The woman looked at them expectantly. Her most striking feature was her hair, which was blonde at the top, transitioning to different shades of blue as it went down, hanks of navy and robin’s egg. She was odd-looking, eyes a bit too far apart, nose fairly flat, but she could have passed for human, and perhaps was human. She wore a many-colored dress that came down only to mid-thigh, the bottom frilly and white, showing off her long legs, though the red bodice was tight. She had no shoes on, just bare feet on the hard black stone of the clearing.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“We saw the smoke,” said Alfric. “We were just … we’re not from … around here.”
“Ah,” said the woman. She smiled at him. “And, er, I hate to ask this, but where is here? I think I find myself a bit lost.”
“You … don’t know how you got here?” asked Alfric.
“No, no, I do,” she said. “But I’ve been puzzling over it, and I do think that what I remember may not be, strictly speaking, correct.”
“But,” said Pinion, stepping forward. “You asked whether you could help us?”
“You seemed confused,” she said with a sheepish smile. “And I’ve taken stock of my situation, and found that I have food, water, clothing, and everything else that I need for the next few days. I thought I could share, if your situation is like my own.”
“You’re talking without sound coming out,” said the woman. “Is that normal?”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “We’re just having a private conversation, sorry.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that,” said the woman with a shy smile. “Would you like to come in? I’m demonstrating terrible manners, I think.” She gestured inside the tent. It was large enough for people to stand in, and Alfric itched to get a closer look. There were furnishings in there, hidden by the flap she’d stepped through.
This woman remembered an entire life before the dungeon, a memory that was as fake as any history a dungeon ever gave. This dungeon had the shape of a crater, but there had never actually been any weapon detonated here. If she had noticed that her memories didn’t quite line up with her circumstances, she was more right than she knew.
They went into the tent with her. If she was surprised or puzzled by their weapons and armor, she didn’t comment on them.
It was quickly clear that the tent was something special, as it was bigger on the inside than the outside. Alfric thought — hoped — that it was an entad rather than odd space-warping within the dungeon. The entryway had a table with two chairs, and there were other rooms beyond it. Sometimes with an entad like that, the aesthetic was different in the interior, marble columns within a canvas structure, but here you might have been fooled into thinking that everything was perfectly normal. It was still recognizably a tent.
There were plants about the place, all of them potted, some of them on folding shelves, most of them near flaps that were buttoned closed. While the inside was larger than the outside, it wasn’t as extreme as Alfric had seen, only another five times the footprint. Each of the rooms, in fact, seemed as though it might fit within the footprint, which suggested some other features to the tent. It was a cozy place, long-term living so long as you weren’t worried about storms and inclement weather, and didn’t mind having a bathroom that had incomplete plumbing. It was cozy and idyllic, the kind of place that Alfric had always pictured himself living in on the road as a dungeoneer, rather than a huge walking house.
“Sorry, I didn’t think I’d be entertaining such a large group,” said the woman. She took one of the seats at the table. “I’m afraid most of you will have to stand.”
“It’s not a problem,” said Alfric. He was really wishing that Hannah were there. She’d know what to say, what to do, would have the gumption to take action. This wasn’t the sort of taking action that Alfric was good at. Maybe it would have been better with Mizuki too, because she would just rip the bandage off.
“You were saying there were some … inconsistencies?” asked Pinion.
“Ah,” said the woman. “Well, I was sitting here in my tent — and I am sure it’s my tent — and I was about to have a late breakfast, so I went looking for a fork. I went to the place I thought my fork would be, a tiny silverware drawer next to the stove, and the fork wasn’t there.”
“That’s, ah,” said Pinion.
“Well, yes, when I say it, it seems trivial, as there are all kinds of other explanations,” the woman said. “But the drawer has inserts, defined places for everything to be, and there was no place for a fork. And the more I thought about it, the more I was certain that I had never had a fork anywhere in this tent, and when I thought about the tent, I grew more and more confused. I remember pitching it here, but I don’t remember packing it up. I remember my home, but I don’t remember how I got from there to here. There are pieces missing, clearly, but also … oh, I don’t know, details that I can’t recall, or that don’t match up. Do you know, I can’t recall ever once using a fork in my life? But I know all about them, it seems.”
