The sound of about a dozen goblins exclaiming in surprise, confusion, relief, and lingering panic was almost loud enough to drown out the sound of rushing water as the flooded main cave emptied back into the pillar room. The goblins were still looking pretty rough: some had gone into the water at bad angles, dislocating shoulders or injuring themselves in various other ways. Even among those that had hit feet-first, it didn’t look like any of them were strong swimmers. The goblin that had jumped first, in particular, was frantically trying to get water out of her baby’s lungs. Before their feet had even touched ground, others were rushing over to help her, and thankfully a thin, reedy cry soon added to the general cacophony.
I’d hated loud noises and noisy environments as a human. As a dungeon, without physical ears to hurt, it didn’t seem so bad. Besides, the situation more than made up for it. I hadn’t managed to save all of them, but I’d at least saved most, and the human adventurers chasing them were all dead. Thanks for the xp, assholes: save me a seat when you get to hell.
I still couldn’t understand a word the goblins were saying. Probably needed some way to communicate with them, at this point. I looked back over my skill list. Part of the increased system access I’d gotten after passing level 10 – who knew if it was tied to the level, some threshold of my base stats, or what – seemed to be that I could partially preview skill trees, getting some information on how a given skill might evolve or what other skills it was a prerequisite for. This would definitely (hopefully) help with avoiding build traps or dead-end advancement paths. More immediately relevant, though, it let me identify a pair of skills that would solve my language-barrier problem.
[The Heart Speaks] allowed me to speak anywhere within my domain. Based on the skill description, it worked by using the azoth of the domain to directly create sound from the air. It only worked for speech, though, so no sonic attacks or atmospheric background music – though maybe there were some upgrades for that, further down the tree.
That didn’t solve the language problem, though, which was where the second skill came in. [Apophic Tongue] could apparently be accessed in a variety of ways, one of which was having [The Heart Speaks]. The skill's description was jam-packed with juicy lore implications.
[Apophic Tongue]
Prerequisites: [The Heart Speaks]
Keywords: Knowledge, Language
Also called Wyrmsprach, Sorcerer’s Cant, the Lex Titanicus, the Foul Speech. The most unholy and ancient dialect of [Monster]-kind, the harlot mother that has birthed their countless species of debased vulgarity. Apophic is understood by all [Monsters], even those ordinarily incapable of language or possessed of only animal intelligence. Knowledge of the Apophic tongue allows the speaker to comprehend all [Monster] languages.
Lex Titanicus, huh…the “Titanic Law.” The language of sorcerors, named after the serpent Apep of Egyptian mythology, personification of chaos and enemy of the sun god Ra. A common origin for all monsters…word as law… There was a lot to unpack there. I’d have to ask the goblins what they knew about it, if anything.
Alright. Time to make some new friends.
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Nar-shesh was shaken from the pit of guilt and shame that had swallowed him by the sight of movement behind the others. He started to his feet, wildly seized for a moment by the impossible notion that it was the humans, they’d survived, it was an ambush, they were all going to die – before reason reasserted himself and he had the much more likely thought that whatever powerful monster’s den they’d stumbled into was now creeping from its burrow to devour them at its leisure.
Through a doorway (really just a crude, asymmetrical cleft in the stone) that had been submerged under the draining waters, something was moving. As he shoved his way past the other survivors of the village, he saw that it was a thick pillar of the same pale stone that made up the cavern walls. It was sinking below the water that now filled its chamber. There was something on top of it: as the pillar sunk, it came into view, and as the others turned to look where he was looking someone gasped.
It was a realmheart. He’d never seen one – no one in the tribe had, for at least five generations – but the descriptions were unmistakable. Nar-shesh had known their salvation was miraculous, but he hadn’t until now realized that it was a straight-up miracle.
“Uh, hey y’all,” came echoing words, emanating not from the living metal heart the size of a full-grown goblin but from all around them. They sounded all at once like the hiss of a serpent, the roar of a river, the mournful howl of the wind – and a husky, hesitant woman’s voice. “I’m Persephone. Welcome to- oh, wow. Hang on. I’m Persephone,” the realmheart said, as though savoring the taste of the words. She laughed – giggled, really – sounding utterly delighted for reasons that Nar-shesh could not fathom. “Yeah. Okay. Cool. Um, I’m Persephone, and welcome to my f- uh, my dungeon.” After a beat, when no one had spoken, the realmheart awkwardly said “Ta-daaaa…” in a way that inexplicably gave Nar-shesh the mental image of someone spreading their arms and wiggling their fingers.
Teekas’ father Sarsu was the first to throw himself to the ground, prostrating himself in obeisance. Most of the others followed suit. A few remained standing, Nar-shesh among them. Gratitude and reverence for this holy being were probably, by many metrics, the appropriate emotional response here, but he simply could not feel them. It was like none of this was really happening to him. He just felt…empty.
Nar-shesh almost wished that he had died, after all.
