A completely unknown dungeon, in the middle of one of the most populated kingdoms in the Empire. And a pretty big one, too! How could that be?

"Felicity," I asked as we walked towards the location, "didn't you say that a breakout from a hidden dungeon would draw the army here and be a big mess for a third of the kingdom? The thought of this going undetected for centuries just doesn't make sense."

She nodded and looked over at Gareth curiously.

"In all honesty," he said, "I do not know. Powerful as I am, I am only one man, and much of what I have experienced since being released remains a mystery to me. It is clear that there are other agencies and powers at work here. At least one, I believe, is aware of me and opposes me."

"You're not talking about Archduke Stone," Felicity said. Gareth shook his head, confirming her suspicion. "I've been searching for you for months, trying to learn who you are and why you're here. Until now, it's never gotten anywhere, sometimes through odd coincidences getting in my way. There have been enough of them that I've suspected for a while now that you're somehow involved in a þeomachy. Or caught up in one at least."

The warrior let out a quiet groan. "Once again I see that very little has changed. I awaken from one þeomachy gone out of control and find myself in a world transformed, but the godly struggles continue. But this time I do not even know the players."

"Your Chaos War was a þeomachy?" Felicity asked.

"In my day, it was known as the War of Liberation. The Great Tyrant, Valaminor, had forged an unprecedented empire through conquest. Backed by the God of Oppression, Þoladir, he and his followers reigned from the north to the south, from the eastern seas to the western ocean. It was not until he began to outlaw the worship of the Good deities, and persecute not only their clerics but their followers, that other Gods deigned to openly oppose him.

"When the rebellion began, I was nobody. A hot-blooded son of a furniture-maker from an insignificant backwater in Vom, who believed he had a greater fate ahead of him than toiling in a workshop day in and day out, no different from untold others who struck out to seek their fates as adventurers. Speaking honestly, I must credit my rise more to luck than to any real prowess.

"I had some small degree of skill with the spear, nothing remarkable, but it was enough to survive a few adventures with a party of similarly callow youths and climb to the third level. This was when the revolt broke out. I had little love for the Tyrant and his minions, but throughout my life, the Gods had commanded restraint and patience. When that finally changed, the word went out secretly, for it was forbidden already to meet together in open worship. I suppose I was one of the first to hear of it.

"That very same evening, my party entered a city, and as we made our way to the inn I saw a body laying passed out in an alleyway. I went to see if I could help them, but as I approached I noticed that they wore the uniform of an officer in the Tyrant's guard. Drunk and snoring loudly, dead to the world... and then simply dead, at the hands of a youth barely a man who thought himself a hero and a liberator.

"When I felt the power rushing into me, I knew something was wrong. You call it mana; in my time the term 'experience' was in favor, for all we knew was that it accumulated within a person more and more as they gained experience in the world and overcoming its struggles. And slaying this passed-out drunkard somehow elevated me to the seventh level all at once! I fled, hurrying to rejoin my party, and it was not until the morning that I heard the news, that the overlord of the city had been assassinated in the night by the resistance.

"The news was like setting a spark to tinder. The revolt against the Tyrant roared to life throughout Vom, and I found myself swept up in it, pressed into service almost against my will as a commander of a hastily-organized militia due to my high level. But the war was no quick thing, to be solved with the removal of a single enemy champion; it raged on for thirty years of small defeats here and small victories there, and a very few decisive ones towards the end. I was one of the lucky ones, escaping death again and again as colleagues of mine fell, but I slowly rose through the ranks, and eventually I found myself a general, thirteenth level, commanding an entire regiment.

"It was a long time in coming, but the tide had fully turned by this point, and we were within a week of the final push to Cans Mer to throw down the Tyrant once and for all." He let out a bitter chuckle. "The last thing I remember was rallying the troops with inspirational speeches, calls to arms, and feasting. There is a certain degree of painful irony in this. In my revelry, I drank to excess, and lost consciousness. I found myself drifting through a realm of twisted dreams from which I could not awaken; it felt like an entire week passed." He looked straight at me. "And then I found myself erupting out of a crystalline cage, where you caught me as I fell. And now my story, the life I lived and the struggles I fought through, is unknown to this entire world. Your history says that none of it ever happened."

