Kit awoke to the odd sensation of starving without weakness and pain without injury. His entire body felt lightly bruised and sore, while his head would occasionally twinge with phantom pains. Kit cradled his head as he sat up. There was none of the vertigo or nausea he expected. Going to bed without food again, should have made him feel more awful than usual. He should have gone and begged a scrapped of hard bread from the baker at least instead of…

Kit sat upright and scanned his surroundings. A small globe, blacker than the surrounding dimness, was the only thing that stood out to him. A human skeleton incongruously leaned against the wall, impossibly intact. Otherwise, the small dirt room was unremarkable, although he could just make out the walls and an exit, as well.

Oh, you’re awake. Welcome, brave soldier.

Kit’s soul practically left his body as a clear even voice appeared in his mind. It was like someone else was using his thought-box to think thoughts. The sensation was simultaneously weird and terrifying, since he had to wonder what else it could control if it could think In his head. Kit froze and instinctually turned to look at the darker blot of darkness along the left hand wall of the room. The blackness seemed to pulsed and the faintest hint of deep red light gleamed from a crystal at the center.

“W-who?” Kit stammered. He gulped loudly and realized that his throat was parched.

I am this dungeon that you are in.

Kit felt a sense of surreality wash over him at the word ‘dungeon’. Dungeons were places where heroes were made, fortunes were found, and fools died. He felt an epiphany as he realized he was in the last category, a fool. When Kit didn’t respond, the dungeon continued.

You are one of mine. I will give you name.

“What! No! I’m… I have a name,” Kit stammered. He lurched to his feet. The dungeon was claiming him. He’d heard stories about this, how if a dungeon claimed you as its slave you were forced to serve it for life. He had to get out of here, while he still could.

Kit staggered through the exit into another smaller room and jerked away from another skeleton, this one clearly standing upright and holding Kit’s old broken blade. He sidled past it, unwilling to show his back to a clearly animate undead creature.

Be careful of the pit. It’s not too deep if you are careful.

The warning was timely and Kit managed to drop feet first into the pit safely. It only took a few paces before he was across to the other side and scrambling up the wall that was almost as tall as his outstretched arms.

I like silver and bones, the voice commented incongruously.

Kit ran as fast as he could while zigzagging through the baffled walls. It was only a couple dozen feet later and he found himself scrabbling up a steep slope and out a hole into the light of day.

The pangs of hunger and thirst and a vague but growing sense of malaise hit him almost as soon as he stepped foot outside. All the hunger he felt before as well as a pounding headache hit him like slamming into a wall. Kit stumbled and rolled across the ground while he struggled to get his head to work.

It was daylight on the battlefield, probably, hopefully, the third day after the battle. Kit kept low, despite the smell of rot seeping across the ground thick enough to taste. The bodies were heading toward their ripest now. He looked out across the battlefield and was relieved to see very few scavengers. The best of the battlefield pickings had been taken already. These were the lazier or more determined scavengers, but still braver than Kit was willing to be.

Kit skulked his way off of the battlefield. The task was made more difficult by his headache, which seemed to get ever worse, and the pangs of hunger and thirst he couldn’t address. Beneath all of that was a general feeling of doom and foreboding that seemed to urge him to stop or to go back to the comfort of the dungeon where he wouldn’t have to face this misery, but Kit stubbornly refused.

Kit set his sights on Agrakin. The town was only an hour or two distant, even at Kit’s pace. The battle had happened in some hapless farmer’s field. As Kit left the concentration of corpses, his nose remembered what it felt like to breath air untainted by rot. Somehow, his head just hurt worse the further he went. Normally, Kit would have taken a slow circuitous route through the hedges and groves surrounding Agrakin and up to a little used sidegate. Today, he found it all he could do to find the main road and parallel it through the undergrowth.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The south gate of Agrakin was visible in the distance along the road when Kit spotted a column of armed men with prisoners. They flew no colors, but went unopposed within sight of the city. Mercenaries, probably, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be bandits too. The line of prisoners were chained at the neck and included children and women, some of whom were legal slaves in war time since they came from the army of King Barach. Some of them were probably not.

