“I… what…” The little girl grabbed her head. “What happened to me?”

“I’d never seen anything like it before or since.” The man explained. “This dungeon… it seemed to want to escape the boundaries of its cursed prison. It lured you into its depths and then tried to possess you. It trapped you, starved you, weakened you until it could infect your soul. It wanted to take over your soul while it was still bound to your body. It would have been impossible for an adult, but a child might be weak enough.”

“He promised… he promised I’d see daddy again if I let… if I let him in.” She shuddered in a whisper.

Usually, when a monster created by a dungeon left, it would slowly lose its miasmic infection. The dungeon’s influence on the monster would ebb away until it became free of the dungeon’s will. However, it seemed this dungeon wanted to create an avatar, someone that could leave the dungeon, perhaps to lure people into it or some other nefarious purpose. The man continued his story.

“By the time I found you, you were half dead, and the dungeon master was in the process of trying to possess you. I defeated him, but somehow he had partial control of you. I had to… I had to make a pact with him. If I helped him leave the dungeon, then he would release you.”

“I… became a magic blacksmith after years of being an adventurer, so I thought up the idea of putting him in a blade. It required his dungeon as the power source. He betrayed me though and dragged your soul into the blade with him. I never thought he would go so far. Then again, he also didn’t realize I had prepared the blade to capture and destroy him. We had both betrayed the other, and you, you were permanently trapped within the blade, never to be freed. It was the perfect prison I created.

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“I destroyed him, but he clung to your soul. The only way I could save you was to cut away, over and over again, destroying every piece of him. I left the dungeon with you, hoping to find a way one day to restore you to your body. When I was done, I thought I had succeeded. However, it was a failure. It might have been impossible from the start.

“I was never able to hear my daughter like you can hear your woman. I was never able to know that the corruption was slowly breaking her mind and body. She became a cursed blade, and me, the wielder, I also became cursed. For a time, I was known as the Cursed Hero. However, my methods grew more erratic, my sword thirsted for too much blood. I could understand her desires. I could fulfill her desires.

“In the end, we were both monsters, endlessly sacrificing any who got in our wars to satisfy our thirst for blood. Then one day, you took my blood as well.” He ended his story there, but I already knew the rest of it.

Blaming her father for everything, the little girl turned on him. The mural I saw of him stabbing himself was her impaling him. He was trying to stop her, grabbing the blade with his bloodied hands. She then turned her father into a blade, using her cursed nature to torture and punish him for all the wrongs he had done. She pulled his soul into her sword body, and then the curse manifested, creating a dungeon where she could torture him for all time.

The blade likely remained exactly where the father had fallen, except he decayed away with time and only the sword remained. Eventually, she got bored of torturing her father and started to pull more souls into her blade. Anyone who died was turned into a sword or forced to endure her trials, where she forced others to relive the pain that she had to experience.

“I only have one question.” The little girl insisted, her face unreadable.

“Yes, my daughter?”

“After everything I did… why did you save me?” She demanded. “Why did you give your life to block that blow?”

A small, sad smile came onto the man’s lips, and he gave a simple shrug. “Because… you’re my daughter.”