I open my eyes.

I'm not a skeleton. But I have eyes to open, so that's always a good start, tell you what. Eyes are good. Living without eyes one day and then with them the next is always something that you need to adjust to. It's a real process. One of the downsides of being a slime. Skeletons have eyes. Well they don’t, but they do, you know? You can see as if you had actual, real eyes, even if you are just a skeleton with no actual meat eyes. Dungeon-magic is wild stuff, guy.

  Looking down at my hands, I see familiar small wrists and disappointment fills me in an instant. Pale moonlight colored skin, covered in ornate tattoos and markings of esoteric symbols and strange gods, who I don’t actually know anything about, cover my meager, rotting arms.

I’m a dark-fairy again.

  Damn. I hate being a dark-fairy. Being a dark-fairy sucks. Oh gods, it’s going to be one of those runs. Looking around myself, I take stock of where my spawn-point is this time. Maybe if I'm lucky, I would at least… shoot. I'm near the upper layer. Water. I can hear water. This is the moonlight-arena. I don’t know why it’s called that, since it’s underground, but hey. Well, at least it’s a nice place to be visually. It's a large, cavernous room that is filled with water on the sides, except for a stone island in the middle and a path leading through it from one end of the space to the other. Out of the water sprout thousands of tiny mushrooms and dozens of significantly larger ones. Huge ones, actually. I think they're as big as trees, but I am unsure. I don’t remember ever having seen a tree, but I remember that they were big.

  Oh and and they all glow with a pale, sickly, white-blue light. The mushrooms that is, not the trees. Wait. Dang. That’s why they call it moonlight-arena. Aaah, right, right. I see. Listen, guy, you need to understand that dying so often confuses you after a while okay? It makes thinking hard. I’m a trash-mob in the fairy-mother sub-boss fight right now. Just an extra add-on to keep the adventurers busy, while she tries to do something to get rid of them. It never works though.

Oh no this is the worst.

  I sigh. Being a trash mob in the arena means you're at the half-way point of the dungeon, which means your lifespan is half of that of a mob down on the very bottom. I could leave the room if I so choose, but I won’t be safe if a goblin or a slime sees me, so it’s better just to stay here really. Looking around, I rise into the air, happy that, if nothing else, at least I can fly. That's something. A tiny upside to being a meager fairy. The flutter of my wings is loud though, like having a dragonfly hovering next to my ear. It’s a lot more annoying than you would think. But I suppose being able to fly is always really fun. Really freeing. But man. Dark-fairies are undead casters and fragile ones at that obviously and… Wait…

What's a dragonfly?

I blink, shaking my confused head.

  Anyways, uh… dark-fairies, they’re the very worst of the undead, as far as I can tell. At least the kind we have here. We're a mostly undead themed dungeon, you know? Anyways, since I'm undead, maybe that means that I was close to rolling a skeleton this time, I guess? But not close enough, apparently. I sigh and look around. Am I a woman or am I a man today? I can’t say for sure, guy. Too much has rotted off and fallen apart to be able to tell anymore. Dark-fairies are undead, after all. Undeath is the great equalizer of the genders.

  How much time do I have until the adventurers show up? Oh man, I don’t want to be squished. Being squished hurts. Well, no. It's not like I can feel it as an undead though, but still. It's gross, you know? Maybe I can get the wizard-girl to blast me away? Or the priestess? That would be quick. Yeah. That sounds like a plan.

  Looking around towards the distance, I see the other glowing baubles from my kin floating around. The other dark-fairies. There are hundreds of us in this room. I go up to one and look at it, him, her. Hard to say, really. Did you know that dark-fairies glow? You can’t see yourself glow if you are one, it’s really weird. But all the others do, so I assume I do too, I just can’t see it from inside. Is it some kind of fairy-magic? I guess it’s the magic that reanimates us, if anything. But that comes from her. But we'll get to her in a second.