Felicity and I listened patiently while he explained his experience in the war. "So you're saying that you, personally, were the one who touched off the revolt?" I asked.

"I personally began the revolt in that part of Vom," he clarified. "I later learned that there were many stories like mine throughout the Tyrant's empire, and gradually our separate bands joined together into more unified forces."

Felicity had picked up on something different. "You're thirteenth level, then?"

"Yes, but I would not understand that too literally by your accounting. Were I to fight the two of you together, I would most likely win, but not easily. The kith of your Age are suffused with power in a way mine never were, and I've found little to explain it in my research; everything I find assumes cultural knowledge that I lack."

"Did you ever run a search on the term 'ætheric core?'" I asked him.

"No, what is that?"

"The starting point you're missing. It's known, I believe since your time, that there is a small organ in the bodies of kith, between the lungs and the stomach, that acts as a focus for magical energy?"

He nodded. "The ryolbin nucleus, we call it."

"Same here. It concentrates and focuses magical power, dividing it into discrete parcels of magic, which those trained to exercise it can apply as spells."

"Spell slots, yes. But you do not use them; you consider it a curse. In your Age is the ryolbin nucleus removed by surgeons?"

"No, that would cause health problems. But you're not too far off in your guess. At a very young age, typically twenty days after birth, a surgeon inserts a tiny chip of specially-prepared crystal into the ryolbin nucleus, no bigger than a grain of sand. This is enchanted to disrupt the formation of spell slots and allows mana to be streamed continuously through the body, and in and out of it, at a greater rate."

"This enchantment, how does it work?"

"I have no idea; that's pretty specialized stuff and my knowledge of enchanting runs more towards industrial applications than medical ones."

"Would it be possible for me to receive an ætheric core?"

That was a chilling thought! What would a thirteenth-level revolutionary be like? "Again, no idea."

"I actually know this one," Felicity said. "It's possible, but I'd strongly advise against it. There are two very good reasons why the procedure is typically done only to infants. First, it's supposed to be quite painful, so it's a mercy to do it only to those too young to remember. And second, the disruption will shatter your mana progression. You'd find yourself tumbling down from thirteenth level to... I can only guess, maybe third? And you'd need to relearn spellcasting from the beginning. The discrepancies in the power scales of the two systems notwithstanding, that would certainly be a significant loss for you."

"I see." She looked like she was going to say something else, but Gareth held up a hand. "We draw near."

I looked around. "All I see is more forest."

He stepped around a tree and beckoned. As Felicity and I approached, we saw a surprisingly large tree come into view, bigger around than a car, with a hollow opening large enough to walk into. Felicity let out a low whistle at the sight. "Put some jagged wooden spikes around that opening and it would almost look like some hungry, toothy maw, stretched wide to devour adventurers who pass through."

Gareth chuckled and shook his head. "The entrance is safe enough. The dungeon itself, though... keep close to me and you will be safe, at least." He conjured up his storage disc and pulled out a helmet, a semi-open-faced barbut design, and put it on. He stepped into the opening, and the two of us followed, finding sloped, hard-packed ground that spiraled downwards into the underground.

As I walked, the strangest sensation welled up inside of me. Felicity had looked at the tree and seen a devouring beast, but me? Somehow I saw comfort, like the sensation of reuniting with a childhood friend. I couldn't explain it, but walking in here, into an unknown dungeon that Gareth seemed to be hinting was a challenge even for him. There's no good reason that I should be OK with wandering into the "maw" of this tree, as Felicity put it, but somehow it just felt right to me. And there was something very wrong with that.

Even though there was no reason at all why I should, I actually did want to do this.

