe two feet by two feet, but it was clearly some sort of moss or mold.

I squinted. The moss was… moving.

“What is it?” I asked. I inched forward. I felt absolutely no sense of danger from the thing. Maybe I should have.

“Looks like some sort of mold,” Cadoc said. “I wouldn’t get too close, friend.”

Amaia didn’t say anything, but it was clear she felt similarly.

I frowned. There was only one way forward, unless we wanted to try a different door. The green mass undulated and quivered with subtle movements, and there was only a few feet free on either side of it.

“Could we just walk around it?” I asked. “It can’t move, can it?”

Amaia shrugged, but Cadoc volunteered. “I will get to the bottom of this. Stand aside.”

Cadoc strode forward, walking along the right edge of the tunnel. When he got to within a few feet of the mold, he stopped, pivoted and quickly walked back towards us, shaking his head.

“I’m afraid not, friends. We should find another path.”

I laughed. “What? Why?”

“See for yourself.”

I peered at the mold, wondering what trick it could possibly have up its sleeve. It was mold, for goodness sake. What was it going to do? Trigger my asthma? I wasn’t graced with that condition, luckily.

I walked up the same way Cadoc had, determined to walk right past the mold. But when I got to the same spot Cadoc had gotten to, a chill run up my left foot, then my right, crawled up my legs, and continued, slithering higher and higher.

It wasn’t quite a sense of cold, exactly, as I first thought. I was draining heat. That’s the best word I could find to describe it. Draining. I felt my body heat leave me, and the mold seemed to pulsate more violently. I stared at it for a time, captivated by its movements, and began to feel faint, shivering. The dance of the mold was mesmerizing, and I didn’t feel bad, necessarily, just cold. As the heat continued to leave me, I felt more and more like a walking corpse. A standing corpse, I supposed. I didn’t feel afraid, but tired. I wanted to lay down, to close my eyes, to have a little rest…

I had been blinking heavily when something spectacularly warm grabbed my arm and pulled me from behind. I fell backwards, and it felt as if a great rush of heat came over me, like from an oven door being opened. I laid there on the ground for awhile, and it felt like sunbathing, even in that dark tunnel, with armor on.

“Are you alive?” Amaia asked, kicking me. She almost sounded concerned, I thought.

I nodded. My senses were starting to return as I thawed. “What the hell was that?” I asked.

“A monster,” Cadoc answered from somewhere. “I propose we take a different path.”

“Good idea,” Amaia answered.

I sat up, slowly, and took off a boot. My foot didn’t look frostbitten or anything, although the left one was still a little numb. I wiggled my toes, and they moved. I sighed in relief.

I put my boot back on as Cadoc came into view, and then he and Amaia both helped me to my feet. I was a little unsteady, but it was getting better all the time.

“Now wait just a minute here, guys,” I said. The mold must have drained out some of my hesitation as well, because I felt extremely motivated. I hoped, silently, that it hadn’t drained any intelligence. “If there’s a life-stealing mold on the ground here, then that probably means no one has been this way, right?”

They nodded.

“And if we want to find some treasure, we want to go where no one has gone before, right?”

“Yes,” Amaia started, “But…”

I held up a finger. “We shouldn’t give up so easily. Are we really going to be stopped by a bit of mold?” I looked Cadoc in the eyes. “Are we?”

He shook his head. “We are not,” he said confidently.

I looked to Amaia. She rolled her eyes, but didn’t protest.

“Alright then,” I said. “Let’s try a couple more options. Who wants to bet this mold is flammable?”

I took a small bunch of nails from my pocket, and placed them on the floor. With a couple of tries, and lot of concentration, I was able to melt them together into a little chunk of nails again. My body may have been recovering slightly, but my mana pool - reservoir, whatever it was called - was seemingly fine. When the chunk cooled, I picked it up.

“Here goes nothing,” I said. I took a few steps forward, drawing an invisible line in my mind where the radius of the cold was, based on where I had felt it. I walked up to just before that range, then tossed the chunk at the mold. It wasn’t very far away, and, luckily, it landed. The mold didn’t react in any way as the nail chunk fell on it, almost like it was ignoring me. I felt like an idiot for thinking that mold was ignoring me, but there I was.

I lit the chunk, and the little flame burst upwards from it for a second.

And then it went straight down.

It was strange to see the flame warp like that, as if the rules of physics had suddenly inverted. The flame was pulled down to the ground, flattened wide against the surface of the mold.

For a moment - and only a moment - I was pleasantly surprised by this. I had no idea what I had done, but, somehow, I had made my spell even better. I was burning the entire mold, rather than just the little bit where the nail was.

I was in the process of mentally patting myself on the back when the mold reacted.

It grew. In fact, it ballooned to double its size, shooting across the floor in all directions. It grew vertically as well, now a couple of inches thick, and I saw then that the flame wasn’t being pressed down, but sucked in, like the mold was taking a deep breath of fire, feeding on the heat. I jumped backwards in a panic as I felt that ghostly hand of cold reach out for me again, the mold growing and pressing closer.

I didn’t know, then, if it stopped growing at that point, or if it continued, because I turned and booked it.

“You were right!” I yelled as I ran to the door. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”