The realmheart – she’d used the human word,
Most of them shook their heads no. A burst of irritation at their unfounded optimism broke through the dark cloud choking Nar-shesh, and he spoke. “We don’t know. Those were the only ones chasing us but we don’t know if there are other
“How many humans know you’re out here, then?” the
Nar-shesh shrugged. “We thought no one, and then they set the barn we were sleeping in on fire,” he said. Exhaustion robbed his voice of affect, leaving it flat. Dead. Just like he felt.
“Alright,” said Persephone the dungeon. “Alright, we’ll worry about that later then. Do y’all need anything? What can I do to help you right now? I don’t have any medicine or bandages or anything. Lemme, hang on a sec-” With a loud grating of stone on stone, square pillars of rock emerged from the cave walls, forming a spiraling staircase that led up to the sunlight above. Then, as they watched, the cave-in that had crushed the adventurers was reversed, stones and soil rising and reassembling themselves. The stink of gore suddenly filled the air as the flattened remains of the adventurers were exposed. “Oh, gross,” Persephone mumbled absently. “Should probably clean that up…”
“A fire would be helpful, sainted elder sister,” Teekas said hesitantly. “It’s cold and we’re wet.”
“Not that we mind being wet! The water of your lifesaving mercy is a blessing,” Sarsu interjected.
“Right, no, yeah, hypothermia and all,” Persephone said, ignoring Sarsu. “You guys are gonna have to start it yourselves, but lemme see if I can knock a tree over for you or something.”
“We should go get the…” someone began, haltingly. “The, um, go get Darkazgu, and Kadash, and…and Limdu, and…”
“I’ll do that,” Nar-shesh interjected. Stop fucking stammering, he thought bitterly to himself. Just say it. Go get the-
The-
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
If anyone said anything else, he didn’t hear it as he trudged up the stairs, trying and failing to say the word “corpses” about his family.
----------------------------------------
I had a lot more questions for the goblins, but after making sure that there weren’t any more humans coming to kill me in the immediate future, I decided to let them rest. They seemed pretty shaken up.
I, on the other hand, was feeling weirdly peppy. After all those level-ups, I was flush with skill points, my azoth pool was refilled and enormous, and my new understanding of [Dungeon Domain]’s power had my mind alight with possibilities. The physical boundaries of my domain, too, had expanded. The creek, formerly scraping the edge of my domain, was now well within it, and I could feel several small caves pockmarking the limestone underneath the forest.
Even better than all of that, though, was that when I tried to tell the goblins my name, it worked. That sense of stifling surveillance, of the universe itself bearing down on me, was still present, but blunted. With the eerie, inhuman syllables of Apophic, I felt like I could say anything – speak any truth, no matter how little the world wanted to hear it. It was exciting. It was liberating.
“Persephone,” I whispered to myself again. “My name is Persephone.”
I couldn’t be totally absorbed in my own happiness, though, as I watched the survivors wearily begin settling in. Grief and exhaustion weighed visibly on their shoulders as they gathered dry wood for a fire, bandaged injuries, quenched thirst, gathered the bodies of their dead – well, the two dead that had been killed before they made it to the dungeon. The two that had died in the cave were pretty much unrecognizable. I felt a little awkward about that, but there’d been no way around it. That any of them had made it out alive was lucky enough.
I figured there was nothing to be done about the grief: they’d all need to come to terms with what had happened in their own ways and on their own schedule. In the meantime, the best thing for me to do was provide tangible, practical help.
My heart-body beat once more, and a surge of azoth swept out over the domain. It was hierarchy-of-needs time, and the most foundational need was safety. Safety meant defensibility, and defensibility meant access control. With another small earthquake, I began to drag the earth of my domain upwards. An unremarkable stretch of forested, rolling hills was suddenly a single, roughly circular tumulus. Steep walls of earth rose almost vertically, more than three times the height of a human. At opposite ends of the mini-plateau, narrow ramps ran clockwise up the wall. Any hostile force that came looking for trouble would have to either scale the sides of the plateau (doable for now, but I intended to put a palisade up at the earliest opportunity) or walk single-file up the ramp with their sword-arms awkwardly pressed against the wall while the defenders, striking from above, would have full range of motion.
The extra elevation had to come from somewhere: it came, unsurprisingly, from below. Great caverns tore open in the bedrock. For now their shapes and sizes were more-or-less random, opening along natural fracture-points and cleavages in the rock: I’d neaten them up as I expanded into them.
The stream obviously couldn’t flow uphill, but I wanted to maintain access to a source of fresh water so I directed it underground instead. It flowed into an unwelcoming-looking hole in the ground a short distance from the mound, through a series of airless twists and turns hopefully too lengthy for any diver to hold their breath and too small for them to fit through anyway, before emptying out into the underground caverns.
