Our descent into desperation was blistering.

Half the day had came and went by now, as near as we could collectively figure, and we hadn’t even made it past the first room. We hadn’t packed the supplies for a week-long delve. We’d barely enough for a half-score days, and only if we’d rationed, which we hadn’t. Already, our food and drink ran low.

Voices had swiftly found themselves hoist, grow high-pitched and tight-wound, friends and brothers accosting one another as they argued senseless strategy. There was no point to it. None had more experience, more expertise, than any other. Nevertheless, a number of fights had already broken out, further diminishing morale. The worst one even had to be forcefully defused by Aldwyn.

After that point, and perhaps more concerningly still, panicked wroth found itself disestablished by dreadful apathy, the men instead gathering in the main hall, laid despondently upon the plush armchairs and pacing worriedly across the velvet carpets.

Even Aldwyn himself was feeling the strain. The headsman was currently with the group, speaking quietly and calmly to them in attempt to soothe frayed nerves. But I could see the beginnings of panic worming their way onto his normally unflappable demeanor.

For my part, I was far from the party, sequestered in the narrow corridor that connected kitchen to dining room. I was no tracker, nor ranger, nor rogue. I’d freely admit it. What little I knew of forestry, I’d taught myself; but poorly. My main competence was and would always be direct combat.

But without the men nearby, and with voices and tempers so dearly lowered, I could just begin, just barely, to listen.

This place was quiet. Too quiet. There was no life here, obviously, but naught beneath it, too. The only hint of song I could possibly make out was something…hidden, deep within. Something secret.

And it led right here.

But there was nothing here.

I must have scoured this place over twenty times by now. I was sure of it. The corridor was entirely ordinary, undecorated save for a single painting that hung in its centerfold. I’d already checked underneath it. Nothing. I’d tried removing it from the wall. Nothing. But there was nothing else here. This had to be it. So, for what must have been the hundredth time, I examined the painting.

It was a bizarre enough thing, of that there could be no doubt.

Well matched, in that respect, to the manor’s otherwise aesthetic. Its spectacle was a knight in heavy, dented plate exploring a dimly lit room. His surroundings were stone, or granite, perhaps, some manner of abandoned, decrepit, decaying keep. A greatsword he’d strapped tight onto his back and his gauntleted palm stretched outwards, steel phalanges grasping eagerly for an ornate chest just out of reach.

It was rimmed in twinkling gold, this coffer, clearly intended to make up the focal point of the image, and the knight’s hand was almost upon it. His expression, of course, was entirely opaque, given the pigface bascinet obscuring it from plain view, yet somehow still communicated an impatient greed.

This had to be it.

It simply had to be. The answer, if even it existed, had to be hidden somewhere in this painting. Except, I’d examined the house already, exhaustively, and there was no sign of such a chest. There was no sign of such a room. And the knight from the painting was too dissimilar from the gilded knight in the main hall for the latter to be involved, somehow, in the puzzle.

Pursing my lips and scrunching my brows, I momentarily considered the possibility I might be overthinking this. This was, after all, merely the Dungeon’s first room. So, wordlessly, I reached out for the painting, placing a single pointer fingertip ever so gingerly and precisely upon the gilded chest.

And the painting changed.

I jerked back.

It was an instant shift, a split-second stage transition from one scene to the next. The ornate casket was no longer an item of beauty.

It had become a monster.

Long fangs like polished knives glinted ravenously as savage jaws unhinged themselves, drawing to a staggering height and width, swallowing the knight up whole. A too long, too thick tongue had wrapped stranglehold around the armored soldier, bristle-barbed and deep purple, fixing him in place to deposit within its waiting maw.

The greedy knight’s demeanor had morphed to abject terror.

Before I had but another moment to consider it further, though, a great gong reverberated through the house, and behind the painting, a previously invisible door swung open. As I gaped in shock, I heard the noises of the group from behind me.

Their reaction was immediate ecstasy. There were whoops of joy as my fellow villagers beheld the doorway, tears in their eyes as they raced for it.

“Oh, three heavens. Oh…oh, Thank the Priest. Thank th–

“–thoth’s fucking taint, that wa–”

“–iserable, positively miserable! Priest above, if I never have to go through that again, it’ll be too soo–

“–Thank you. Oh, Taiven, thank you, I was beginning to–

“–he fuck out of here, out of this terrible place, the moment we–

“–can’t be many rooms left now, not after that, why perhaps the Champion, eve–

“Well done my boy.”

A calm, clear baritone cut through the noise and bodies shoving their desperate, joyous way past me. Aldwyn clapped me on the back, a broad smile splayed across his face, amber eyes twinkling.