“How odd,” said Verity, who was still looking unwell.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” said Alfric. “But … you’re in a dungeon.”
“Ah,” nodded the woman. She folded her hands in her lap. “And what’s that?”
Alfric had been hoping that she would work through some of the implications on her own, but if she didn’t even know what a dungeon was, that was going to be a bit of a problem. How would he possibly explain what had happened?
“A dungeon is … a created world, a half-world, usually, a place that only represents a shallow — or not shallow — reflection of the real world,” said Alfric. That had gone horribly.
“Oh,” said the woman. She looked thoughtful for a moment, and reached up to give a lock her hair an idle tug. “So we are, in some respects, what someone would see in a dirty mirror? That’s why our memories aren’t quite consistent, why there are gaps in our understanding of how we got here?”
“Er,” said Pinion. “It’s — that is to say — we’re not from inside the dungeon, we’re from outside it.”
“Hrm,” said the woman. She looked at him, focusing on his eyes. “I’m sorry to ask this, but do you have proof?”
“Well,” said Pinion. “Not without taking you out of this place?”
“Oh,” she said. She perked up a bit. “That’s something that can be done? I was a bit worried that I was trapped, if I couldn’t get out of the crater. I knew of the crater, but no one goes here, because it’s so difficult to climb back up.”
“We can bring you out,” said Alfric. “But there would be no way back. Do you know of anyone else here, with you?”
The woman looked alarmed for a moment. “No way back? I would need to uproot my life?”
“There’s no life for you here,” said Alfric. “From everything that we know about dungeons and how they work, as soon as we leave, everything in here will disappear, reabsorbed, or possibly evaporated.” The exact mechanics of that didn’t seem germane to the conversation, but there was some variability to the outcomes, and disagreement on what actually happened, which was largely academic. “And while we haven’t checked yet, it’s very likely that there’s nothing else beyond the crater.”
“Nothing else?” asked the woman. She scoffed. “That’s nonsense. There’s a village to the north. I — I think I have a house there, maybe.”
“There might be a village,” said Alfric. “But there are limits to how large the interior of a dungeon can be, and this one is already quite large. We’ll scout before we go, to see whether there’s anyone else for us to take out with us, but … you need to be prepared for that village to not be there.”
“Oh,” said the woman. She looked slightly lost. “You’re saying … that my mother, she never … ?”
“Never existed,” said Verity. “We’re so, so sorry.”
The woman looked at her hands for a moment, then looked up at Verity. “I would like to file a complaint.”
“Er,” said Verity.
“Is there someone I can complain to?” asked the woman. “Some mayor, or a national assembly? I’d like to … well, to lodge a formal protest, I suppose.” She frowned. “I can take my tent out with me, when we go?”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “We’ll help you pack it up. We need to search the rest of the zone, make sure there’s no one else here, and there are some animals that we need to take as well.”
Verity turned to him. “You’re still planning that?”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “It’s not clear that we’re doing this again.”
“This?” asked the woman.
“We’re dungeon delvers,” said Alfric. It was important to be upfront about this, even if he didn’t really feel like it. “Under normal circumstances, dungeons don’t create someone new. We were trying something different — not with the hope of this outcome.”
“I want to see,” said the woman. She stood up from the table. “We need to make a trip up the side of the crater, so I can see for my own eyes that you’re telling the truth.”
“That will take time,” said Isra. She looked at Alfric.
Alfric nodded. “Or … I have a helm that allows flight. I could fly up and first confirm for myself that there’s nothing beyond the crater, or at least get the lay of the land. And if there’s nothing, as we think will be the case, then we can help you up. And it’s time worth taking.” The helm was partybound, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to go on her own, though that was probably for the best.
“Good,” said the woman. “Do that, please.”
Alfric stepped out from the tent.
