Below us, the earth shook. We could hear the lizard trying to rip apart the stairwell, trying to claw us out of where we’d hidden. A faint ribbon of yellowish mist swirled up and ignited, becoming a crimson tendril of flame that burnt itself out of existence.

It didn’t quite reach. We were safe for now, up in the Gardens, back where I had started my Descent.

Your creation has received divine favor.

It has been Named ‘Field of Lament’ and given the following Blessing:

Enemies slain within this room shall leave behind a revenant shade, attacking those who follow in their footsteps to challenge the Dungeon.

[https://i.imgur.com/okCjs7y.png]

I pushed the notification away. If it was meant as consolation, I saw it as mockery,

I didn’t expect the world to be fair. Bad things happened to good people all the time. I had been the bad thing, I had happened to good people, and their misfortune had been my gain. I could accept the raw and senseless cruelty of the world.

No, what made me angry-

- beyond the hole in the world where Adamant should have been -

- was that it would have taken the gods and their messengers three or four words to tell me that I was sitting atop some kind of deathtrap, that digging down would awaken subterranean horrors.

Three or four words and I wasn’t worth that much.

The phrase repeated through my mind again and again.

And I realized I had to kill them. Just to claw back my dignity. Because if there was one thing I couldn’t do, it was accept that all this cloying sorrow, all this nauseating and confusing feeling overwhelming me, was just a small and insignificant speck for some higher power to ignore.

I was too proud to accept that. I was too important to accept a role in obscurity. Too clever and too dangerous to be ignored.

And right now, I had an opportunity no other Dungeon could claim. The Mana up here was too thin, leaving me feeling a low, constant pain. It was like I never had quite enough air to breath comfortably.

But by returning to a higher strata, I was able to place a Law on my first floor. I considered long and hard what I should choose. But in the end, if I was serious about my vendetta against the gods, there was something I needed.

Thus it is spoken, and shall be Law:

Past this point, all divinations and scrying shall fail. The Dungeon’s secrets shall be eternal.

[https://i.imgur.com/okCjs7y.png]

Now they couldn’t simply read my thoughts. Or at the very least I had some amount of defense, even if it wouldn’t stand up to the gods themselves. Now I didn’t need to worry that, however cunning I was, I’d simply be spied upon, my schemes dismantled by all-seeing eyes. I had shadows to retreat to and secrets I could keep, now.

And I had work to do.

Argent had retreated to her nest and carried me with her, despondent, and the two surviving golems stood vigil over the stairwell in case the hounds tried to follow us up. I watched as the Arachne stood there, unsure of what to do, and reached out into his mind.

Confusion and horror. His short life had been interrupted by violence, and he had seen me at my best, working with godlike power over the earth, only to watch as it came crumbling down. The stone lizard had assumed a role like a devil in his heart; an unstoppable force.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

He had a dream-like way of seeing the world, and it left him sensitive. I commanded him to make a nest for himself. The work would do him good, if he was anything like me.

For myself I began to hide the stairwell. I wove colored mosses over it, making it appear like part of the ground, and drew the lights of the luminescent mushroom garden in around the silver door instead. Now, adventurers would assume the way forward lay through that door.

And they would be the Marquis’ problem.

There was nothing to do but work, work, push the anger and the sorrow back by keeping myself busy. It was a bitter satisfaction but it did the trick of salving my wounds. I would kill those elementals in due time.

I had reached a plan, while I created the Field of Lament on the second layer. A moment of inspiration on how to seize the unicorn. I would need a vast amount of nightvein, and to make a few new golems. I needed time.

And that was when the dwarves arrived.

[https://i.imgur.com/okCjs7y.png]

Suffi Halfhand was claustrophobic. She had been raised in the city under an open sky, and tunnels, cavernous halls, all of it gave her a feeling like her stomach was being tied in knots.

So she was not at home in the city's underbelly, not at all. The clan chieftain waded through the tunnels of the sewer, her face scrunched to a horrified grimace as she tried not to hurl from the cloying, nostril-destroying stink of it all. Koth, captain of her personal guard, offered her his pipe, the warm-sweet smolder of tobacco a godsend down here. “It helps,” he said, “But not much.”