That put a considerable dent in my azoth reserves, but I was far from done - which was good, because I’d been reading as I worked and I’d picked my next two skills. [Empower Minion] built off of [Bind Minion]. It allowed me to turn my azoth directly into experience points for a minion, levelling them up through brute force. The azoth-to-experience exchange rate was pretty grimace-inducing, unfortunately, and it imposed a deep penalty to my minion xp sharing as well. Those felt like reasonable balance factors, though, so I wasn’t too mad about it.
[Empower Minion] was a prerequisite for the second skill I chose, [Azoth Mutation]. It would let me – as the name suggested – spend azoth to warp and evolve bound minions. The only stated restriction was that the mutations had to be "consistent with dungeon mythos.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I was confident that I’d find out soon enough.
Now where’d I leave that owl?
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Nar-shesh was staring at the corpses when Malik found him. His childhood friend squatted beside him and held out a skewer of roasted fish with his good arm. His other arm, clubbed since birth, was pressed against his chest. “Teekas caught some of the fish swimming around the realmheart’s chamber,” he said. “You should eat something.”
Nar-shesh took the fish without making eye contact and bit into it. It was hot and delicious, which was somehow hateful to him. It seemed unjust that there could be anything good in the world, at this moment.
“The others are talking about whether we should stay here or try and press on southwards,” Malik said. “I figured you’d want your space but I thought you should know in case you wanted a vote.”
Nar-shesh wasn’t fooled. Malik had wanted an excuse to check on him. They were both prickly about accepting help directly – Malik with more reason to be that way, of course – so such maneuvers were the stock-in-trade of their friendship. “Has anyone who wants to stay asked the realmheart about that?” he asked, pointedly, taking another bite of the fish.
Malik blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Are we sure she’s going to let us stay?”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Malik looked at Nar-shesh like he’d asked whether he was sure the sky was blue.
“She called herself a dungeon, Lika. Like the humans do. Who knows what she’s thinking, or whose side she’s really on?”
Malik snorted. “She killed five humans to save us, Shesha,” he said. “I think it’s pretty clear whose side she’s on.”
Nar-shesh looked away at that, staring down at his feet. “Not all of us,” he muttered.
Malik was quiet for a moment. “You think you’re the only one who feels guilty, man?” he said at last, a little sharply. “You think I don’t feel like I could have saved Kadash? Or Limdu?”
Nar-shesh turned to look at his friend and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Lika, I don’t know if it’s escaped your attention, but you’re fucking blind in one eye and you’ve only got half your left arm.”
“Exactly, so it’s stupid of me to feel that way. Now, Shesha, I don’t know if it’s escaped your attention but you’re level 2 and those fuckers’ leader was level 17. What the fuck do you think you could have done, really?”
Nar-shesh didn’t say anything. He made the mistake of looking at Kadash’s sightless eyes, staring up at the clear blue sky overhead. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t look away.
Malik sighed. “We all jumped, Shesha. We’re all cowards. Don’t take it out on the others. Find a use for the anger. That’s all we can do.”
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With the cracking of bone and the crunching of gristle, my first minion was rewarded for jumping on the bandwagon early. She climbed through the levels – all the way from 1 to 7 before I tapered off the azoth, wanting to spare some for other uses. I mutated her as she went. I was no biology expert, so we’d see whether I needed to rework all the changes later, of course, but for the time being the humble screech owl had grown taller than a goblin (so, maybe four feet or so), with wingspan to match. Her eyes were still massive, but I shrunk the proportions to leave more room for brain. The whole head, in fact, I made larger compared to the rest of the body, likewise for brain reasons: it looked a little bit unnatural, but I suppose that added to the creepy vibe I was shooting for. I had to really beef up her neck muscles, though, to support its weight. The bones and muscles of the wings, I adjusted to give her an opposable thumb to match her (hopefully) increased intelligence.
By this point, she’d woken up. Her status menu informed me that she was now a Giant Mutant Owl – Lv. 7. She squeaked loudly in alarm and fell out of her nest.
“Hey!” I said. Her head snapped around, looking for the source of the voice. “It’s your dungeon speaking. Don’t panic.”
She squawked confusedly, looking herself over, which [Apophic Tongue] helpfully translated as “Whuhappen?!”
“I upgraded you. Don’t worry about it, go back to sleep.”
She looked up at wherever she’d decided the source of my voice was. “...Hungry,” she said plaintively.
I would have rolled my eyes, if I still had eyes. “So go hunt, then. You’re level 7 now, you’re probably the toughest thing in these woods.”
“‘S bright out…” she whined, holding a wing over her eyes for emphasis.
I sighed, and sent a tendril of azoth into her skull. This would be kind of tricky, but let’s see if I could… “Alright, how’s that?”
She blinked, then gave another chirp of surprise as the secondary, tinted eyelids I’d created slid over her eyes, glossy black and reflective. Hopefully, built-in biological sunglasses would let her operate during the day when I needed her to. After fidgeting for a little while longer, I assumed to get used to her new proportions and finish waking up, she flung herself into the air – eerily silent in doing so – and was off.
Before I could grab another animal and start experimenting, I noticed that the goblins were trying to get my attention.