He was their best fighter, though Isra was no slouch when it came to combat. Alfric didn’t think that the woman would attack, and if she did attack, he didn’t think that they would have a problem with her, but it was still something to be aware of.
He rose into the air, getting a better look at the crater as he did so. It was possible that he should have done this from the moment he’d seen how wide open the dungeon was, but they’d had their fair share of run-ins with birds, and attracting attention from across the entire dungeon was something that should be avoided, if at all possible, unless you were doing the Overguard Maneuver.
The aerial view of the dungeon provided no surprises. It was a pockmark on a vast, featureless plain, one consisting of the dull brown mund that stretched on forever. There was no village, no people — who would have been starkly visible — and nothing of note beyond the crater walls. Looking down, the verdant crater seemed as though it was the aberration.
He was hoping that a view like this would make an impression on the woman.
Alfric swept down, trying not to disturb the ‘horses’, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes to circle the crater, looking carefully from above. It would be easy to miss someone, especially if they were trying to hide, but there was only so much time and effort that Alfric could devote to the task. They did have a lute that would pull in someone from within the hex, and that was stashed within Lutopia One, but he wasn’t sure whether that would work here, or if that woman would count as a person. Normally, magic worked on bastlefolk the same as it did on humans, not discriminating between the two, but this place wasn’t a hex, and Alfric wasn’t sure if that would foul it up. It was worth trying, anyway.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
When Alfric descended next to the tent, the interior had changed. Instead of there being six rooms, there were more, not all of them visible from the vestibule. The internal geography was making less and less sense.
“Anything?” asked Quinn.
“No, sorry,” said Alfric. “There’s nothing beyond the crater.” He took off the helm. “Getting you up there will take some work. The helm will only work on someone who’s a member of our party, and you’re … not. It doesn’t have enough power to lift a passenger, but I could take you up another way, folded into extradimensional space.”
“Extradimensional space?” asked Quinn. She cocked her head to the side. “I don’t know that term.”
“This tent,” said Alfric. “It’s bigger on the inside than the outside. Like that.”
Quinn looked around. “This is laundoncraft, as I was explaining.”
Alfric looked around at the others.
“She was saying that she built this place,” said Verity. “We … don’t really know what to make of that.”
“It’s laundoncraft,” Quinn repeated. “That must be something that exists on the outside. It works here, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not known to us, no,” said Alfric. He looked around the tent again. “We would call this an entad.”
“They had mentioned it,” replied Quinn. “But they had said that the word, ‘entad’, had an implication of uniqueness. The tent — my other possessions — they’re not unique. I could make them again.”
Alfric looked at Pinion.
“It’s what she claims,” said Pinion. “I … think for now we have to set that claim to the side.”
“I can make something,” said Quinn. She had her arms folded across her chest. “It would take a few hours.”
“It’s not important for now,” said Alfric. “What’s important is assuring you that we’re telling the truth about this dungeon and that you can leave without thinking that it’s a terrible mistake. Our second priority is to take as much as we can with us. There are animals out there we were hoping to take with us, but … I don’t know.”
“The birthen,” said Quinn. “They’re docile, unless backed into a corner.”
Alfric took a breath. “I was hoping to use the tent.”
“You want to put a birthen in the tent?” asked Quinn. “Even if you could get it to go willingly, what about my things? And why wouldn’t we use my barn?”
“You … have a barn?” asked Alfric.
“Just a moment,” said Quinn. She pushed a hand out to the side and one of the sides of the tent thrust outwards with a flapping of canvas. A new ‘room’ had appeared, and she stepped into it. Her mood had shifted, and now she seemed somewhat annoyed, rather than experiencing any existential horror.
The new room was a collection of things, and Alfric might have called it ‘junk’, except that nothing seemed particularly rundown or broken. Alfric had parents who were prolific dungeoneers, and the new room seemed like a smaller version of the kind of dungeoneering hoard that eventually developed over time even with the best of efforts. He saw a mirror in an ornate frame, a set of wind chimes, a broom, a quilt, a candle holder — all sorts of things, the kind he’d have called henlings if they didn’t very much appear to belong to this woman.
