You may remain for as long as the moonlight lasts in the sky above.

[https://i.imgur.com/6NVmTKz.png]

The place I arrived was so dark it could’ve been a sea of night. In the gloaming dark there were small, pale flowers that bled a blue starlight glow, like lanterns in the black; the misty light of those luminous flowers illuminated a sea of other blossoms growing in the dark. The air was perfumed with the smell of pollen and brittle, paper-thin petals. There was total silence.

“Hello?” My voice echoed into the gloom.

The landscape was defined by huge hills of moss and briar, and crooked trees that stood atop vast colonies of vein-like roots sprawling across the earth like serpent spawn. As I started to walk, I saw a gleam of bone underneath the hills, and leaned down, brushing away the undergrowth; beneath was the hollow eye of a vast skeleton.

That wasn’t the worst I found.

As I walked on, I found living men engulfed in the gardens. Parasitic flowers clung to them, winding thin roots into the spaces behind their eyes, their ears, their noses and mouths. They stared blankly, drooling. Their legs were pinned to the earth by roots. There were countless such lost souls, sitting among the garden’s sprawl like statues of withered flesh, their faces sunken and hungry, looking like masks of death.

I waved a hand in front of one of these living statues. Not the slightest response.

“Don’t worry. They’re quite happy.”

I turned. Sitting across from me, grinning down from the hilltop, was a green man made of vines and fronds. An avatar similar to the one I’d used to speak with the stone golems, but infinitely more complex. Spiny, broad leaves made up a great green beard, and his face was intricately shaped, full of ‘wrinkles’ formed from interlocking roots. With a crown of briar on his head and a walking stick in hand he seemed like a wizened old king of the earth.

“Are you the core?” I asked.

“Who else? These unfortunate souls, well, they tried to take my secrets and they failed my test. Now they’re deep in pleasant dreams. As far as they know, they won - they conquered these halls and returned triumphant. They have wives, families, grand old lives. All illusionary.” He grinned, slipping down the hill to approach me. His staff raised to point at my chest. “While you, my strange duck, you seem to not even notice the hallucinogenic spore in the air. And you appeared from nowhere, bypassing the gates. Most curious. A servant of the gods, perhaps?”

“Perhaps. I’m like you, another core - this body is just an illusion the gods lent me so I could speak with one of my own.” I held out my hand, trying to smile. I was already beginning to doubt I’d find a fellow soul here, in the dark and eerie gardens, but I’d put my best foot forward.

He walked right past me. “Iiiinteresting.”

“I was hoping to learn from you. They said you were the wisest of our kind.” I was also hoping flattery would work on this grizzled old specter.

“Mmhm. They didn’t lie. My narcissus flowers don’t just trap their victims in fantasies. They’re all one living thing, interlocked by miles of roots that serve as neural tissues. A living network like a brain.The damned serve my purposes as they sleep in pleasant dreams. With every life I claim, my mind unfurls through a new vessel, and the thoughts become so much clearer, so much more able to count the secrets of the Pale.” He turned back to me, grinning. His teeth were dark stubs of oak. “You understand now, I hope? Great achievements take unorthodox methods.”

The thought was slightly nauseating, honestly. My own thoughts but spread through a thousand minds. Occupying their skulls like parasites. “Still, a bit lonely down here, no?”

“Oh, I have plenty of friends down here in the dark.” He reached out and cupped his weathered, claw-like hand around the chin of a captive philosopher. The poor thing made a hideous gurgling noise.

I tried to hold back my distaste. “I mean- you don’t seem to have made anything more alive than flowers.”

“Hmpph. What, you think I should have some slack-jawed idiots roaming around? Some creepy crawly bugs, a few overgrown lizards, that sort of thing? I have all the guests that are intellectually fit to keep my company.” He snorted, clearly losing his patience.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“We’re not very alike, are we?”

“No, no more than a candle is like a bonfire, sadly. But we are brothers, and I’ll help you for the sake of that.” He sighed, and turned back, finally offering his withered old hand. “There are few enough of us children of the Black Wolf that I should stop jousting about for pride’s sake and show you some courtesy - and half of us, well, they’ve turned mindless with hunger. You can call me the Philosopher.”

“The Oasis.” I offered in return as we shook.

“What is it you wish to learn?”

“My ability to shape magic within creatures is still rudimentary at best. I’ve figured out how to create organs of crystal that will convert Mana-”

He stopped me there with a wave of his hand.

