How many rats lived in a city like Caltern, occupying the squalid in-between spaces? Not even Argent knew. But they knew Argent.

Rats did not have names. They had distinct aromas, telltale scars, they could pick a familiar friend out a crowd of thousands, but they did not have names. Except her. Roughly translated from the crude language of ratty kind, they knew Argent as She-who-is-with-us.

And that name, the power of her having a name at all, was burning through the city in quiet ways.

The rats were getting bolder. They were coming up from the in-betweens and underneaths, the edges of civilization. They were glutting on cheese and half-drowning in wine.

For a young bravo rat there was only one thing to do. Steal a gem, any gem that sparkled like a star, from an unsuspecting ear or out of a jewelry box. Carry it down by the secret ways of rats, into the sewers 'neath the city. There would be danger; lurking spiders and deadly serpents. The way could be lost; a labyrinth of tunnels turns down in the dark, and the sheer smell of human filth washes away all the scent-trails a rat usually follows.

But carrying on, and through, the brave rat would find his way to a secret place, and lay his prize at the feet of a queen who shines brighter than any jewel.

Do that, they knew, and they would be accepted. Do that, and they would be invited through midnight paths to daring raids. Do that one small thing and they would have a chance to win excitement, pride, even a name of their very own.

Even Argent was surprised by how many flocked to her nascent cause. By how many interesting tidbits the rats of the city found to bring her.

That day, they brought her whispers. Something was about to happen. The humans were flocking, massing above the Dungeon. Their mages bore shiny crystals and the smell of rare incenses. There was spellwork in the air.

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Argent perched on a roofing shingle, watching the mages set up their contraption. Shining crystals of Mana-infused stone in tall, three-footed stands, the sun breaking into rays of different colors as it passed through them. Thousands of rainbow lines streamed down on the cobblestones of the street. As they adjusted and tweaked the crystals’ positions, the lines began to form a pattern, a scintillating mandala.

It was directly above the Dungeon’s heart.

Despite her best efforts, Argent had been unable to learn spellwork. She had no way to read the spell that was being formed by the mages, syllable by secret syllable.

But it couldn’t be good.

At her side were the bravest rats she knew. They were eager to go, preening themselves that they were fast, cunning, strong. They were young and the spectre of death didn’t phase them.

They were willing to give their lives; that was why she, as their leader, had to be unwilling. To refuse to let them waste themselves for her approval. Because when you threw away lives, it would become easier and easier to continue doing so. That was what callousness was; repetition without hesitation.

She would go herself.

Argent skipped down from the roof, landing on a windowsill, a water barrel, the street. There were toughs clearing back the crowds so the mages could work; their eyes closed, their fingers twisting in complex knots to form intricate symbols of spellwork. None of the muscle spotted the silver rat darting underfoot, not until it was too late.

She flashed in a blur of quicksilver, landing atop one of the crystals stands. The mage nearest paused, his spellwork sputtering off his fingers in a spray of dying sparks, and reached out to stop her. It was too late. There was a flash and she pulled the crystal with her as she leaped again, sending the stand toppling down. The formation broke apart. Lightning jumped between the crystals, sizzling bolts of pale blue raking across the mages- and one long, serpentine bolt smashing into Argent’s side. She was thrown across the street, silver fur singed black, her back leg twitching spastically. The crystal fell as she rolled along the cobbles.

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The shadow of a boot lifted over her.

The street ripped apart with a massive shudder, the earth bucking upwards and splitting in two. The man preparing to squash Argent fell backwards as the ground shifted underfoot. The trembling, quaking continued, nearby houses starting to crumble, walls caving inwards and their roofs bending to a slant until the rough thatch or clay tiles atop came crashing down.

A hole was being carved out of the earth, all the way down to the Dungeon beneath.

But it was going wrong. The tripods toppled into the breach, and one of the mages, caught up in his weaving of arcane designs, failed to see the rupture reaching a tendril towards him. The yawning chasm carried him down in an avalanche of crumbling stone.

It was chaos.

