“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”

-Tacitus

==Zidaun==

We ran into the other party on our way out. We only talked with them briefly. They indicated that they should be done with the tests by the evening, and we agreed to meet them after our delve. Our business done, we reentered the dungeon.

Door two took us right back into the town and now the gate stood before us.

I touched the gate and the crystal flashed green.

The gate swung open, even as I could hear the clank of chains moving. We tensed, just in case, but the doors opened to the sight of the drawbridge lowering, and long bars of metal retreating into the walls. In a few moments it was done, and the drawbridge settled into place with a soft thump. The metal of the bars became flush with the walls, On each side of the drawbridge short stone walls reached up three feet. Each wall was covered with long metal blades. Climbing and walking on the wall would not be possible.

Fortunately that wasn’t a problem for us at all. The drawbridge was more than sufficient. We walked the twenty or so feet to the other side. The wood beneath our feet was roughly polished and banded with iron. The iron bore faint traces of rust in the grooves and around the rivets driven through the door. The drawbridge ended at a pair of abutments, and a thin ledge of stone was cut to secure the end of the bridge in place.

Stepping onto the bridge gave us a message.

You have entered the:

Broken Aqueduct Meadows

As we moved off the bridge, the drawbridge began to rise back up. Each abutment had a hand-print depressed into the stone. A left hand on the left side and vice versa for the right. I pressed my right hand into the one near me. The drawbridge reversed course and began to come down again.

“Okay,” I said, “it looks like these will bring it back down so we can exit. Inda, mark them down.”

I needn’t have bothered, she was already pulling out the map. I made my own notes, and we prepared to move on.

The road ahead of us curved gently through the meadow, edging around the gentle hills, but it mostly went in the same direction. It lead toward the far end of the cavern. We couldn’t see where the road split from here, that was over the curve of the nearest hill.

Above, the ‘sky’ was blue, and clouds scudded across low overhead. The illusion was only shattered when the clouds reached the edge of the dome and disappeared, instead of continuing into the false blue sky.

Still, the wind was real enough, it drove the clouds, even as it reached lower to the meadow with gentler hands. The grasses, one to one and a half feet tall, waved in undulating currents as the wind swept over and around the hills. Longer sections of grass bobbed up and down, slightly bowed down beneath their own weight. Small copses of trees waved their branches with the wind. The trees were tall, with long column-like trunks, and green leaves.

“Ready?” I asked.

They were, so we set off down the road.

The road was made of rectangular blocks of stone. Dirt was thick in the cracks, large sections of it host to small blades of grass or small curly leafed ferns. They flattened beneath our footsteps, only to spring back up and then slowly straighten the last of the way, like they were stretching after rising for the morning.

The wind kept us alert. The movements of the grass would make it easy to conceal monsters that lurked within.

We reached the crest of the first hill without issue. Ahead of us the meadow rose over more rolling hills. Ahead, the road continued, but it also divided and curved to the right. We couldn’t see it from here, but we knew it would lead toward the ponds and waterfalls.

To the left, the aqueduct was visible. It curved gently, cutting straight through any hills that got in the way. Arches of stone gracefully reached up to support the structure. The evidence of small leaks was visible from a distance. Sections of the aqueduct were green with veins of moss. Woody vines also crept up the sides of the supports, their green leaves waving with wind.

We continued on, and were soon attacked.

It proved to be nothing special. A burrow of plate-mice was nearby, and when we passed too close they came out to attack.

The attack was nothing like the organized strategies of the sewer and town. This felt like an encounter with wild monsters, or particularly aggressive animals. The mice streamed out of their burrows, and each attacked as they could. They didn’t gather together as a horde, or use any maneuvers.

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I frowned after the attack was done and the corpses had faded away.

“That was… different,” I said, my brows furrowed.

“I’m not sure exactly what happened,” Inda said.

I wasn’t either. It was not a pleasant feeling.

“Stay here for a moment,” I said.

I could feel where the burrows emerged from the ground. I walked toward them. I damped the vibrations of my footsteps, the dirt and stone beneath me responding to my command.

I grew closer to the burrows and my brows rose in surprise. I could sense more mice deep inside below the ground. I walked around, tracing the tunnels beneath my feet. Soon I had seen enough and walked back to the path.

“The dungeon is having them act like animals,” I said. “There are still mice inside. Most of the females and a few males remain. The females are tending to their young. So, the colony reaches out to attack us, but leaves more inside to breed in case things go wrong.”

“That is odd,” Gurek muttered. “If they heard us, even the babies should be blindly trying to attack.”

“Well,” Firi said, his voice calm, “what does it mean? Were these something new, Zidaun?”

“No,” I said. “They were the same monsters we have already seen. Very basic level one monstrous plate-mice. Nothing special.”

“Monsters bearing young is already unusual,” Inda said. “In a dungeon, anyway. They usually create fully formed monsters, and then make more when those die.”