The doors she was pulling out were large, but they hadn’t been in a place of prominence. Alfric went over to help her get them out from behind a wardrobe, and she startled for a moment before silently accepting the help.
Once the doors were out, she grabbed three long posts that had been slipped beneath a bed frame, and began setting up outside.
“Er,” said Verity. “Is this … necessary?”
“I’m setting up the barn,” said Quinn. “You need the barn, right?”
“If we can put the horses in there,” said Alfric. “And if they can survive in there long enough to remove them from the dungeon. Then yes. But not here, we should do it closer to the field.”
“Closer,” said Quinn, taking a breath. “Alright, then I’ll put these back and pack the tent up. Everyone out.”
They exited the tent as a party, and Quinn collapsed it down, the many rooms first zwooping in as though they’d never been there at all. Alfric wondered about how it worked, and brought the wizarding glass up to confirm that it was an entad — but if this was some new sort of magic, it was possible that it would show a glow that was exactly the same. The wizarding glass was weak, both to help with its lifespan and to keep its cost down, but Alfric could see enough of a glimmer to confirm that it was magic. When the tent had been collapsed, its canvas folded as though it didn’t have any furniture inside of it, Quinn placed it inside a pack that shouldn’t have been able to hold it, then placed that pack within a purse that shouldn’t have held the pack.
They started walking to the plains, following Quinn’s lead. Verity didn’t give it long before she started asking questions.
“Where did you get all those things?” she asked.
“Laundoncraft, as I’ve said,” replied Quinn.
“No, the others,” said Verity. “The things in that room.”
“What things?” asked Quinn. “The odds-and-sods?”
“Yes,” said Verity.
“Well, according to you, none of it existed an hour ago,” said Quinn. “So I suppose I got it all from there. But if you’re asking what my memories tell me … I don’t know. It varies, doesn’t it? You all have houses, don’t you, or places to live? I doubt all the things you have come from the same place.”
“Many of the things we have come from dungeons,” said Isra.
“Ah,” said Quinn. “Well, no, most of it —” she looked back at Verity, slightly puzzled. “Is this a test of my memories?”
“No,” said Verity. “I was just … it seemed like a lot of things.”
Alfric thought that Verity was probably telling the truth, but if they did want to test this woman’s memories, this was a decent way of doing it.
“Here and there,” said Quinn. “Yard sales, shopping trips with friends …” She paused, catching on that word. Friends who would never be seen again, friends who had never been. “Inheritance, gifts — I don’t know. I’m thinking about it, and I might be able to tell you the origin of every single item in that room. These memories I have, they’re quite complete.”
“But you don’t remember deciding to go into the crater?” asked Alfric.
“There are lots of things I don’t remember,” said Quinn. “I remember losing a tooth when I was six years old, and feeling the missing spot with my tongue until there was a sharp point I could feel, like a little grain of sand. Some things are like that, obviously missing, maybe with just a tiny bit of something to show what went there. I had a childhood friend, but I can’t remember her name, her face, or anything about her. I keep trying on different clothes for her, different hair, like I’m slipping her into wigs or costumes, but it’s never going to solidify, I don’t know.”
They were silent in their walking for a bit.
“How much do you remember?” asked Quinn.
“Not everything,” said Isra. “Time makes memories fade. That’s normal.”
“I can’t remember whether my father wore spectacles or not, whether he had a beard or a clean face,” said Quinn. “He died a few years ago, and I don’t recall how many years it’s been.”
“That’s … less normal,” said Isra.
They had reached the edge of the forest, and stepped out into the coiling grass. The horses weren’t far away from them, perhaps only three hundred feet, close enough that Isra could ‘call’ one of them over, if the barn proved suitable.
“How old are you?” asked Verity.
Quinn paused for a long time. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m … no, I can’t say. I was trying to go by the seasons I remember, but it’s too difficult. I can remember only a single naming party, my tenth.”
