“It worked! It really worked!”

I opened my eyes to see a wizened old man with a mean looking face jumping around me in excitement, his long black cloak and the strange dark grey and sickly green haze he gave off made the sight even more surreal. The old man walked over to me and I felt him run a hand over my body.

I tried to recoil at the sensation, but I couldn’t move. Making matters even worse was that my body felt strange and foreign to me, I hadn’t even been able to move a muscle.

“I’ve done it… They said it couldn’t be done, but I’ve done it! Oh, I can’t wait to see the look on Morgana’s face! The old bat thought she was so clever with her youth restoration tricks, but when I show the coven that I’ve tamed a dungeon…”

I looked down at myself, a feat that was made all the more unusual by my being able to see everything around me in all directions, and what I saw shook me to my core. I was an orb, a simple floating white orb. I gave off a faint light and was about the size of a small child’s head, but other than that there were no distinct features to my body.

I tried desperately to move, to run my hands down my body and confirm that it was there. I was normal, I was a man with arms and legs and a head on a torso. I wasn’t some strange floating orb, I couldn’t be because that would make no sense. The only problem was that I couldn’t feel my hands, and I certainly didn’t see any…

“Now, Dungeon, from this day forward I will be your master…”

I felt something pulse into me from the old man, his hand collecting and condensing the strange haze that surrounded him before pushing it into me. I watched in a mix of horror and a twisted sort of pleasure as the white orb became dyed in the dark greys and pale greens of the old man’s hazy power. It felt good, almost right to take in the haze but a part of me screamed that it was wrong. I was a man, a person, but the old man was treating me as if I was some sort of prized tool, a thing for his use. I hated the feeling that sort of treatment gave me, but I loved the feeling of power flooding me more. It was an addictive and almost heavenly feeling to have the haze of grey and green pour into me, and even better was the feeling of it becoming a part of me.

I couldn’t be sure how long it lasted, but eventually the old man pulled his hand away. He was panting hard and dripping with sweat, but his tired face lit with glee when he looked at me again.

“You’re a greedy one aren’t you? But I suppose that’s only to be expected given what you used to be… Now make something for me.”

I didn’t understand what the man was asking of me so I just immersed myself in the euphoria I felt. It was as if I had just eaten a delicious meal until I was full right after having great sex. I wanted to enjoy the afterglow for as long as I was able to.

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Unfortunately a sharp pain digging into my body denied that enjoyment to me. I looked up to see the old man digging his finger painfully into my floating orb with a scrunched up face.

“I. Said. Make. Something… NOW!”

I didn’t know what to do, I just wanted the pain to stop. I would’ve happily tried to do whatever the old man wanted if I just knew how, but I couldn’t tell him that since I couldn’t speak. Not that I didn’t try to…

“Very well then, be difficult…”

The old man walked away leaving me alone. Relieved that the pain was gone I looked around and investigated my surroundings, I seemed to be in a cave. Everywhere I looked seemed to be hewn from rough brown stone, and the only thing I could see in the cavern I floated in besides myself was a few crates and barrels against the wall beside a small opening in the rock. I assumed that the opening, the same one the old man left through, lead to another part of the cave since there was no light coming from it. Now that I thought about it the only thing giving off any light at all was the orb that I was still having a hard time accepting as my body, and since it had changed color the light the orb gave off had grown dimmer.

I took this moment of calm to reflect on what had happened. I had woken up and there was an old man, but how had I gotten here in the first place. I thought back and felt a cold chill as I realized I didn’t have an answer, I couldn’t remember anything before I woke up in this cave. I had no idea who I was outside of the feeling I had been a man, and I certainly had no idea where I had come from. I felt myself begin to panic.

***

I had nothing to do, I couldn’t move or even speak. The only thing I could do was wait, wait for the old man to come back and maybe give me more clues as to who or what I was. I couldn’t tell the passage of time very accurately since I was stuck in this dark cave, but I was fairly sure it had been a very long time since he had left.

What did he even want me to do in the first place? He kept saying I should make something but how am I supposed to do that when I don’t have any hands?

I sighed, or at least tried to. I was getting almost painfully bored waiting here like this.

Maybe it was… what’s the word? Metaphorical? Yeah, maybe the old man was being metaphorical! But that still doesn’t give me any idea of what he wanted…

I waited, just floating alone. I could tell that it had been a very VERY long time now since the old man had left me, but even after all this time there was nothing I could do but think. So that’s what I did, and that’s what I had been doing all this time. I personally felt that I had gotten very good at thinking, something I felt proud of since at first I was almost embarrassingly bad at forming thoughts as words. Now I felt confident that I could easily hold entire conversations, well that is I could if I could actually speak.

Hmm… Maybe by make something, the old man was insinuating that I was nothing and I should make something of myself? No, that seems wrong… Make something… Huh… I guess I could try making something with my mind? Like, I could imagine stuff and then technically I would be making something… But then would what I make with my imagination really even be real? Hmm…

I was all but convinced at this point that the words of the old man had been a riddle, and I had devoted myself to trying to solve that riddle. It was the only real way I had to pass the time…