We made our way down for a while, arriving in an open stone chamber, dimly lit by typical dungeon light that seemed to emanate from nowhere in particular. There was a musty, dank smell to the air, with strange undercurrents to it, heavy mildew mixed incongruously with the appetizing scent of freshly baked bread. The combination made me feel a bit queasy.

Seven floor-to-ceiling pillars were scattered throughout the room with no clear pattern to their placement, carved with abstract geometric designs. They looked like they had once held some meaning, some sort of symbols, but they were weathered, worn down by time to the point where I couldn't make out what they depicted or were supposed to represent. Several of the pillars had cobwebs strung between them. Not the huge, scary webs of giant spiders, just the ordinary variety. Aside from the three of us, though, the room was devoid of life. Just the pillars, an opening in the far wall, and a long, rectangular table, about the size of a conference room table but made of granite, lying near the opening, knocked onto its side and broken about a third of the way down its length.

"We may come across some bats in the next room," Gareth said. "Do not fear them; they are simple, harmless beasts, not monsters. The true thing to worry about are the stone cats. The room ahead is filled with statues of panthers, but two of them are not truly statues. Watch carefully; like their fleshy cousins, they will seek to pounce when your back is turned. Thankfully, even their paws are stone, so they cannot move truly silently. A brief scrape of their paws may be all the warning you get. Be on your guard."

Felicity looked to me. "Pouncing predators. What a time to not have Joanna with us! Will you be all right?"

"If I stay between the two of you, I think so." I took a minute to conjure up a bit of a force barrier around the three of us. "I'm nowhere near the abjurer she is, but this will be better than nothing."

We headed in, and found the second room much like the first, with seven stone pillars scattered about at irregular intervals. Except these didn't reach the ceiling; about seven feet up, each one terminated in a pedestal, with a statue of a large cat on top, each one in a different position. One crouching; one curled up to sleep; one rearing up like a horse; one standing straight, mouth open in a roar or a snarl; one laying on its side; one with its back arched, and one reared back, tail high in the air, looking ready to pounce.

"Which ones are the monsters?" Felicity asked, looking around.

"It changes each time." He pointed to the one that was arranged like it was about to pounce on its prey. "I don't believe I've ever seen that one be an actual ambush. I don't know if that means it never is, or that that one is simply due. Either way, expect the attack to come when we are about halfway across the room.

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He went to take a step forward, when I reached out and grabbed his shoulder. "Wait. If they like to spring when your back is turned... why not deny them the opportunity? Go around the edge of the room with your back to the wall at all times?"

He pursed his lips. "I had never thought to do that, perhaps because I have little to fear from these monsters. But that does sound like a good idea, one my younger self would have delighted in." Instead of striding forward, he began sidestepping off to the right, back to the wall, eyes on the pillars at all times. I followed him, and Felicity followed me, her shield held in front of her body, mace in hand down at her side. Gareth held his spear warily across his body, and I was building a spell construct in my mind. Stone monsters were really Kayla's area of expertise, but I had something that might help.

Slowly, one careful step at a time, we approached the end of the entry wall, turned, and made our way along the side wall, approaching and then passing the midpoint without incident. We carefully reached the end of the wall, turned again, and slid along the far wall towards the exit from the room. Still nothing, even when we reached the end; the cat statues remained as motionless as... well, statues.

"They will strike as soon as our backs are turned, I am almost certain of it," Gareth said. "Perhaps we should turn, take a single step, and then immediately turn around again?"

Felicity and I both nodded at his idea, so we turned and stepped into a narrow corridor leading out of the room, then turned around again.

Two of the pedestals were empty. The rearing cat and the sleeping cat were gone. Not hopped down or leaping at us; gone.