Inda looked around at the environment, her eyes sharp.

“I just had a thought…” she said slowly. “The dungeon has been all about training so far, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, hearing the others agree as well.

“So what does this train you for?” Inda said.

It only took me a moment to get it, but Gurek beat me to it.

“The wilderness,” he said.

“Exactly,” she said. “This place is meant to mimic a truly wild area. The rest of the dungeon, so far, has been very different than most, but it has shared one thing in common with them. It was… sculpted, manicured. Not so much in appearance, but the monsters we ran into were set up in advance. I don’t think this place is like that. In the wild you might run into something really dangerous just a mile outside a city, and most dangers can be avoided if you are careful.”

“I see,” I said. And I did, it made perfect sense. I didn’t understand this dungeon, though. Why spend all the space, time, and resources on… this? If I understood things correctly, the dangers of the meadow would be almost random. Sure, there might be some truly dangerous monsters here, but people could use the roads and never get near them. Unless Inda was wrong… but it felt right.

I tried to understand what a dungeon might get out of this. A dungeon wanted adventurers to come in and fight against monsters. Preferably, the adventurers would die, though it would still get something if they didn’t...

I stopped at that thought. Stronger adventurers were worth more. Most weak adventurers died fast though. So how did a dungeon get stronger adventurers? Most dungeons answered that question by just having the strongest monsters they could. Sure there was some level distribution, and the monsters got stronger as you went inside, but most well developed dungeons started at at least level ten to fifteen.

That meant that new adventurers went to newer dungeons, when they could. Or they formed large groups to try and kill the monsters in other dungeons. That meant most dungeons would be killing a bunch of low level adventurers or a few at their own level of difficulty.

However, what if a dungeon was patient? What if it trained the low level adventurers? Then they would level up. And if the dungeon kept slowly increasing in difficulty, the adventurers would come back, over and over again. At least until they encountered something that they couldn’t handle. This way a dungeon would always reap the full reward.

Awakened dungeons would create some variety, and spread things out a little more, but not to this degree. And they were still… off. The proportions were wrong. People would never be comfortable in those dungeons.

I thought about the doors, the ease of access to where we had been before. The dungeon was absolutely catering to people who had already gotten farther inside. It wanted people to go as deep as they possibly could.

It was beautiful; it was insidious. The dungeon truly understood how to harvest. The perfect corridors, the bathrooms, the empty safe area that was waiting to be filled, they all made perfect sense. The dungeon was making people feel comfortable and at ease. It was the ease of animals raised to the slaughter.

The question was… when would a dungeon deem a slaughter appropriate? Did it kill those that grew too powerful? Would its progression suddenly become just a little bit steeper? It wouldn’t want anyone to escape and go to another dungeon. It would be easy enough to blame deaths on people being unprepared, or simply encountering a bad match-up. Especially if everyone knew that the dungeon was always fair. A sudden change to the progression might allow it to harvest most people. And if this dungeon was as smart as it seemed… it wouldn’t show this change to everyone. It would be sudden, a seeming random confluence of bad luck. Something that could be ignored as unfortunate chance, in case anyone escaped.

I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t. I would keep up my guard, though I expected nothing but a slow gentle progression. People would come, grow, get overconfident, and then die. I felt fear and worship in equal measure. My god was a dungeon without equal.

My team was well trained. Hopefully they didn’t need my warning. I breathed out a sigh of relief as I had a thought. I could still warn them to be careful. If I saw them slipping, I could remind them. We were trained to go in first, and to expect danger from anywhere. My warnings wouldn’t upset what the dungeon was trying to do; it wouldn’t give away the game.

We talked briefly about the layout of the meadow. About treating it like the wilderness. Then we continued

I walked through the meadow with my party. I was both more, and less, wary than before.

Soon enough we reached the fork in the road.

“So, which way do we want to go?” I said. My voice was steady, my tone calm. Even if I wasn’t calm inside, my body obeyed the dungeon’s needs.

“The exit is probably on the far side,” Inda said.

“True,” I said. “And we are supposed to proceed through as quickly as we reasonably can.”

“It made us go out of our way last time,” Firi said. “It might make us to that again. There were waterfalls leading down into darkness and mist, right?”

“Yeah,” Gurek said. “The right path leads to that, and the pools.”

“So that might be an exit too,” Firi said.

“Unfortunately, you are right.” Inda sighed, and then continued. “There might be an exit on either path. Or none, for that matter. There could be a random hole in the ground that leads to the next floor.”

“Probably not,” I said. “This place seems too organized for that. I wouldn’t be surprised it there are secrets around, puzzles, that kind of thing, but I expect the main entrances will be fairly obvious.”

I thought for a moment.

“I don’t think it matters much,” I said. “It could be either way. You three vote on it, I’ll abstain so we don’t have a tie.”

In the end, Inda voted to keep going straight, while the other two voted for the path to the right. We turned right, and started off again.