She seemed older, but that was just a guess on Alfric’s part. If he’d have met her in a city, he’d have thought that she was in her early twenties, though nothing about what she was wearing said ‘mother’ to him, and he desperately hoped that she wasn’t about to say that she had children.
When they were a good distance into the prairie, Alfric helped her to set up the doors, which would presumably lead into a barn of some sort. The posts needed to be pounded into the ground, which took a fair bit of work, and he wasn’t certain how she’d have done it on her own. The final beam, the third one, slotted easily into place once that was done, and the doors, once affixed, seemed as though they were snapping into place.
Alfric had been feeling some burning curiosity about what this entad would be like, but he hadn’t imagined that the interior would be nearly so cavernous. He also hadn’t imagined that it would be so completely filled with things.
“We’ll fit the birthen in here,” said Quinn.
“Alright,” said Verity. “Why do you have this much stuff?”
“It just piles up over time,” said Quinn with a shrug. She pointed at a cart that was sitting beneath a collection of picture frames. “My neighbor was getting a new cart, and getting rid of his old one, and I had the space, so … why wouldn’t I take it?”
The inside of the barn was a jumble of things: an enormous bird cage, the frame to a four-poster bed, a brass telescope, a pair of bookshelves with books crammed into them and another few piles of books beside them, a marble statue, collection of different chests, a pair of barrels, a chandelier for no good reason, tapestries and rugs, a bell the size of Alfric’s head, all kinds of things, and more of them in each place he looked. The barn had a second story to it, and there were more things up there.
“Will this work?” asked Quinn. She was rubbing her chin. “I’m worried the birthen will destroy too much.”
“They’re herd animals,” said Isra. “I think if there’s food, and one of them behaves normally, the rest will follow.” She looked at Alfric. “Are we really concerned about getting the animals out?”
“If possible,” said Alfric. “If it’s not possible, then we’ll leave.” He turned to look at Quinn. “You have everything?”
“Everything I think I brought into the crater.” She set her pack, which contained the tent, down on the floor of the barn. “But I still need to see with my own eyes that there’s nothing out there.”
“You believe it?” asked Alfric.
“I do,” she said. “There’s too much that doesn’t add up, and it’s as likely an explanation as any.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” said Pinion.
“Well, all things considered,” Quinn shrugged.
She was taking it well. Alfric didn’t know precisely what was going on inside her head, how much she was poking at the missing and inconsistent memories, but she seemed to have put her head down and decided to help them with the horses, which he thought somewhat admirable. Putting your shoulder up against a heavy object was an admirable trait, in Alfric’s opinion, and to greet confusion with action was about as much as he could have hoped for. He’d been most worried that they’d be greeted with denial, anger, or distress.
Isra led the horses in, which required druidism to be explained to Quinn. She seemed slightly alarmed by it, particularly the way that the horses did this quite unnatural thing, but she relaxed once they were inside.
“We should get food for them,” said Isra. “I think they’ll eat almost any grain, but we don’t know how long they’ll have to be in here.” She looked at Quinn. “There’s also a good chance that I can’t stop them from defecating. I tried to have them go before putting them in.”
“You’ll help me clean, if that happens?” asked Quinn.
“Of course,” said Verity. Alfric gave her a ‘are you going to clean up poop’ look, and she gave him a ‘yes, of course’ nod. Alfric wasn’t sure that he believed that. It didn’t seem like the kind of work that Verity was most inclined toward.
It was starting to get crowded in the barn once all twenty horses were in, and the only reason they were at all calm was because Isra was very clearly influencing them.
“This isn’t going to work,” said Isra after they were all in, more than an hour later.
“We just spent a huge amount of time on this,” said Alfric. “You’re saying this now?”
“I need to be in here with them,” said Isra. “They’re herd animals. If one of them spooks, the rest will spook, and they’ll destroy everything they can. Worse, they’re very likely to injure themselves against the metal, and as I’ve said, injuries could be fatal for them.”
