Now, there was a certain type of spirit that became a dungeon core. Those spirits had to be immensely powerful in order to anchor their soul to the world, often well and above their peers; they had to have authority, able to grasp at the very strings that made up Aiqith and refuse to let go; they had to have knowledge, to be aware of the innate magic that was needed to rip one's own soul out as their body perished.

But above all else, they had to be smart.

I was, of course, very smart. Brilliantly, wonderfully smart.

And every possible thought that my crystalline form had was firing.

The schema that sat heavy in my core had spent the last months staying still and pretty, which was perfect, because I did not like it and I did not want it moving. The gods hadn't even wanted to give me the schema, had only relented when I'd argued that I needed to know what it was so I could defeat others who attacked me; they hadn't wanted me to create one. I hadn't wanted me to create one. They were the antithesis of creation, to everything my halls stood for.

The pitch-shark.

Its schema shouldn't be aware. Shouldn't be anything more than a tool for me to use.

Shouldn't know what that rune was.

Well. For all I was terribly clever, I was also terribly curious.

I reached out, hesitant, to the scroll; pulling out a curl of mana, I pushed it through the outline of the rune, tracing over top of it. The half-circle rising sun—or setting?—the line splitting it, the cracks beneath. A final jagged line–

Something lurched.

Waters deep, waters endless; swimming through the Darkness Between the Stars–

I jerked back.

The thought—the idea, the memory—sunk back beneath the surface, sluggish, wisping away as if I'd never had it. But if I stayed still, mana frozen around me, I could almost imagine that I had a body again, one dark and sinuous, swimming through water—through air? through something emptier?—in an all-encompassing need to devour something, something bright, something scorching and impossible before me–

And then it was gone.

Gods, what was that thing?

My mana shuffled a little hesitantly around me.

That rune was… something. I didn't have words to describe it, not as a sea-drake and not as a dungeon core, but it was something, and it scratched at my thoughts like a living thing. Runes were old, yes; frightfully old, passed down from the gods in the nameless world, unmade by anything on Aiqith. They had power, direct connections to mana beyond these shores. A whole other suite of elaborate metaphors that I could wax poetics about until the moon fractured and the oceans fell, but.

They weren't this. Runes summoned power, inlaid protections, called upon gods. Not whatever that had been.

Nicau's memory said that the man selling the scroll had said he picked it up from a recent excavation—and had thought, judging by his desperation to sell and lack of a nightmarketer cabal behind him, that he was a local. So there wasn't far he could go beyond the walls of Calarata for excavating something.

So where the hells had he gotten this scroll?

It was made of dried animal skin I didn't recognize and with runes spelling out a lovely little poem that spoke of something that had happened well before known memory. That wasn't normal—of course, nothing about this situation was—and there was a biting sort of frustration as the pieces didn't magically fall into place.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

That wasn't my only sensation, though.

Because, far in the back of my awareness, there came a prickle of something deep and bright. Some like star-burn.

A god's awareness.

They had sensed me playing around with the rune, and I got the strangest little idea that they did not appreciate that. It wasn't anything specific—not the redwood smell of Rhoborh, the gnashing stone-teeth of Mayalle, the iron-rot of Nuvja's darkness—just a taste of divinity. The distant awareness of dozens, maybe more, different gods focusing in.

The roughest outline of a single rune was drawing all this attention.

The star-burn deepened.

I made a split-second decision—I reached out in a cloud of mana and dissolved the scroll, eating into the stretched animal's hide and dissolving it into golden motes of light that flickered gently through my floor, eventually reaching my core. Gone, only the disturbed green algae beneath as any sign that it had ever existed. With it gone, I had disintegrated everything Nicau had brought back from Calarata, and once more my dungeon was full of only dungeonborn things. Normal.

Nothing unnatural.

Look at me, I was practically shouting. Getting rid of the evidence, no more rune, all gone, see? Nothing to worry about here.

The star-burn hummed, a final push, and drifted away.

I exhaled an unfortunately intangible breath of air.

Well. That decided things for me. I wasn't the weak-scaled type to roll over and show my stomach at the first sign of disapproval, but the gods weren't exactly ones I felt comfortable ignoring. That hadn't been an order per sé—probably better for it, because if it had been an explicit order I absolutely would have disobeyed it on the principle of the thing—but it had been a very strong suggestion.

I still remembered the message, so long ago—telling me I should have received an Otherworld schema right when I'd first come to awareness. But the gods hadn't given me that, and they'd left me to flounder and nearly get captured immediately. It was only after I offered them pretty floors to claim as their territory that they had started paying me mind.

Not particularly fond of that, I was.

But I was less fond of them smiting me in an overloaded bolt of incredible divine power, so I bristled my mana, waving it around the Fungal Gardens like I was cleaning the air, and set about busying myself. Normal, classic tasks that I had been doing before Nicau dropped these lovely things into my halls.

Speaking of, I swam down through my various rooms, sinking a few points of mana into the third floor. I bored a tunnel for Nicau, closing it behind him as he fumbled through the stone; I wouldn't make him ruin his nice new clothes this time by swimming through, even if I very much needed a more permanent plan for him to constantly travel from the Hungering Reef to Calarata. Irritating.

Everything about today was irritating. Even the newest schemas and title sitting pretty in my core weren't enough to shake the feeling that something was wrong.

But if I got caught up in that, I couldn't prepare for the Adventurer's Guild that was assembling itself merrily outside my door; and if I started researching it, then the gods would notice, and I had the worrying little thought that they would not necessarily appreciate that. They had barely let me keep the pitch-shark's schema, and this rune was intrinsically tied to it; or, if not it, then where it had come from. Where it had come from before.

No, they wanted me as a docile little dungeon, creating new creatures and bringing mana to an Aiqith that was deprived of my abilities. Messing around with anything from the Abyss was not the plan. Was not anywhere near the plan.

So I would play along. I continued guiding Nicau lower into my halls, towards the wave-lapped beach where his new sleeping den sat—almost ironically, the new leader of the unevolved kobold tribe up in the Drowned Forest had been too in awe of Chieftess to take over her room and thus had taken over Nicau's as the next best—and smoothing over the worst of his exhaustion. I gathered together my mana and prepared to fall upon my Hungering Reef, finishing it as best I could; to aid in the fledgling sea serpent coiling through the third room, the billowing clouds of prismatic dartfish, the almost-finished evolving reefback turtle. Going about my regular life, reacting to the week or two timeline that Nicau had given me before the Adventurer's Guild was completed.

Normal. Everything was normal, of course.

But in the back of my core, hidden beneath the running concentration that was necessary to maintain my dungeon, I carved a memory of the shape of the rune. Not a full thought, not anything that could manifest, to draw attention of either the gods nor the twin-mawed beast in my core; just a blip. Hardly even a flicker.

The rune I would remember, and when I knew more, when I was more comfortable, when the gods were more trusting or perhaps unable to look at me, then I would try. Then I would experiment.

Because the rune meant something. I knew that.

But I could wait. And I would.

And one day, I would discover what it did.