It gave me little comfort.

“Aldwyn, something’s wrong,” I muttered, frowning as we trailed the group down into what must have been the manor’s basement.

“What do you mean?” He frowned back.

What did I mean?

“That was too easy,” I replied, anxiously. The room can’t have been finished with us yet. Why, I could’ve figured that painting out by pure chance, initially. Anyone could have. “There was…there was something more there, something–”

“Something?” Aldwyn interrupted, brows furrowing in concern. “What do you mean?” He repeated.

“That’s the thing, I don’t–”

My answer, unhelpful though it doubtless was, was nevertheless cut short by a flurry of activity just in front of me.

The basement was empty, barren, compared to the rest of the manor. It was a large space, with dirt floors and walls, similar in size to the upper bedroom, but totally devoid of features save for one; a broad stone pedestal. Unremarkable entirely, lacking in all manner of engraving or decoration, and atop it rested a rusted iron key, presumably for the main door.

Our group had happened upon it just presently, and promptly exulted once more.

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My stomach churned.

My fists clenched. My gut twisted itself into knots. Something felt deeply, deeply off about this. One of the men rushed over to grab the key. The same moment he did, a massive tremor shook the house, so strong it almost knocked me from my feet. Our party stumbled as one, some of the most elderly even wholesale toppling over.

“What…what was that?” Aldwyn gasped, head whipping about.

“Aldwyn, just wait,” I tried, once more. “I think–”

“Priest alive, who cares, let’s get the fuck out of here!” another interrupted, a chorus of agreement swelling his support. The key was not turned over to Aldwyn, the men apparently so desperate to escape this place as to eschew the proper chain of command completely.

Friends and nigh-family members I’d known all my life raced back upstairs as a single mass, a singular morass of flesh, a jostling, shoving jumble with Aldwyn at its heel and I not too far behind. My mind was racing. There was something missing, here, I knew it. One of us opened the door, and together we tumbled through it.

To find ourselves in the upstairs bedroom, not the first floor.

Other than that, though, nothing seemed amiss; the bedroom was just the same as it had always been. Its corners, void totally of furniture, its gargantuan bedspread positively lousy with pillows. There were so many of them that they almost hid it from sight, a great pile, a mountain of feather-filled cushions. Close to one hundred, surely. The door downstairs was just on the room’s other side.

The sickness in my stomach intensified.

As we made our way over to it, the men laughing and congratulating each other, delighted to be homeward bound at last, I lagged slightly behind. Unease washed over me in awful waves, one after the other after the other, tensing my muscles and raising up fierce goose pimples on my flesh.

My instincts were untrained, untested, unpolished, and still they screamed at me. My body was on high alert, but there were no enemies to be seen. I focused hard, squinting my eyes, searching for song, blotting everything else in the world out.

The ornate chest. The hapless knight. The monster hiding in plain sight. My mind spun and suddenly everything fell into place.

A cluster of fine hairs on the eastern shelf of my neck shivered, and my gaze adjusted in their direction, just in time to just barely notice a minute portion of the mighty pillow pile to ever-so-slightly…

Twitch.

“Fucking Priest!” I shrieked, “it’s the WHOLE HOUSE! ALDWYN, RU-”

The pile exploded.

It was a bright white mountain erupting, a volcano of pillows metamorphosing mid-air into malformed beasts, all stringy muscles, mangy feathers, lolling tongues, and sharp teeth. They washed over the group entirely, a tsunami of dainty white plumage and wretched purple flesh. They swallowed my friends up whole.

Aldwyn’s eyes were so wide I could see their sclera clearly just before he disappeared.

My heart pounded in my chest.

Adrenaline drove me to heights I’d never felt before, turning my blood to instant acid, liquid fire that drove my limbs forward at breakneck pace. The screams of friends and fathers echoed in my ears. There was no thought, no cunning, no plan.

I swung my sword blindly, bereft form or fashion, nigh-decades of practice obliviated in as many instants whilst I lunged at the closest mimic with a high, reedy roar. For all the fell creature’s horror, its skin was soft as the guise it adopted, and my blade severed cursed flesh with barely an effort.

It was nothing at all like I’d imagined.

The tales of slaughter I’d heard recounted had always erred towards the impersonal; this was anything but.

The vibrations of strong, whet, flexile steel reverberated up my hand and arm, transferring force and feeling almost as if it was my own palm that did the deed. I felt my metal part the horror’s feathery skin with grotesque clarity, felt the slight resistance before it plunged beneath. I felt it sever tendons and more rigid fibers, grit my teeth as it scraped nauseatingly across fragile bone.