She took it gratefully and drew deep, letting the smoke fumigate her skull and push out the sewer-stink. They were almost there. Bulbous mushrooms grew on the tunnel walls, a thick coating that obscured the original brickwork under bubbling shapes and reaching little wisps of fungal root.

They marched ten strong, her guard carrying poleaxes, Suffi bearing only a small, ornate coffer. The tunnels rang with the clank of their platemail.

Koth glanced back behind them. A tiny owl was hopping its way in their shadow, not as stealthy as it thought. “Should we..?”

“No. Never interfere in a seer’s business. Gets you tangled up in fate.” Suffi shook her head.

Now the brickwork gave way to rough-hewn stone, and they stepped clear of the horrible, crushingly-tight tunnels to the lip of a vast ravine. Huge prismatic spears of glass jutted out from either side, forming a strange tangled interlace above the top of the chasm, where spiders spun their silver webs and luminous fungi sent their reflections leaping from one finger of glass to the next, swaying slightly in the breeze and making all their echoes shiver.

It was beautiful, and somehow hypnotic. They had to catch one soldier before he stepped over the edge, his eyes wide as he stared at the dancing lights.

“Dungeon! I’ve come to bargain.”

She felt ridiculous, speaking to the dark and empty air. Like she was trying to pray.

And she felt boots-shaking nervous, because a damn lot was riding on that dark and empty air responding.

After years of slowly building up power, this was one of those moments where everything could crumbling down or rise to new heights. This was her play.

“I’ve brought you three gifts.”

She set the coffer down, kneeling on the hard stone as her guards kept a lookout.

“My mother made the box. But me, I made this; it was my very first creation worth keeping.”

The first time anyone had thought she would amount to something, the first time the other apprentices had taken her to a tavern and gotten drunk with her. The first time she felt like a dwarf.

She lifted an ornate goblet out of the box, holding it up for nobody to see.

It was obscenely gorgeous. Shaped from gold, an inset red band ran around the middle of the bowl, and on that surface horses were embossed in black jet. Or no, a single horse, captured moment by moment in a gallop, recording every small movement in a frozen sequence of seconds, so that if you spun the cup it burst into motion. A thin line of diamonds set along its back emphasized each motion’s shifting of the curvature of the back, the flick of the tail.

“And this, this is your brother…”

Then she lifted the next gift. One that made her little cup look like cheap trash. It was a dagger, with a hilt of white lattice woven around an inner shaft of lapis lazuli, capped by a golden teardrop like the top of a minaret spire. The blade was patterned with thousands of minute ridges that caught the light along their crests in serpentine lines of silver, made by folding the steel hundreds of times. Dwarven runes were carved into the groove that ran down the blade’s middle.

But the crosspiece, the crosspiece. At the centre was a diamond sun with teardrops of ruby extending in a halo around it. That was set amidst a straight guard carved out of faintly blue onyx, representing the night sky just before morning, with a wide and shallow semicircle of gold wrapped over the lower edge, folded into bands of color that graded from rich orange to pale yellow to almost white, showing all the shades of a true dawn lifting over the horizon.

It was as if someone had taken the morning sky and made it sharp.

Please somebody be listening, she prayed.

“You began as a ring, yes? That ring was made by Master Varhailen, who I was lucky enough to study under. He was a genius, and his last work, it wasn’t just you. It was a set. Thirteen pieces for each of Caltern’s thirteen bells. This is the Mane Dagger. Your brother piece.

“I can give you a lot, Dungeon. I can give you a Name, I can give you shelter from the adventurers who come to knock down your doors, I can give you whatever you want. I just need you to swear a pact with me. To give my people your Attunements.”

Finally, she lifted a tiny piece of rune-carved bone on a chain from the box. “This is the knucklebone of my great grandfather. Only thing I have of him. I swear on him I won’t betray you or scheme against you. If you want these gifts, all you have to do is send a messenger to take them. And we’ll talk about the rest.”

And she waited for the dark and the silence to answer.