Kit crouched into the hedgerow along the road as they marched past. He felt himself break into a cold sweat and a fever chill swept through his body. Suddenly, he felt the urge to sneeze and held it in as the long train of prisoners shuffled by to sounds of clanking chains and quiet weeping.

Finally, the group was gone. Kit skulked up to the city wall. No way was he going through the main gate now. City guards weren’t above making a buck from a quick slave, either. Instead, he skulked along the wall to the east until he found the side gate he normally used. This gate was only staffed by one guard, an older man named Clyde with a penchant for cheap beer. Kit held no fear of him.

Kit rapped on the small gate, barely bigger than a regular door.

“Who’s that?” Clyde called. The slur of intoxication caused the words to run together.

“It’s Kit. Let me in.”

The guard peeked out rather than reply and moments later the thump of the heavy crossbeam being pulled back allowed the gate to open a crack. Kit wasted no time in slipping though.

“Find anything?” Clyde asked.

“I about died,” Kit said. The sudden darkness set his head to spinning and Kit had to lean against the wall for a moment to steady himself.

“Too bad,” Clyde grumbled, but didn’t press the issue. Kit just looked that terrible.

The pathways of the slum side of town came naturally to Kit, although he did find himself moving slower than normal. He quickly made a beeline for the bakery and dug into the trash bins there. Several minutes and lowered expectations later, Kit had something that could be broadly termed food. His next stop was the public fountain that bordered the middle class district.

The streets were blessedly uncrowded, and Kit made good time to the fountain, making it there before the sun topped out in the sky. He collapsed onto the fountains edge and splashed water on his feverish face. The bread scraps he’d reclaimed from the trash bins were burnt and harder than rock, but he’d learned that if you soaked it, you could eat it out of the crust like eating out of a shell. Of course, today, he was so hungry he ate the crusts, too.

After his meal, he lay back in the sun, just feeling his head ache to the beat of his heart. His stomach unclenched somewhat and he was no longer thirsty. The warmth washed through him, and quite accidentally, he fell asleep.

❦

I was bemused by the sudden departure of the two legs. I couldn’t decide if the creature was smarter than Fide or not. On the one hand, it had responded to me with words out loud, which was something Fide couldn’t do. On the other hand, Fide was much more coherent.

I decided that time would tell. The little human had left immediately seeming panicked. I hoped it was off to help in the same way that Fide did, so I told it what I liked, but the creature hadn’t responded. In fact, I’d gotten a strange jumble of incomplete thoughts and strange emotions from it before it left my dungeon entirely.

I put such thoughts on the backburner. I spent some time digging the pit a few inches deeper, and then I surveyed my dungeon. I was once again struck by how small it was compared to the threats I feared. In the midst of thinking of how I could improve my dungeon, I noticed my younger skeleton which I had stationed just behind the pit. It was holding a broken sword.

Very good! I congratulated it. It gave no sense of caring one way or the other, but I thought that it was only right to praise someone when they did something right. The skeleton had acted entirely upon its fragmented memories, left over in the scraps of mana trapped in its bones. Those fragments hadn’t all dissipated before I put the bones back together and this was the result.

I wished to get more weapons for my skeletons, so I directed the younger skeleton to step outside. Almost instantly it began to crumble. My mana bled out of it and naturally flowed back into my dungeon. After merely a pace, the skeleton had become so weak I almost couldn’t command it to return in time to save all the hard work it took to make one.

I mused over the difference between these undead and Fide, who could go out for hours on end without severe problems. I could only assume it had something to do with the ability of Fide to produce his own mana, which the skeletons clearly lacked.

I set myself to lengthening my dungeon, carving out another half a foot on every wall of my core room while the going was easy, since it was all permeated with my mana. Then Fide returned with enough bones and I made another skeleton, stationing this one at my side as well, until it had grown in power. I noticed that my first skeleton had stopped adding layers of mana. It has become as strong as it was going to through natural processes, although I thought that if I was able to live on a deeper level, my skeletons would be able to grow more powerful as well from the ambient mana.

At this time, I realized that it had been a long time since the little human had left. Fide had been quite sick after merely a day away from my dungeon, initially. Wouldn’t that be a problem for my newest companion?

Fide follow two leg? Keep safe. Be safe.

Fide cocked his adorable little head to one side and nodded. Safe.