Up in the rafters, the little golem sat, contemplating how it might forge song into iron. How it might tell of those grand halls, the lights flickering among the arched stone like the stars. Ancient memories still drifted through it. It thought of stars among the dome of the sky, and another song drifted through the little golem.

The melody rose through ash-covered floor of stone, rose up from the earth to meet the heavens. It was a dirge, sung with a sorrow heavy enough to weigh down flames. Something important had happened. Something important had been lost.

But grasping at it was like trying to seize the wind. How to show it? Like the other songs, there was an intangible quality to it that felt impossible to represent.

The golem looked up. A small rat was in the rafters with it, left paw frozen mid-creep, looking both suspicious and vaguely familiar. She held a silver coin in her mouth. For a moment, they both watched each other. Then the rat gently dropped the coin, pushed it toward the golem, then scampered off while the pigeons looked on.

Slowly, the golem rose, then seized the coin and held it aloft.

Inspiration came to it slowly, creeping into its mind as the wind whispered in the rafters.

As it shaped its next piece, willing the two metals to twist and move, the golem thought of old dwarves solemnly chanting by the fire, speaking in whispers, glancing up at the constellations. There was a beauty in shared grief, a beauty in the bond they shared.

When the ring emerged from its crucible, it still had the crude outside, but within the rough twisted iron were holes where the silver glimmered. It still did no justice to the memories, to the songs, that even now slipped like rain into the earth. They fled from the creation, for again, it was flawed. It could not be what it needed it to be.

The golem stared at the discarded ring for a long time, until a soft squeaking made it turn. The rat had come back. It crept forward, sniffed the ring, considering it. Her whiskers twitched, beady eyes examining the craft with care.

Then it ran off. Flawed in the eyes of others, too, then. The golem watched it go. It felt the urge to forge and shape again, to feel its mind wrapped around iron, but couldn’t think of what to make. So it sat, listening to old songs by the fire as the night in its memory passed in synchronicity with the night of the moment.

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As I watched Cabochon, watched the wind nibble and push the ash of our foe around, I considered my problem.

There was simply too much magic I did not understand. The invisibility spell. The incense. The door to the Everforest. And now, the magic of another dungeon, one that had taken a path that was my anthesis.

And there was Cabochon himself.

I could have ordered him to pick up the sword and ember gem. It wasn’t that I feared he might not—no, it was because those things were his anthesis too. Best to have one of the remaining nacre spiders cover the items in pearlescent spit and drag them along until I could learn from them. Learn what I was up against. The tunnels that would let me smuggle them back in were completed, granting me a new avenue by which to move in my underground empire, but there was a deeper, more fundamental problem. The problem of reaction.

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I was still reacting to each threat as it came, planning for what I already knew. I needed to plan for what I didn’t know.

Or at least, didn’t know yet.

I busied myself repairing the ravine ledge, attempting to reinforce it so it wouldn’t fall so easily to earth magic. The defenses by the lake were regrowing. Soon, only black scars of char on the mangroves would be left to hint at the battle that had taken place there.

I paused my work on the statue in the pond of the Heavenly Brides. I had put all but the finishing touches on the statue of my Adamant. It would have to wait for a stroke of inspiration. It had a beauty, but its completion left me no satisfaction, only a hunger for reclaiming the second level.

I needed something new.

A group of newly made stone-tusk rats darted around my hulking salt golem as it pawed restlessly next to the trap door below. They had returned from burrowing near my second level, seeking what wealth was already within my grasp. The others, Argent had brought with her for a new heist. While I waited for my dark-iron and binding spike, I could demand more books on magic, could forge new shards, and bolster my ranks.

The stone-tusk rats pleased me. Crystals well-formed enough to be considered gems, as it turned out, were common enough in the earth. They had brought back faceted quartz and amethyst, along with rainbow-glimmering bits of opal for me to experiment with. The geodes they’d found these crystals in fascinated me. The way they played with light, the way their rough exterior held pristine beauty in them inspired me.

Adventurers would always have new ways to destroy my creations. Their destruction should come at a cost.

I started with one of my spiders, then, tried to replicate the type of mana I had found in the pools below. I willed it to change into a thing of earth. The layers of nacre were not unlike crystal. The spider’s body was a bulbous thing, perfect for hollowing out. The outside turned dark and rough, so that the spider would blend into the earth, while inside, I dripped mana until crystals grew. They were a different type of crystal, a calcite that other creatures used in their shells, but they were still a brilliant white that in the right light shone like fragments of rainbow.

I think it was Cabochon that inspired the final touches. I had hated the earth elemental’s flint tusks and fire because it destroyed, but there was beauty in flame, beauty in moments, and I could make destruction something beautiful. In the hollowed out-geode body of my spider, I left glands that would secret chemicals. Like my explosive blooms, they would fill with deadly potential.

Adventurers would find a way to destroy my creations. But when they did…

[ Calcite Spider ]

Halfway between living rock and insect, these slow-moving spiders trade silk and poison for hardened bodies and razor-tipped limbs. When cut open, the gasses trapped in their body will cause a violent explosion.

It would be a beautiful thing to watch, as their inner body of white-rose crystals glimmered, then shattered outward as razor sharp stone shrapnel to the soul foolish enough to threaten my domain. My first spider chittered, clacking about the rhinoceros salt golem. The strangulating thinness of the mana here was a dull pain, but it would all be healed by my revenge. Until then, there was more to learn, more to prepare, and more plans in motion.

Vaulder had, as I instructed, brought me more books on spellwork, but also books on other dungeons and the adventurers that had raided them. It was time to learn more about the tactics of my enemies.