I scarcely had time to register this when I heard a faint scrape of stone on stone, directly behind me. A moment later I was tackled and borne to the ground by a ton of animated rock. I hit the ground hard, my barrier spell the only reason I didn't bounce my head off the floor and get a concussion. Luckily, one of Felicity's stronger-than-it-should-be shield bashes immediately knocked the stone cat off of me before it could maul me. I lay there and quickly released the spell I was holding before the shock could break my concentration, and a wave of ice washed over it, encasing its feet in thick icy boots that froze it to the ground. It wouldn't last long, but then again in a fight it doesn't take that long to deal with an immobile opponent.

I saw Felicity raise her mace to finish the stone cat off, but then from behind me Gareth's voice barked out a terse "step aside." She quickly sidestepped, and I saw the second stone cat fly through the air and crash into the first, hard enough that both of their stony bodies began to crack. I quickly got to my feet and saw Gareth step into view and drive his spear through one of the stone cats and into the other, impaling stony bodies as easily as if they were flesh, his spear visibly glowing with a pulsating violet aura. Felicity took advantage of their immobilized state to quickly smash one in the head, then the other. Both stone cats' heads cracked, causing their bodies to go inert.

"Well fought," Gareth said. "Both of you. None of us knew that would happen, and you still did well."

I boggled at his words. "Only reason I did OK at all was that barrier I put up beforehand."

"This is often true, that preparedness makes a bigger difference than responding in the moment to difficult circumstances."

"Fair enough. And learning from your mistakes is also important. I think we just discovered that this dungeon doesn't like being cheesed. Or just that those cats don't; it's hard to draw a firm conclusion with only one point of data, but I'm not sure how many more I want to collect."

Felicity nodded. "So what's next?"

"Ahead is a library of nonsense," Gareth said. "Look at the books if you wish, but unless languages have changed drastically in the Sixth Age you're unlikely to find anything useful. No monsters."

He led us into a room with another stone table, this one upright and intact. The exit wasn't straight across this time, but to the left. Bookshelves lined the right and far walls, filled with leather-bound books dyed various colors. They didn't have titles on the spines, but each one was tooled with flowing geometric designs reminiscent of the pillars in the first room. Felicity and I picked a couple books at random and started leafing through them, curious.

"Wow," she said after a moment. "Are they all like this?"

Gareth didn't even look at what she was reading. "I haven't examined every single one, but yes, I believe so."

Her confusion was pretty reasonable; the books looked like they were written by someone who had seen books before but had no actual concept of language. There were letters laid out in rows like a proper book, with spaces between "words" and "paragraphs" here and there, but nothing was recognizable as actual words. The letters were a chaotic mix of scripts, and the Common parts had capital letters randomly sprinkled in the middle of "words," and so on.

"How many scripts do you recognize here?" I asked, laying my book on the table. "I see Common, High Elvish, this looks like Jade Elvish or something related to it, Ancient Arcana, Ætheric Arcana... and that's only half of it."

"A fair amount of this is Kobol glyphs, and there's some Goblic," Felicity said. "None of it actually has any meaning that I can make out. And... look at that." She pointed to a symbol near the center-left of the second page, looking like a crude lines-and-dots drawing of a face expressing disgust. "Is that an emoji?"

"As I said, pure nonsense," Gareth sighed.

"Maybe not," I said as it began to click for me. "There is one thing that has changed in our expression of language: do you know about encryption?"

"A thing of rune tablets, used to hide secrets in the open," he said. "Much like writing a coded message to be delivered through enemy territory, but the ætheric version is strange in its details; I have not researched it much."

"Yeah, basically. Encryption uses very advanced mathematics to produce a coded message that looks like... random nonsense, basically. And if somebody were to take an encrypted volume, and use some base-encoding scheme to remap all the data into printable characters defined by the Universal Textual Foundation, what you would get would look a lot like this."

"I understand perhaps a third of that. You believe this is an encrypted message?"

"I think it could be. The problem is, encryption is meant, by design, to be indistinguishable from random garbage, so there's no good way to rule your theory out; we can only prove that it is encrypted if we find the key, a piece of information that explains how to decode it. But this emoji here? That had to have been produced by ætherics; no one uses them in any natural system of writing."