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Chaos! Human bodies rained down, breaking as they hit the ground below. Sunlight gouged into my beautiful, luminescent gardens, and with it a terrible sense of exposure seized me. The humans had simply made their own entrance.

One of them was still alive, his leg brutally fractured. My mantis reared up in front of him, splaying her glowing wings out, making them buzz through the air in a rapid flicker that turned the spotted rings of pale and lurid purple light on their undersides into a dazzling blur of color.

The injured man gawped, staring in awestruck confusion at the gleaming lights before him. And all the while he was shrinking, shrinking, growing small enough that the mantis could overwhelm him.

When it struck he was barely larger than the insect, and now match for its crushing, serrated claws. It ripped his throat out in a bloody display of dominance.

I watched all this with a sense of restraint. I could no longer shape the first layer, and I was determined to let it stand alone. Even as adventurers threw down ropes and clambered down into the gardens, a full eleven armed men descending, I was resigned; this was Cabochon's test.

Worst of all was the fact the nacre-spiders' lair had been cracked open. Their secret doors were twisted and warped, becoming all-too-visible against the backdrop of cracked stone, and many of them had been tumbled out of their secret dens and onto their backs, bladed legs scrabbling at the air. Men with spears made short work of the injured spiders.

One of them went down suddenly, cursing and crying in pain. A glass-bodied snake had sunk its teeth into his ankle, crawling up unseen through the dense and colorful fungal blooms that rose to the waists of the invaders.

The leader of the crew rescued him, seizing the snake in a mechanical hand of bronze and ripping it away so brutally the man cried out again. With a squeeze he crushed the serpent to pulp within his grip, shaking its remains from his palm, and tossed a vial full of what I took to be antivenom down to his wounded comrade.

They were prepared.

The invaders had formed a rough circle in the center of the gardens, fending back the nacre-spiders that crawled down from their ruined nests with sword and spear. Every second counted against them, but they were moving fast.

One of them was weaving spellwork, golden diagrams spreading under his hands. “Nothing. I can’t see anything.”

So at least my Law prohibiting divination was working.

“We’ll have to sniff this out the old fashioned way. Men! Spread out, carefully now, and scout the surroundings!” The man with the mechanical arm shouted.

Only a few feet from the mage’s casting, two men armed with spears were fending back a nacre-spider, jabbing at its pearlescent armor as it slashed at them with blade-like forelegs. The fact that he could maintain his concentration that close to a running battle told me these were hardened veterans.

My Dungeon was mounting a counter-attack of sorts, serpents crowding towards them through the low underbrush of fungus and moss, but they hacked away at the mushroom jungle, even as they shrank down into it. Denying my beasts cover was a fine strategy- it was also inflicting hideous damage on my beautiful jungle of gleaming lights and translucent fungal bodies.

Another man fell, pulled in by the reelfish. His fate was sealed with sudden tangling of tendrils around his ankle and a sharp pull. Before anyone could move to rescue him he was under the water, being slammed into by their blunt, battering ram heads. The air left his chest in a burst of bubbles fountaining from his mouth.

His corpse was pulled down, into the mud and murk of the underwater labyrinth.

It was a small victory, but one I cheered. I was a nervous creator watching his works take their first independent steps, and at the same time, I was furiously scheming a way to prevent this kind of breach from happening in the future.

A thin man with scars on each cheek vaulted through the fungal blooms, coming to a halt at the edge of the wide, shallow pool where the Brides of Heaven swum. He sniffed, almost seeming to sense riches in the air, and dipped his blade into the water, wiggling the shiny metal like a struggling bright insect to lure one of the placid gold-scaled beauties near.

He almost didn’t see the fungal-golem lurking in the reeds around the pool’s edge. The lion lunged for him, paws extended, and the thin man moved faster than I would have believed possible, rolling backwards and somehow leaving his knife impaled through the lion’s neck. Another one was drawn from his boot as he popped back to his feet, calling over his shoulder.

“Here! Treasure over here!”

Like a pack of dogs catching an unfamiliar scent, the adventuring party turned as one.

He had said their favorite word.