“All wrong. An easy mistake to make, mind, since even advanced creatures will usually bear some crystalline organ or bone in which to store Mana. But those are only reservoirs.” He reached into soil, grasping something below. “Most dungeons go down the wrong route at first. Beasts have a different relationship with magic than humans do, with their runeworks, and are equally distant from our own method, connecting to the Forms and using them to gift Mana physical shape. I’m guessing you developed in an area with almost no Mana pools or crystallization, nowhere that magic has taken physical form you could study.”

When he lifted his hand from the soil, dripping dirt from his fingertips, there was a flame of Mana in his palm. Dozens of different colors danced in ribbons around a bright green core. “The Mana-flame of a living thing usually contains a variety of different colors, growing in vibrance and variety as the beast consumes others. This state, many different Mana-forms in flux, should be called Myriad. It’s the key to evolution and growth but-”

Leaning forward, he blew against the flame. It flickered, condensing down and becoming a single green, a breath-takingly pale and wonderful shade that seemed to contain some hint of a spring rain, a summer day, an inherent echo of growth and fertility.

“The way animals use magic is by condensing a singular flame that consumes all colors of Mana into one, like an alchemical furnace. At first they usually acquire a fairly rudimentary and basic Mana, such as an elemental affinity. Over time, through connecting with an environment rich in complex magic-forms, they gain the ability to do more subtle magics.”

I watched in fascination as he continued to shape the Mana-flame, the last flickers of secondary colors slowly melding into the whole.

“You said there weren’t many of us that weren’t mindless. Out of curiosity, how many have you met, exactly?”

“Here.” He drew new Mana-flames from the earth, flowers wilting all around us. “Practice. There were eight born onto this world including me. Two of the others were capable of conversation, and one of them is dead. The last destroyed herself trying to shed her material form.”

I grasped the first flame in hands. “Material form? What’s a dungeon with no form?” I tried to shape the Mana within, to compress the colors, the different varieties, into one. Instantly I crushed the whole thing down to a sputtering ember and watched it collapse. A twinge of pain jolted through my mind.

He handed me a fresh fire. “A madman’s delusion. But damn her, it almost worked, too. She managed to shatter her core and survive, anchoring her soul to dreamspace, but the experience splintered her mind. Now her domain exists in sleeping minds, moving where it wishes, consuming people’s souls while they rest in their beds. No better than a beast.”

“But the goal was admirable. Could she even be killed, now?” This time, I didn’t try force. Instead I worked to shape the flow of magic, manipulating the threads of color to move through each other. The result was briefly promising, the rainbow melding - but it all boiled to a dull, greyish-black that dissolved again. This time the mental backlash was enough to make me flinch.

“No, and I’ve tried. All three of us began with the goal of transcending our limitation. The Dreamer, the Humanist, and me.” He waved a hand to his garden. “Even I’ll admit, this would be grotesque without a goal. A meaning. Some purpose. Existence would be grotesque, without that.”

“So you really are a philosopher. I assume you’re not telling me what do here on purpose? A test?” I was trying a combination of the first methods. Pushing against a single color of Mana, condensing a powerful ember, then slowly bending the other colors to move through that concentrated space. It was working; as I fed the different colors through that single spark they took on its colors without muddying it.

“Mm, more that I’ve never seen two of us work the same way. I happen to have enough to waste, especially since none of this is real.”

I blinked. The flame nearly dissolved in my hands as my attention faltered. I quickly struggled to establish control.

“What? I spend my days trapping fools in fantasies. You thought I would’t notice? I’ve gone to great lengths to hide certain things from the gods, and mysteriously, all those things ceased to exist just before you arrived. Almost as if this is a mental construct formed by someone without full information.”

“Damn.” The concentration required was an almost physical weight, sparking a long, electric shard of pain to jolt through the space behind my right eye. I held the flame steady, slowly stopping it from collapsing, feeding it back to life.

I made the movement of the threads of different Mana within slow, circulating them through the central ember with enough steady precision they wouldn’t overpower and drown it. As I stabilized the final thread into a holding pattern I felt something shift within.

The flame gleamed bright, slowly changing shades.

The Philosopher grinned at me. "I'll leave you to it. Me, well- a mental space this strong is a terrible thing to waste and I have my own studies to pursue." His body of green life collapsed, leaving me alone.

A dozen more flames flickered in the dark, waiting for me. I had time enough to practice while the moonlight lasted.