"A dungeon that prints ætherically encrypted messages in paper tomes?" Felicity asked with a tone of incredulity. "Now I've seen everything!"

"This 'key,' what would it look like?" Gareth asked.

"Encryption isn't really my specialty, but... probably like more of this, just a lot smaller. A single page, a little note, that looks like more nonsense. Have you seen anything like that?"

"No, but I have not reached the end of this dungeon. There are things in the depths that are beyond my strength alone."

Yeesh! "I hope you don't expect us to help you with that?"

He shook his head. "No, not today at least. I promised you a safe delve. But I did wish to show you some of this place."

"Well, there's not much more to be learned here without a key," I said. "So what's next?"

We put our books back on the shelves while Gareth explained. "I call this next part the Corridor of Ruins. A quarter-mile of twisting hallways, with rooms to the left and right, each one buried in rubble. To the best of my knowledge, there is no treasure within any of them. However, there are various points where lurkers dwell on the ceiling, waiting to ambush the unwary."

"More things pouncing on us. Lovely."

"Yes, but they are easy enough to see if you can conjure light, and if they fall, well..." He patted his spear. "It's a shame neither of you have pointed weapons."

"Let me try something," I said. Closing my eyes, I started composing a formula in my mind, but after a minute I had to let it dissipate; it was complicated enough to give me a headache, and that's not something I wanted to mess with. "Nope. Tried to conjure a mageblade, but I think that might be a bit beyond my level. I can still toss ice spikes though."

"And I can catch them on my shield and throw them to the ground."

"Then we are safe to proceed. At the end of the corridor is the champion of this floor, a glass golem that throws spikes and daggers made of glass. A good blow or two from your mace should shatter it, Felicity."

Gareth led the way into the long corridor, with me behind him and Felicity on rear-guard. Almost right away, I started tossing balls of magelight up at the ceiling. We didn't see anything before passing the first room, at least. Looking inside, it looked like a cave-in; whatever the room had been was buried under tons of rubble.

Felicity had a different view of it, though. "Hey, can you toss some light right there?" she asked, pointing. She walked in after it and pulled free a stone from the pile, about the size of a fist. Bringing it back, she showed it to us. "Nothing valuable down here, you said?"

It looked like... well... a rock. Grayish, a little bit shinier in some places than most rocks, with other spots that had the rough, dull reddish color of brick. Gareth just shrugged. "Some sort of ore?"

"This looks like deep cobalt ore to me. Not worth much back in the day, but it has industrial applications in modern times, and it's almost nonexistent this close to the surface. This chunk... just a wild guess here but I'd say it's worth 200 crowns or so. And the room looks like there are a few tons of it in there."

I shook my head slowly. "First those books, now a... mine? This has to be the strangest dungeon ever."

"I would not say that," Gareth said. "Wild dungeon cores have a certain consciousness to them, some form of mind whose thought processes, though quite alien to our own, follow a form of reasoning. They seem to delight in strange puzzles and surprises. I am not certain why such things are not common in the official dungeons that are available to the public today, but none of this is particularly unexpected to me."

"Commercialization," Felicity said. "The Guild has some sort of influence over the Cores, and they dumb down the dungeon design for the broadest possible appeal, at the expense of quality."

The rest of the rooms held more deep cobalt ore among the rubble. The lurkers were easily dealt with — no surprise there, with Gareth in the party — and it wasn't long before we reached the end of the floor. The final room was rounded rather than square, mostly empty, with a downward-sloping passage leading out of the far side. In front of it stood a warrior made of faintly blue-tinted glass.

The only other interesting thing in the room was the rather gruesome sight of a skeleton chained to the wall, like a tortured prisoner had died there. Except this was no kith skeleton; it was quadrupedal, looking like some sort of wolf, or maybe a small bear. Hard to tell when the skull and all the flesh is missing.

