Most safe rooms were large enough for ten to twenty people, but this room was much smaller. However, I noticed an area that might have once been a transportation array too. This was one of a dungeon’s safe rooms. That means the room behind me had indeed been a boss room. That would mean that this entire place was once a dungeon.

This wasn’t the dungeon known as the Deep. This was a dungeon that formed after the Deep died. It was created within the corpse of the Deep, much like Maid’s Lament grew from my dungeon, and my dungeon was recreated from Maid’s Lament. This would have been a much small dungeon, perhaps only lasting twenty years or so.

The mural had decayed heavily, not unlike Terra’s Dungeon had thanks to the lack of mana. I could only make a single image. The image was of a little girl she was standing next to a man with a crown on his head. The king was holding her hand, the pair of them smiling. The king had a beard and was otherwise quite short. That was when I started to put two and two together.

“This dungeon… was formed after the fall of the Deep Dwarves,” I explained.

The girl nodded.

“You’re a Deep Dwarf, or you’re once a Deep Dwarf. Your father was the king of the Deep Dwarves?”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

After another moment of hesitation, she nodded again.

“Was this the home of the Deep Dwarves?”

She shook her head as a no.

“Where is it?”

She looked like she was trying hard to remember, and after a moment she pointed down.

“Deeper…” I sighed. “So… what… this was the place of a great battle?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and then wiggled her hand. It told me kind of.

“They… were running… and something caught them and this is where they fell trying to escape.”

She winced, but then she nodded.

“Your father… was he the dungeon master for this place?”

She nodded again. I ended up learning quite a bit just with this. It didn’t do much more than confirm a lot of what I already knew. The Deep Dwarves encountered something and fled. It looked like a large batch of them was caught here where they died. The rest made it to the surface, where they didn’t have a good time of it either. They were scattered, rejected, and enslaved. They exploited those they could for their blacksmithy knowledge, and the rest died out. It was to the point where this was only the second deep dwarf I had ever seen, and she was already dead!

If it was her father who was in charge, she seemed afraid of him. It was hard to predict the mind of a product of a former dungeon. It was even harder after the dungeon was gone and they were on their own. They ended up developing their own life independent of the lore that once constrained them. I wasn’t sure when the dungeon collapsed.

I only had one more question for her. “Have you seen any more of these murals? Do you know where they are?”

She seemed surprised by the question, but she did nod.

“Can you take me there?”