Dungeon of the Deep - Chapter 1 - Book One
The darkness spilt over everything like a chronicler knocking and spilling their ink all over their pages, it turned something with its own history into a slave for the shadows. It was a stain to creativity when not controlled carefully, but like anything in the reality of existence, it could be manipulated to create wonders of legend.
A young girl sat timidly in the darkness, confusion and dread overwhelming her. She didn’t know how she got here, although the ladder dangling through a hole in the rocky roof said otherwise. But it didn’t help that her memory simply ceased to exist. What was her name? She ran her fingers through and then tugged at her hair in frustration, she didn’t know. It was a weird thing, she couldn’t remember something as simple as her name but she had pictures of magnificent halls and lofty decorations, all without their own names. It was as if some demon simply plucked the specific memories out of her head and decided to watch her for its own amusement.
She chuckled, the girl could see why it would be so amusing. If it wasn’t her at least, she never enjoyed masochism. Her thoughts ran dry at that, it being her in the situation grounded her sadistic impulses. Patting herself down, she noticed she was only wearing the bare necessities, and she could barely make out a leather pouch attached to a belt with a sheath at her side. Bitterly, she snuck her hand under the flap and felt for the contents, and sighed as she heard the tinkling of gems and felt a glass vial of… empty. Tears fell and the girl brought her hands to her face, lamenting the quickly increasing likelihood of her demise in this damned hole.
But she had one last saving grace she could rely on, she hovered her hand in front of herself and felt the mana run through her. It felt limited, but her groggy mind barely held on to that fact as the current reached the tips of her fingers. She willed it to make a light, and a spherical orb of light magic slowly expanded. Her concentration didn’t need to be too high, so she looked around the room she had found herself in.
It was plain, to say the least. The only feature of the room would be the hole in the ceiling and the unreachable rope ladder, but other than that it was plain. For some reason, she knew that beyond that hole was a sprawling span of caverns that held the easiest of monsters to nightmarish challenges to people’s sanity. Her mind grew fogged at the thought and the light spluttered, cracked and the room once more sunk into its eternal darkness - the last ebs of her mana fading away, and for some reason, with no signs of restoring itself. The only thing that caught her attention as the darkness rushed in was a glint of an oversized gem. She paid it no mind, her life more important than riches.
But after a while she found her eyes sneaking glances in the general direction of the gem. Even though it was true that her life was more important, if she returned to the surface with nothing to show for to pay for her massive debt, her life would be reduced to hell. She paused - trying to latch on to the vague memory that connected her to herself, but it fleeted away like a whimsical cloud.
Any attempt at grasping at the fragmented memories was fruitless, her only result being the wasting of time. It wasn't like she could do anything to save herself, the mana in her body was seemingly broken. The darkness fluctuated continuously.
Time was an enigma in the total darkness, but she hungered and her tongue started to turn dry - she could tell that time was slowly ticking by, a cold reception to her impending doom. Trying to move was hopeless, however, the way she got down here certainly wasn’t pretty as her bottom half was paralysed. She didn’t know if it was a result of a fall or because of a monster with the tendency to stab things and inject them with its lethal substances, with her being on the tail end. At that thought, she tried to laugh, but all that came was a croaking set of rasps which quickly deflated her mood. She noticed that over the past (days?), her mood inflated and deflated in record times - a slight feeling of delirium creeping up her spine made her top half shiver.
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Closing her eyes, she let the images flood them. Although her memory was a mess, inside the darkness of her eyelids it seemed she hadn’t forgotten her imagination. She was sure she was some kind of architect, tinkerer or a lover of the arts that got into the nitty-gritty, but her past self stupidly got into debt which forced her into this godforsaken hole. Clearly they never really matched, but they also did. An example of a painter never truly drawing a masterpiece until they witness one themselves, that was why, from some scraps of memories that she found, she adored a certain painter who travelled realms merely to paint the most dazzling pictures. Their art could beautify and give meaning to the lost, and it only served to enhance the already beautiful.
She felt this but with something else, something which she couldn’t quite remember. In its place was a gaping pit of agony, of tears and lost dreams. It felt like her soul had been ripped out, and she wasn’t too keen to delve into those thoughts as she was barely aware that the majority of her time in this cave was being unconscious. Opening her eyes, she saw the darkness but also saw more. It was creeping in around the edges of her vision and even that occasional blue sparkle was dimmed and subdued by the finality the darkness seemed to bring.
It was then that pictures flittered past, not real but vaguely part of her memories and the dreams of her lost future. Contraptions seemingly made out of bits and bobs, the once trash materials being manipulated into something magnificent - giving worth to the little things. A rickety old house being transformed into something beautiful, a small but enviable picturesque house built by her own hands - that was not counting the sprawling basements that were full of wonders of its own. At times she got memories and dreams that she knew weren’t her own, but it felt like a suggestion and it stuck to her. Stretching halls of grandeur were decorated in the finest metals and woods, a scant disguise for the stuffed-in traps that would spring out at any intruder. Similar halls being able to be made at ease, only limited by imagination. There were strange, but likeable scenes. Green, disfigured humanoids sat at a table playing a primitive form of poker; they wore patchwork suits, sat on ramshackle chairs made of bone and scraps of metals, had the strangest of cups full of bubbling and fizzing liquids. A two-headed wolf scratches its side with its fifth paw, both of its tails wagging in delight and three eyes squinting in pleasure.
The scenes resonated somewhere deep within her. A once dwindling spark of life felt enlivened, and the blackness receded just a trivial amount, but it was enough. A screen shone brightly in front of her eyes, and deep inside her, she felt another chance sprout at the words seemingly floating in existence.
> Your love of creation is appreciated, and your delving mind is very fitting!
>
> Rejoice! A second chance of life awaits you, where the depths of your imagination will surely be tested.
>
> Do you accept this ‘life-changing’ moment?
A small part of her flickering existence detested and shrunk away from this chance, but was quickly squashed by a growing desperate desire to live. She didn’t really know what she was going to get into, but a second chance at life? The girl no longer thought about it and seemed to have agreed from the depths of her soul.
A ding resounded in her mind, and she mentally sighed as the text shifted.
> Ding! Starting Suitable Material Absorption…
>
> 1%... 13%... 46%... 74%... 91%... Warning..! Not enough surrounding material in the designated area, increasing size… successful.
>
> 100%. Suitable Material Absorption complete!
>
> Starting Core-tuning..!
She was vaguely aware of her surroundings being pulled in towards herself, making her feel eerily full. The messages were hard to read as her entire being trembled in an unknown ecstasy, which whilst was blissful, scared her at the unknown feeling. Time itself seemed to not matter and then all of a sudden she was dropped into a black space.
Everything that happened next was quickly forgotten, but the results were imprinted on to her soul. The power behind her second life deciding the foundations of how she would be shaped.