The glass golem began to move. I refreshed my barrier spell, not wanting to get hit by glass projectiles, and hung back as Felicity and Gareth charged forward, engaging the floor boss in tandem. It didn't last long against their level of power!

"Would you like to venture further?" Gareth asked.

Felicity and I looked at each other. She must have seen my hesitation; she simply said "No, we need to get back. If we left right now, it would probably still be sundown before we made it back to the highway. Any later and we'll be driving at night, and nobody likes to do that."

"I understand." He turned and started leading us back down the corridor.

"For what it's worth, I agree with Brad on this one. I've seen some wild dungeons during my time in Lutreron. None of them would challenge you, and they didn't have things like the library. This place is really strange, as dungeons go."

"Then your Age has lost much of what was beautiful and awe-inspiring in my world," he said sadly.

Felicity kept the ore chunk she had grabbed, and on a whim I pulled out my phone and took pictures of the library. I couldn't help but think that there had to be something in that room that we were all missing, something that I specifically should have picked up on.

As promised, Gareth walked us safely to the edge of the woods, hanging back so he would not be visible from the highway. Felicity turned to him before we left. "Our offer is still open. The notion that you can live in a corrupt world without losing yourself to it is a core doctrine of the Path of Meþas. I know that you've seen things that worry you, but there is good in our world as well."

He looked like he wanted to turn her down, but in the end, after a few long moments of hesitation, he simply said "I will consider it," and turned to walk back into the woods.

My car was still where I had left it. I unlocked it while Felicity removed her armor. "So, how did that stack up against your expectations?"

She gave me a wide-eyed look. "So completely not like anything I thought would happen! He seems so... human. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I never would have thought there would be things someone that powerful was afraid of. But did you see how nervous he got at the mention of his connection to Meþas?"

She finished up getting her armor stashed, and we got in the car and started driving back to Sharliya. "Hey, did you notice any sort of mental effects going on in there?" I asked her.

"What do you mean?"

"You know I've never been big on dungeons?"

"Yeah."

"When I walked into the hole in that tree, or even before it, when I first saw the tree, I had completely the wrong reaction to it. It was... I don't even know. Like, I know this is a horrible cliché, but it felt like coming home. It felt so right, like I belonged there, and that's so completely wrong that it kind of worries me."

She shook her head. "I didn't feel that myself, but I do know the sensation."

How could she... "Is this a Path thing?"

"That feeling that all is right, it came quickly and only stayed briefly, but left an impression on you?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, that's a Path thing. That confirmation is how I know I'm, well, 'on the right path' for lack of a better term. Though the sensation of being at home is new. There's usually some sort of distinctive 'flavor' to it that helps give me some degree of specificity, but I've never felt a confirmation I'd describe quite that way."

"...well, crap," I said as the obvious explanation hit me.

"Hmm?"

"Do you remember the Guidance you gave me, outside the church a few months ago?"

"Yeah. I don't always remember them, but that one I do."

"You advised me to use some of the windfall money to buy a house, but the Guidance said something very different, to establish House Webb."

"...oh. Ohhhhh, wow," she said as it hit her.

"That part never made any sense. It's not like becoming a homeowner would win me a patent of nobility."

She nodded. "But purchasing a plot of unwanted wilderness to develop would make you a Gentleman."

"I probably could, too. But I can't help but wonder whether trying something like that, legal or not, would annoy Meranas. Seems to me that either he'd be mad at drawing attention to his hideout, or think it's pretty cool that I'm establishing a way for him to hide in plain sight, even if that's not my actual intention."

"I'm not sure either, but I'm leaning towards the latter. I just don't feel like Meþas would lead you into direct conflict with Meranas."

"Well, at least you have some sense of all this. None of any of it makes sense to me."

"Don't set your ideas of my vantage point too high. I have about enough light to see one step ahead by, and that's all. But sometimes, with faith, that's enough."