  Looking at the fairy in-front of me, I tap its shoulder. An empty, hollow face turns towards me and stops only to look away in disinterest a moment later. There’s nothing behind it. Though I knew that already. Dark-fairies are undead, just like the skeletons on the final levels. They're just empty, soulless automata. Except for me. I sigh. It's really lonely, you know? At least slimes are alive and they’re touchy and they live in a community of sorts. It’s really nice to be a slime. Lots of touch and body contact. It’s the only time I get to communicate with something these days. Though 'communication' is for sure a stretch of the word, in that case.

  Wait no. That isn't true. I was just a goblin, I remember. Have I forgotten already? Oof. My memory has gotten pretty bad these days. Guess I'm getting old. Goblins can talk to each other. They aren’t very smart or very emotional, so the conversations are fairly crude. But they can talk. Not big huggers, though. Very tough-love minded folk, those goblins. They wouldn’t like me now. Trash-mobs keep to their own for the most part, tell you what. Goblins swat fairies, slimes eat goblins, adventurers kill us all. It's a dog eat dog dungeon out there and we're on the very bottom of the heap. Anyways... am I forgetting something?

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Oh right. Looking around the arena, I see her. The fairy-mother. The sub-boss here. That’s what the hero calls her at least, I think? I sort of, kind of, heard a half-word one time, when I was a slime-girl. That was a weird one, I don’t really want to talk about it any further than that, okay? Let's focus on the task at hand.

  Flying down towards her, I look at the silent, rotting woman, sitting atop a giant matte-white toadstool. She is giant compared to me, to us. The fairy-mother is the size of a fully grown human, while we dark-fairies are just maybe the length of one of their hands. She’s wearing a very concealing, sort of mystical outfit. Very necromancer chic, you know, with a hood over her shadowy face. Golden bangles adorn her arms and legs. Elf ears jut out of her ornate hood, which is odd, because apparently they had cut holes into the sides just for her ears to stick out? I mean, what? Sure, stylistically it makes sense, I guess? But it doesn’t seem practical if you want to stay warm.

  Though, I guess as an undead it makes no difference. The fairy-mother came from the desert before she died or so I have heard, so her outfit makes sense in that context, I suppose. I just want to take a moment to note that when I said shadowy face before, I mean shadowy face. One of the cool things about being a monster is that the rules of the world work a little differently in a lot of small contexts. One of them being that if you wear a hood, it always obscures the top half of your face with a thick black shadow, like in an edgy drawing. It's really cool honestly. I have no idea how it works, but it does and I appreciate it a lot. It really brings the theatrical dramatics of the world-design together. It might be a gift from the dark-lord, or it might just be dungeon-magic, it's not for me to say.

  The fairy-mother looks up at me. There isn't any curiosity in her gaze, which was sparked by my presence. No, there is nothing deeper to read in her expression at all. It's a mechanical, robotic reaction. Something moved in the room, close to her, so her head turns to see. She sees that there's nobody here but me, just one of her children and holds her hand out like she always does when one of us comes too close to her. I land on it and look up at her face. She looks sad. Not that I can see her eyes mind you, but the lower half of her face. It looks sad. I suppose I can’t blame her, you know? Being a glorified zombie surrounded by like a thousand of your undead children is probably a real bummer. I try to smile at her, to make her feel better. But I don’t think I have a jaw. Hmm. Well, it’s the thought that counts, right?

  Lifting her hand upward, she raises me higher up into the air to give me a platform to fly off from. A better vantage point to embark on my journey, a final gift from mother to child. Thanks mom! I wave to her as I rise back into the air. I don’t know if she notices or is even capable of noticing, but manners are important, even as a trash-mob. It’s these little things that keep me together. It’s why I’m narrating myself, why I’m explaining this to myself right now, even if nobody can hear it. Because it’s what keeps me together. I don’t want to unravel. I look back at her, as I float through the air, higher still. Her face is still cold and empty.

I don’t want to become like that. So I need to stay aware. I need to stay awake. I can’t stop doing the little things like this. I can’t sleep.