The monster squealed an awful rattle as I fell right through it.

My stroke split it clean in two, opening it from stem to stern in a grisly shower of pale plumage and violet viscera. Its blood was scalding, stinging my flesh where it landed, and I panted for a moment, swallowing back my own sick desperately as the creatures started to surround me.

One darted in on my left and snapped at me, yelping at the slash I gave it in reply. I backhanded another as it jumped up to maul my face, teeth scraping the flesh of my palm and drawing ichor of my own. The song blared a great bugle-call right behind me, and I spun and thrust, impaling another on my sword, following through with the heel of my boot to drive it off.

My breathing had smoothed now, pulse still hammering in my chest but growing more consistent, near decades of practice taking over as I frantically fended off attack.

Then the mimics were done testing waters.

They fell upon me as one, and it was all I could do to reply.

Movement was key. How oft had Ewan impressed such upon me? When faced with foes in numbers greater than one, to remain fixed in place was a sure death.

So I danced with monsters as best I could, plowing through them this way and that, avoiding damage wherever possible. My swings came smooth and precise, every movement leading into the next, fighting to conserve energy. The song guided me like never before, throbbing in my ears, drowning out all else, gifting me a preternatural nature without which I’d have been slain in one hundred different times, and places.

I missed nothing.

It wasn’t enough.

I was fast, but they were endless. Ceaseless. Every mimic I cut down saw one dozen take its place. Their flesh was soft and weak, but their teeth, and claws, were sharp as knives. Sharper. Soon my chest was slick with blood, and screamed in countless places, and my limbs were leaden.

But something…

Something was happening to me.

The song was clear, now, so clear, impossibly so. And it was only growing clearer. It wormed its way through open wounds, gnawing towards my chest, twisting in my veins, squirming in my temples. What was happening to me?

And the weeping lines of lightning crisscrossing my skin analgesized, and my leaden limbs were filled with sudden vigor, and the whole world was made silent, quiet, peaceful, such that all I could hear was the song that filled my each and every breath. What was happening to me?

I breathed in.

My wrist twitched, sword flickering out in an instant and severing a mimic’s spine.

Spin, cut, parry, pivot, strike.

My arms blurred, muscles unbothered by the monstrous exertion, two handed grip bisecting three in a single blow. They were so slow. Had they always been so slow?

Left, right, below, behind, above.

I felt a stinging in the corners of my eyes. Was I crying? I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. Such self-reflection, somehow, proved beyond me. Each drop felt too warm, too sticky.

I tasted iron on my tongue.

Gore, pierce, stab, spear, faster.

I felt…dreamy.

The world had grown dim. Faint. Distant. The intimate reverberations I suffered through every strike had faded delightfully away. My sword carved through cursed flesh like fresh-warmed butter.

The air was thick, thick around me, saturated with purple, toxic blood. My languid strokes sent forth violet surf spraying in every direction. The song was iron and sickly lavender.

Where once I had detested it, now I began to enjoy its aroma.

Gouge, crack, slam, shatter, FASTER.

Blood wept from dozens of wounds across my body. I knew it. I should have bled out long ago, should’ve fallen to my knees. I should’ve died here.

I knew it.

I knew it, but academically. It didn’t bother me. Why should it? I barely felt the pain.

I met the creatures at every turn. I relished it. Their host was boundless, but then, so was I. What had I to fear? Their whetted claws broke against my skin. How could they have harmed me? Their white-purple flesh crumpled beneath my palms. How could they resist? I carved through the lot of them, ravenous, relentless, re–

FASTER

I bellowed, thirsty for more.

A mad grin was forming on my face. And why shouldn’t it be? This was what I’d worked for, what I’d always worked for, what I’d broken bones and split knuckles and battered myself for, each and every second of my entire life. Here, I was immortal. I was Valour, I was Vaultkeeper, I was free.

The song screamed, and I screamed with it.

FASTERSTRONGERSAVAGEMANGLEMAUL–

“TAIVEN! TAIVEN, STOP! STOP!”

I blinked.

My head was spinning.

My mind was buzzing, my arms were shaking, my own blood was weeping from my every pore.

Grasped within my left hand was Aldwyn’s trembling frame.

My right was raised high, sword poised to strike. His amber eyes were wide, wider even than when the creatures attacked him before. He was staring right at me.

He was afraid of me.

His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear him, the song having long since burst my eardrums. I tried to read his lips but my eyes were drooping, tried to hold him but my body was numb. The lacquered, violet ground rushed to meet me, and I greeted it gladly, with open arms.

As I slept, I dreamt of blood and slaughter.