Andres walked towards the cave entrance, tired and full of dread. His party members made sure to criticize his decision to include the villager Stor every single step of the way towards the dungeon. For his part, the madman kept himself quiet and didn’t make the situation worse. He only hoped that bringing this man was worthwhile in the long run.

They stopped in front of the cave entrance, the breath of the dungeon assaulting their minds and senses. They took a deep breath in, then walked across the threshold.

Andres had few doubts that this cave wasn’t a dungeon, and those were quickly put to rest when inside. This was a dungeon, it was even more of a dungeon then the Azure Pits. He could feel it on his skin, the way his vitality quaked and shook like a candle flame in the breeze. He felt this place was dangerous, but this strange new clairvoyance was fickle.

It wasn’t hard to tell that the dungeon was playing with his mind. He was a trained professional though, and when his instincts failed his training carried him forward. The others in his party weren’t terribly stupid or novices either. The less combat-oriented held back and the others gathered into formation. Even the haggard madman readied his bow and adapted to their tactics without any trouble.

Nothing happened. He was expecting something to come out and attack him, but nothing of the sort came. He looked around and discovered that the maze of tunnels reported from the second village excursion was more accurate to the dungeon’s interior. He knew the tactics of navigating mazes and maze-like environments, so he grabbed a piece of charcoal and started marking the walls.

It didn’t take long to discover tunnels carved into the walls, big enough for the paralyzing rats that he heard about. That put him and the rest on edge. They were known monsters, with dangerous attacks, and they were seeing signs of them. He couldn’t help but think, though, of what created these tunnels in the first place.

Not just the small rat tunnels, but the much larger tunnels he was walking through. Everything was too smooth, too carved to be made by natural means. Magic was the easy answer, one that he was well aware of. He felt that if wizards and the like had the magic to create dungeons, they would have done so already. Dungeons make a lot of money.

So it probably wasn’t a wizard, but then what? Raw magic did a lot of weird things, but acting order and uniform was not one of them.

His thoughts stopped when he saw a large monster in the tunnels. Rather, the corpse of a monster. He didn’t know what the monster was, but from the fearful explanations from Stor he learned that it was a rather dangerous and powerful one. Something from the deeper parts of the forest, though not one of the truly horrific or strange monsters.

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What was strange and horrific was what was growing out of it. There were red stalks of some sort of mushroom or fungus, and no matter how he looked at it the sight made him want to vomit. Along the stalks were mellow bits of something sticking out, reminding him of some of the shelled creatures he knew from the canal.

The botanist side of the scholar crawled out and it was only through physical restraint that they managed to prevent a possible infection. Judging from the way this thing died, a tree goliath was the name or something, it appeared to die from the red mushrooms. That made him very leery about going anywhere near it.

Then he saw the insects that made the horrid stalks their home and backed off. Stor was telling them some things he gained from this ‘mythical ability’ of the exiles. Apparently the stalks of mushrooms, which he calls scarlet rot, bloodshrooms, and red caps interchangeably, had some healing and satiation properties. While they were interesting, these weren’t the sort of things that dungeons attracted.

The shell insects, as Stor called them, were a bit more interesting though. He couldn’t articulate what exactly they did, but it was easy to deduce that these monsters could cause a very gruesome death. There weren’t many species of insects in the Azure Pits, but he knew from rumors that insects could be particularly nasty. Weirdly enough, there weren’t many strange or unusual insects in these forlorn forests, though there were plenty that were deadly.

They found a puddle of some sort of skin or flesh. To Andres, it looked like a pasty wax that melted from a giant candle. Stor insisted that this was from a monster, though Andres couldn’t see how that was possible. Unnervingly, there were small splotches of red on the skin-colored ooze, the same sort of red as the fungus. He tried to assure himself that it was only a coincidence.

They wandered off and found a wolf eaten by these scarlet mushrooms too. From what he could tell, the pelt looked smoky gray though at the right angle it became pitch black. The wolf was more expressive than the tree goliath, and it fully displayed the agony of its death. There weren't any bits of shell on this one, it was a pure specimen.

They failed to restrain the botanist scholar though and he rushed to grab a piece of it. Stor tried to stop him, the entire party did, but they failed. He grabbed a stalk before he was pulled back. They waited for anything to appear, but nothing happened. That didn’t mean anything, it was possible that this infection could take some time to appear. In either case, the botanist was now the only one that was allowed to touch these strange fungus.

Samples were collected, and when they turned around to return, they found that their path was blocked by several rats. What really caused Andres to hesitate was that a couple of rats had a strange red color at the base of the roots of their fur. The same color of red as the fungus.

For some reason, he didn’t feel like this was a coincidence.