  I wonder how long I have to live? Usually it used to take a full day for the adventurers to reach the final floor, at this point. We’ve come a long way since this all started though. Since the surface and the fights up there. The upper floors were nice, but I don’t spawn there anymore. I only actually ever spawn down near to the very bottom now. How many floors are there between here and the surface? A handful? Dozens? Hundreds? I can’t recall. So I have maybe eight hours, until they reach here to try and, as they would say it, 'save the fairy-mother'. They never do though, save her, they just kill her every time too. I only saw it once, the last few times I was a dark-fairy, I died before that. I don’t like seeing people being killed. Sure, she might not be all there anymore. But it just seems kind of savage really. Can't we all just be friends?

Floating higher towards the upper ceiling, I sigh, though the logistics of this move escape me however, as I have no air in my body to exhale.

Something tugs on my shoulder.

  Ah? What? I feel heavy. I’m wearing a bag now? This is new. This wasn’t here a second ago. It just appeared out of nowhere and now I'm wearing it. I’ve never had a bag as a fairy before and it is very awkward to fly with it dangling behind my back I say as I try to keep my balance mid-flight. Some aesthetic differences are always to be expected when you respawn into a different body. No monster is exactly the same as the other. But things like this always have a purpose. If you have a bag, that means there's something in it. The dungeon-master doesn’t give you something for no reason. He can spawn in new trash-mobs like myself when he needs them and he can spawn in new items too, sometimes, even equipment for us monsters in bags, much like this one. I appreciate the dungeon-master, he really tries his best. He’s calculating, methodical, devious. He has a plan. A plan that has never-ever worked, granted. But a plan nonetheless.

  Reaching towards the clasp of the bag, I eagerly look inside at my gift. A metal disc. A single gold coin, that I recognize as the human currency of the land, which supposedly lies far up above the dungeon. What am I supposed to do with this?

Wait. Oh no -

I understand now.

  Damn it! He’s made me a target. Shit. That asshole. Dungeon-master, why? What did I do wrong? I take back the nice things I said about him before. The adventurers are going to go after me now first, before I get away. Why? Why? I shout out into the void with my garbled, wordless voice. Why did he give me a loot-drop? The sound echoes around the hollow room, but no response comes. He’s ignoring me. Or he can’t hear me. Actually, I’ve never spoken to the dungeon-master before. Never seen him either. But I know he’s there. Somewhere. What a dick. I don’t want loot. This is just going to slow me down. Ugh. I try to pry the bag off my shoulders, but it won’t release. It sticks to my body like a new limb. It is part of me. It can’t be removed. I groan. Once the dungeon-master had decided what to do with you, there's nothing that you can do about it. The big guy upstairs, well downstairs in this case, has the final say over all things monstery.

  I could hide? Hmm… No. hiding never works. If the fairy-mother dies, I die anyways. Trash-mobs are always linked to the master of their floor. The sub-boss. Mini-boss. Trash-boss. Whatever terminology you prefer. If the bone-lord dies, so do all of the skeletons. If the fairy-mother dies, so did all the dark-fairies and so on and so on. Each and every species has a patron of sorts somewhere inside of the dungeon that they needed to stay alive. I don’t know how or why it works like that, but it does. Some kind of magical parasitism maybe? Magic is the catchall answer here, dungeon-magic specifically.

  I’ve hidden before, when I was a goblin once or twice, but then they killed the goblin-king and I just sort of faded away a bit after that, you know? It wasn’t a bad way to die. It didn’t hurt, but it felt wrong to do. Like I wasn’t doing my part. I don’t think anybody here actually realizes if I do or don’t and it never really made a difference yet, but I need to protect mama

   No! I shake my head. The fairy-mother isn’t my mother. This isn’t my body. But staying in one begins to put thoughts in your mind that you need to resist. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll really believe you’re a dark-fairy. This is just temporary. It’s just a phase, mom.

Sorry.