“So … what?” asked Alfric. “We take them all out and find some other way?”
“I'm staying here,” said Isra. “There’s an upper level, I won’t be in danger.”
Alfric turned to Quinn. “That will work?”
“Why wouldn’t it?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t personally like being in a place when the door is disassembled, since there are some dangers, but we have enough people.”
“Good,” said Isra. “I’m going to try to put them to sleep. Get moving, and bring me out as soon as you can.”
“We’re going to need to find a field to keep them in,” said Alfric. “Something with higher walls than pigs or sheep need.”
“Find someone who raises goats,” said Isra. “They’re leapers.”
“Will do,” nodded Alfric.
While Isra had been getting the horses in, Alfric had been collecting corkscrew grass for the horses, ending up with a large pile of it near the barn’s entrance. Alfric didn’t have a scythe, but he had a variety of weapons, and a spear worked well enough if swung from a distance beyond where the corkscrew grass would curl up from his presence.
They made their way through the remainder of the prairie, moving to the part of the crater wall where Alfric’s red flag was still flying. Quinn had gone silent, and they were following suit.
“So this happens often?” asked Quinn as she came to the crater wall. “You go into these dungeons, looking for treasures, and pull out befuddled women instead?”
“No,” said Alfric. “This is, so far as we know, the first time.”
“How far do you know?” asked Quinn.
“I’m a dungeon scholar, not a dungeoneer,” said Pinion. “My mentor is one of the leading authorities in our world when it comes to dungeons. No one knows of this happening before.”
“Yet you were prepared,” said Quinn.
“We were trying something new,” said Verity. “I’m sorry.”
“If I understand you right, I would have no life at all without you,” said Quinn. “I should thank you, if you brought me into being, I think.”
“This will cause some problems outside,” said Alfric. “I don’t necessarily know who to report you to.”
“Report me?” Quinn asked. “For what purpose?”
“So that they … I don’t know,” said Alfric. “So they know what to do with you. So you can find a place to live, a life to lead. You have nothing right now, only the tent, which is admittedly large, and the barn, which is admittedly full. We need to make sure that you’re taken care of. We have some duty to you.”
“I appreciate that,” said Quinn. She pursed her lips. “I also have a trade.”
“A trade?” asked Alfric.
“Laundoncraft,” said Quinn. “It’s common, here. Or … I remember it as such. I was a middling crafter, having made the tent and the barn, but if it’s unknown in the new realm, I could make a living at it.”
Alfric pursed his lips. He felt as though it shouldn’t work out there, in the real world. It wasn’t an established field of magic. Perhaps she wasn’t quite human, but for an entire extra magic to have come from a dungeon on Verity’s early try seemed a bit much — alarmingly much. If other people could be taught laundoncraft, that was … unprecedented would be putting it mildly. It wasn’t likely, but it was where Alfric’s mind was going.
Once they reached the red flag, there was more climbing to get to the top of the crater wall, and this time there was no suspiciously convenient set of stairs to go up. With the helm of flight, getting to the top was easy for all but Quinn, and once Verity and Pinion had flown to the top and tossed the helm back down, Alfric flew alongside Quinn, offering her his hand and some help with the climb.
Quinn froze when she got to the top. There was only the mund, brown and kludgy, almost sucking at their feet, stealing the energy of their motion. It stretched on forever, as expansive as it was useless.
She fell to her knees in the mund, and tears began to stream down her face. There was nothing beyond the crater, and she knew that now, any doubts about the truth of what they were saying now gone.
Verity sat down beside her and patted her on the back, and Pinion stood awkwardly beside Alfric.
It lasted for ten wordless minutes, and then Quinn stood up, face set, if red and puffy from the crying.
“Right,” said Quinn. “Let’s go then.” She brushed herself off and turned back toward the crater edge and began the climb back down.
“Is she going to be alright, do you think?” Pinion asked in a low voice.
“I think so,” said Alfric. He looked over at Verity, who was looking distraught. Quinn wasn’t the one that he was worried about.